BG Reads | News You Need to Know (May 27, 2021)
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
[THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE]
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Group behind Austin’s camping ban revival says it has new plan to put police staffing on the ballot (Austin Monitor)
Save Austin Now, the local political action committee behind the campaign to reinstate rules against camping in public, has started circulating a petition to put a new proposition on the ballot – a mandate that would require certain levels of staffing at the Austin Police Department.
“Austin … used to be one of the greatest places to go, to hang out, to be, and we need to continue to keep it that way,” Council Member Mackenzie Kelly, who represents far-Northwest Austin, said at a press conference Wednesday morning. “We need officers who can help protect us and help us get to where we need to be as a community so we can feel safe for our families and each other.”
Supporters of the petition say this is in response to the rise of some violent crimes in Austin and City Council’s decision last year to cut millions from the Police Department – a move that will likely be financially impossible to do in the future, as a bill penalizing cities for cutting police budgets is likely to become law in Texas.
Petitioners need to collect 20,000 individual signatures from Austin voters in order to get their proposal on a ballot; they say they are planning for a public vote in November. Matt Mackowiak, Save Austin Now co-founder and chair of the Travis County Republican Party, said the committee has started collecting signatures.
The petition, if it gets on a ballot and is approved by voters, would require that the Austin Police Department employs at least two full-time sworn officers per every 1,000 residents. Currently, the department has roughly 1.7 officers for every 1,000 residents.
While APD has long used the ratio of two officers for every 1,000 residents as a reference, a spokesperson said the department no longer uses that scale to determine staffing needs.
In a 2012 study of police staffing, outside consultants said that ratio appeared arbitrary. They went on to recommend that the police department add 228 sworn positions, resulting in 2.11 officers per 1,000 residents.
Interim Police Chief Joseph Chacon did not respond Wednesday to a request to comment on the petition.
“George Floyd was killed one year ago, and instead of working on police reform, this group is fear-mongering and trying to avoid police accountability,” Council Member Greg Casar, who represents North Central Austin, wrote in an emailed statement.
“Their petition drive is about writing a blank check of taxpayer funds to their own department, while cutting off funds for all our other public employees and critical public safety needs.”
The petition would also require an additional 40 hours of training for officers once they graduate from the cadet academy. While the petition does not dictate exactly what kind of training this would be, it says it should focus on “critical thinking, defensive tactics, intermediate weapons proficiency, active shooter scenarios, and hasty react team reactions.”
“It is not contradictory to both support the police and advocate for changes that can improve the effectiveness and accountability for the police,” Cleo Petricek, co-founder of Save Austin Now, said at Wednesday’s press conference.
Several of the changes asked for by Save Austin Now appear to be either part of APD’s protocol already or something that the city is working on. For example, the petition asks that officers receive additional pay if they speak languages other than English; according to the department’s most recent contract, that policy is already in place.
Those who spoke at the press conference, including the president of the Austin police union, said the petition would help make Austin a safer city. They argued that Council members’ decision to reduce its police budget has led directly to a rise in violent crime… (LINK TO STORY)
On Joe Rogan's podcast, Austin Mayor Steve Adler criticizes city manager for homelessness response (Austin American-Statesman)
Feeling heat for the city's homelessness problems, Austin Mayor Steve Adler appeared to deflect blame onto City Manager Spencer Cronk in a recent interview with podcast host Joe Rogan.
During the nearly hourlong conversation from Rogan's studio in Austin, Adler touched on a number of challenges the city has faced since he became mayor in 2015 — and devoted much of the time to addressing pushback from residents over the city's policies on camping in public.
In recapping the Austin City Council's decision to repeal a ban against camping in public in 2019, Adler said that Cronk, in his role as the city's top executive, failed to clearly define where people experiencing homelessness could and could not stay after the new rules went into effect.
The mayor did not elaborate. After the interview became public this week, his spokesman said Adler was referring to a letter sent to Cronk two years ago requesting clearer rules for camping.
"We asked the city manager to come back with a set of rules that say where is it people can go and can't go," Adler told Rogan. "For lots of reasons, that never happened. That's where we made our mistake."
A city spokesman pushed back against Adler's comments and told the American-Statesman the mayor and the City Council did not provide clear direction to Cronk to implement the changes Adler now says he wanted back then.
The letter was not a binding document that would have directed Cronk to take action, spokesman Andy Tate said… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin condo development sells out in 5 hours (Austin Business Journal)
A South Austin condominium development held a sales launch event last week and sold out in what developer and investor Legacy Communities believes to be record time: 132 condos sold in just five hours.
The Station at St. Elmo, located at 4510 Terry-O Lane in the rapidly changing St. Elmo neighborhood a few minutes south of downtown, will be made up of units running from $200,000 to more than $600,000. Crews will begin construction this August with a target opening date of fall 2022.
The condo project is being led by multiple Legacy companies: Legacy DCS, which oversees development and construction; Legacy International, which handles sales and marketing; and Legacy Performance Capital, which serves as the financial engine. All three are headquartered in Austin.
Legacy is expected to announce the general contractor in June.
The entire region has seen declining housing inventory over the past year while prices steadily climb, yielding a frenzy among buyers. Across the metro, Austin Board of Realtors reports, there's about two-and-a-half weeks of housing inventory when experts said a healthy market demands closer to six months of inventory. That has helped push the median price of an Austin-area home to about $460,000, and closed sales are up about 37% from a year ago when the pandemic briefly deterred homebuying.
Local Realtor and developer Kevin Burns of UrbanSpace said the market for condominiums in particular has been healthy over the past year. There was only a slight dip in buyer interest during the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, he said.
Demand is already outpacing supply in some corners of the city. Burns is selling the condos at 44 East, rising in the Rainey Street area. Other condo projects under development in the city include The Colorfield at 1012 Baylor St. and Parkside at Mueller in the Mueller community. StoryBuilt recently completed the 59-unit Willa condo community at 1600 S. 1st St.
The experience of The Station at St. Elmo is an instructive one for other developers and marketing teams looking to turn that pent-up demand into sales.
The St. Elmo neighborhood, long a hub of low-rise industrial buildings, has been at the center of some noteworthy new development of late, with retailers and developers becoming interested in recent years — some making use of the old industrial structures. Car maker Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) has a showroom in the works near Legacy's site, at the old home of Music Lab.
Developers of The Station have even bigger plans for the area, with talks already underway for a potential “Station II,” said Philip Jalufka, CEO of Legacy Performance Capital and Legacy International… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin’s music and arts community to receive windfall from American Rescue Plan (Austin Monitor)
The American Rescue Plan spells huge relief for Austin’s music and arts scene. In a resolution passed last Thursday, City Council proposed spending $25 million over a two-year period to revive the city’s creative industry, mostly using money from Austin’s $188.4 million cut of the $1.9 trillion stimulus package.
While Austin’s creative sector has received some help since the beginning of the pandemic from relief programs funded by the CARES Act, those in the industry say they’re still hurting.
“Musicians have gone without stable earned income for 14 months now, and gigs are not back yet,” singer/songwriter Sonya Jevette said. “We need this money to sustain our industry until gigs are back at 100 percent.”
According to a Brookings Institute report from last year, 32 percent of those in Austin’s creative sector lost their jobs because of the pandemic. The pandemic has also upended the main way the city supports the arts – revenue from the Hotel Occupancy Tax. Austin has lost $75 million in HOT revenue so far in the pandemic, meaning the city can’t fulfill its HOT-funded cultural arts contracts.
The resolution proposes $15 million in grants over two years (up to $7.5 million per year) for artists and arts organizations and $10 million in grants over two years (up to $5 million per year) for musicians and music businesses. The funds are not yet available because the resolution simply directs staffers to come back with a spending plan.
Even though a big chunk of the money will come from ARPA, it will also come from elsewhere – the city’s General Fund, for example, or other local, state or federal sources… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick calls for June special session after three of his priority bills fail in Texas House (Texas Tribune)
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday is asking Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session of the Texas Legislature in June to advance three pieces of GOP-backed legislation that died in the Texas House at midnight on Tuesday.
The bills sought to ban transgender students from playing on sports teams based on their gender identity, prohibit local governments from using taxpayer funds to pay for lobbyists and punish social media companies for "censoring" Texans based on their political viewpoints.
In a statement, Abbott said the call was premature and instead urged lawmakers to "work together to get important conservative legislation to my desk."
"Some are trying to end the game before the time clock has run out," Abbott wrote. "Members in both chambers need to be spending every minute of every day to accomplish that mission."
In his call to bring back the Legislature, Patrick said the bills in question have widespread support… (LINK TO STORY)
A false date rape drugging accusation against a lobbyist exposed claims of his role in the Texas Capitol’s culture of sexual harassment (Texas Tribune)
Although it had not been officially released, the investigative report began ricocheting around computers and cellphones at the Texas Capitol early Tuesday evening, and it made one thing unambiguously clear: Rick Dennis, a lobbyist with one of Austin's most prominent firms, was not guilty of using a date rape drug on two female legislative staffers during a night out in Austin.
Rumors that Dennis had been accused of doing so rocked the Capitol in late April, prompting outraged reactions from legislative leaders and state lawmakers. But a Texas Department of Public Safety investigation found the allegation baseless. Authorities soon after said they would not seek charges.
The DPS report, a copy of which was obtained by The Texas Tribune, concluded that the false allegation was fueled by two female legislative staffers, one of whom was trying to cover up behavior of her own that had nothing to do with Dennis.
Still, the incident laid bare larger questions about a Capitol culture that many female staffers say often leads to allegations of misconduct and harassment being brushed under the rug by those with the power to act.
Dennis has faced multiple accusations of inappropriate behavior with women as both a legislative staffer and lobbyist — and in at least two instances has been banned from visiting certain Capitol offices because of them, according to current and former staffers and documentation reviewed by the Tribune… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Cities reverse defunding the police amid rising crime (Wall Street Journal)
One year after the movement to “defund” law enforcement began to upend municipal budgets, many American cities are restoring money to their police departments or proposing to spend more.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would reinstate $92 million for a new precinct after scrapping the project last summer. The mayor of Baltimore, who led efforts as a city councilman to cut the police budget by $22 million last year, recently proposed a $27 million increase.
After attacks on Asian-Americans and a rise in homicides in Oakland, Calif., city lawmakers in April restored $3.3 million of the $29 million in police cuts, and the mayor is now proposing to increase the department’s budget by $24 million. Los Angeles’s mayor has proposed an increase of about $50 million after the city cut $150 million from its police department last year.
In the nation’s 20 largest local law-enforcement agencies, city and county leaders want funding increases for nine of the 12 departments where next year’s budgets already have been proposed. The increases range from 1% to nearly 6%.
Many U.S. cities are led by Democrats who supported protesters’ calls to defund the police—a term that activists have used in different ways, including to push for simply shrinking the size of police forces but also shifting resources from law enforcement to social services. The demonstrations, led by Black Lives Matter and allied groups, followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last year.
But city officials have found it difficult to keep police budgets down after seeing a rise in crime over the past year, with murder rates up by double digits in many cities. In the last three months of 2020, homicides rose 32.2% in cities with a population of at least one million, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report. Law-enforcement officials and criminologists say pandemic stress and a police pullback amid protests are likely contributors.
“It’s hard to have a serious conversation with folks about cutting a police department’s budget when crime is up,” said Michael Nutter, the former mayor of Philadelphia and a Democrat.
Last year, the defund movement coincided with a drop in tax revenue caused by Covid-19 shutdowns. With the pandemic fading, many local governments now have more resources due to an economic revival and federal stimulus dollars. Some city officials and law-enforcement leaders also note that changes intended to reform policing, such as enhanced training for officers, can be costly to implement. And some neighborhood groups worried about police cuts amid the rise in crime… (LINK TO STORY)
How Trump got a Bush to bend the knee (Politico)
In what’s expected to be a brutal contest pitting the Bush family scion against a scandal-plagued incumbent, Trump’s endorsement will go a long way toward determining the winner. The former president remains popular with the Texas Republican base — so popular that Bush, Jeb Bush’s son and currently the state’s land commissioner, has studiously avoided his family’s entanglements with Trump.
“It’s going to be the Holy War of Texas. We haven’t seen a battle like this since the siege at the Alamo,” said Jeff Roe, a Republican strategist and top adviser to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016.
“George P. is both the heir and protector of a historic Texas political dynasty, but this is a race against a two-term incumbent attorney general,” Roe said. “A line in the sand will be drawn, and people will have to choose sides. Everyone always thought George P. would carry the family banner into the next generation, but I’m not sure anyone anticipated it happening like this.”
Trump’s antipathy for two generations of Bushes has tarnished a once-mighty brand that once was synonymous with the Republican Party in Texas and across the country. Trump humiliated Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential primaries and briefly amplified a vicious tweet that said the former Florida governor “has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife,” a reference to Columba Bush, Jeb’s wife and George P.’s mother, who was born in Mexico and is an American citizen.
Jeb, former President George W. Bush and their parents, former President George H. W Bush and Barbara Bush, have been critical of Trump in turn.
Even so, George P. Bush endorsed Trump in his reelection last year… (LINK TO STORY)