BG Reads | News You Need to Know (June 29, 2021)
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[MEETING/HEARINGS]
The Austin Council next meets for regular business on July 22.
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
In Austin, tech giants press Congress to boost chip industry amid global shortage (Austin American-Statesman)
A global shortage of semiconductors — the computer chips that operate everything from your laptop to your car — is an area of growing concern for Austin's technology sector, one of the pillars of the region's economy.
As they gathered Monday for a roundtable discussion in Austin, tech giants and semiconductor manufacturers were looking to Congress in hopes that proposed federal investment in the semiconductor industry will boost the sector and help shore up supply chain issues.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, is one of the authors the CHIPS for America Act, a bipartisan tech and manufacturing bill designed to expand domestic technology manufacturing. The bill calls for $52 billion to support domestic semiconductor manufacturing, $16 billion to the Department of Energy to research and develop energy-related supply chains, and $81 billion for the National Science Foundation.
Representatives from tech giants Samsung, Dell Technologies, Infineon, NXP Semiconductors, BAE Systems and AMD met with Cornyn at Samsung's Austin facility to discuss the need for solutions to the supply chain problems… (LINK TO STORY)
U.S. Supreme Court to weigh legality of Austin ban on digital billboards (Austin American-Statesman)
The legal controversy now before the nation's highest court began in 2017, when Reagan National Advertising and Lamar Advantage Outdoor sued to overturn the sign ordinance after the city denied applications to convert 83 static billboards into digital advertising that could feature changing messages.
A federal district judge upheld the ordinance, but the companies appealed and won at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which voided the digital billboard ban as a violation of free speech rights.
The appeals court ruled that government officials needed to read the digital signs to determine whether they were allowed as on-premises advertising or not allowed as off-premises ads — making the ordinance a ban based on the content of the message in violation of the First Amendment… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin’s biomass power plant idled again during mid-June energy crunch (KXAN)
The City of Austin’s biomass power plant sat idle again, producing no power, during another statewide electricity shortage last week, according to the city’s electric utility Austin Energy.
An Austin Energy spokesperson attributed the dormancy of the power plant — which is in Nacogdoches and runs on wood chips — to energy economics and a problem firing up the plant.
“The utility operates all of our plants most efficiently and when it makes the most economic sense to do so,” according to an Austin Energy statement. “Last week when ERCOT called for conservation, we started the 24 – 48 hour process to start the plant back up. Upon startup, we discovered an issue that needed repair. Once those repairs were made, we were clear to run the plant.”
The biomass plant began producing power June 21, according to a utility spokesperson.
ERCOT, or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, oversees the state’s electrical grid. On June 14, ERCOT called on Texans to conserve energy. According to energy experts and ERCOT, an unusual number of power plants had gone offline at the same time the state was seeing blistering heat. People were urged to turn up their home thermostats and hold off on using large appliances. The call for conservation lasted through June 18.
Meanwhile, Austin’s biomass plant produced no power. The grid alert last week unnerved many Texans, but it registered as a relatively minor inconvenience compared to the winter storm crisis Texas experienced in February. The Nacogdoches plant was powered off during that event as well.
Dr. David Tuttle, a research associate at the University of Texas Energy Institute, said the plant isn’t a major power producer — pumping out about 105 megawatts or enough energy for roughly 20,000 homes in the summer — but it would have been helpful to have it online during the recent power crunch. Tuttle is also a board member of the Austin Electric Utility Commission, which oversees Austin Energy.
Austin Energy’s contract with the former operator of the Nacogdoches power plant was described as a financial “disaster” in 2016 by one Austin city councilman. Austin was contractually obligated to pay over $50 million a year, regardless of whether the plant produced power, and that payment would escalate over the contract’s 20-year lifespan. City officials opted to cut their losses in April 2019 and buy the facility from its former owner, Southern Company, for roughly $460 million, according to city officials and media reports. Purchasing the plant saved the city roughly $275 million, according to Austin Energy.
Dr. Joshua Rhodes, also a research associate at UT’s Energy Institute, said the Nacogdoches plant has sat idle largely because of the economics of running it.
“Biomass just costs more to make electricity,” Rhodes said. The cost to run the plant is “quite a bit higher than any of our, most of our, gas fleet, our coal fleet, definitely higher than any of our renewables, and our nuclear.”
Austin Energy’s power contract was signed at a time when natural gas was more expensive, and biomass made more economical sense. With the proliferation of fracking and cheaper natural gas, that financial equation changed, Rhodes said… (LINK TO STORY)
PARD continues to work through lifeguard staffing shortages (Austin Monitor)
After a year of lockdown measures and closures aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus, Austinites have entered the summer season ready to interact with the world again. But as people head outdoors, they’re noticing that the city’s aquatics operations aren’t as robust as in previous years, with many pools and splash pads around the city still closed.
The reason boils down to staffing, the pandemic and the winter storm.
The city’s Parks and Recreation Department didn’t enter the season with enough lifeguards to staff all available pools. PARD’s lifeguard staffing issue is not a new development; the shortage has been on the horizon for months.
In January, the department put out a memo to Mayor Steve Adler and City Council letting them know that the department would need to hire 600 lifeguards by May. PARD fell well short of this target and as of June 14, had only 219 guards on payroll.
To help mitigate staffing complications, PARD implemented “a tiered opening schedule, based upon the number of lifeguard staff needed to operate the facilities, with estimated opening dates.”
In an email to the Austin Monitor, parks department spokesperson Kanya Lyons said that the tier system determining which pools would open first was based on factors like location or proximity to other facilities, staffing levels needed to operate the pool, programming needs, and the department’s maintenance/repair schedule.
Pools like Bartholomew, Barton Springs and Deep Eddy opened first, and pools like Parque Zaragoza, Rosewood and Montopolis opened on June 19 as the staffing shortage began to ease in recent weeks. As of Monday, PARD has 316 guards on staff.
The department considers the shortage to be “a direct result of operational modifications necessary during the pandemic.”
The city had to stop hiring lifeguards in March of last year as the pandemic began spreading, and wasn’t able to resume hiring efforts again until March of this year. But even then, hiring efforts have been stalled by limits on the number of guards who can be trained at one time due to coronavirus protocols… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Texas students' standardized test scores dropped dramatically during the pandemic, especially in math (Texas Tribune)
The COVID-19 pandemic appeared to undo years of improvement for Texas students meeting grade requirements in reading and math, with students who did most of their schooling remotely suffering "significant declines" compared to those who attended in person, according to standardized test results released Monday by the Texas Education Agency.
In districts where fewer than a quarter of classes were held in person, the number of students who met math test expectations dropped by 32 percentage points, and the number of students who met reading expectations dropped by 9 percentage points compared to 2019, the last time the test was administered. In districts with more than three-quarters in-person instruction, the number of students meeting math expectations only dropped by 9 percentage points and those who met reading expectations by 1 percentage point. Students of color and lower-income students saw greater gaps as well, although those gaps were smaller than the one between remote and in-person instruction.
“The impact of the coronavirus on what school means and what school is has been truly profound,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath told reporters Monday. “What we know now with certainty is that the decision in Texas to prioritize in person instruction was critical.”… (LINK TO STORY)
New chart reveals sobering look at COVID-19's impact on Texas deaths (Houston Chronicle)
More than 51,000 Texans have died of COVID-19, according to the state’s latest tally. That is larger than the capacity of Minute Maid Park, though it represents less than two-thousandths of Texas’ 29 million residents. So, was the virus, which killed less than 2 percent of the Texans with documented cases, responsible for anything more than a blip in historical death trends? An examination of Texas the past 50 years reveals the answer: Unequivocally yes. Deaths in Texas historically are cyclical, explained Mark Hayward, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies mortality trends. They peak in winter with the annual flu season and ebb in summer, and steadily increase overall as the state’s population grows.
During the pandemic, however, that pattern was disrupted by a surge in mortality with no precedent in modern history. Hayward said that will lead to a decreased life expectancy for Texans; a British study published this week found the average lifetime of Americans decreased by almost two years in 2020. “You don’t lose two or three years of life expectancy without actual catastrophe happening,” Hayward said. “Modern populations don’t go through that. In any kind of normal year, there’s never that kind of impact on a population’s mortality such as we’ve seen from COVID.” Instead of falling in the summer, Texas deaths surged beginning in June 2020. They peaked in the third week of July at 6,211, up 71 percent over the same week the previous year. A second wave of the virus during the holiday season peaked the third week in January at 7,154, a 69 percent year-over-year jump.
The Chronicle examined weekly deaths in Texas back to 1964, the earliest year the state health department has reliable data. From that year through 2019, deaths in Texas increased an average of 2 percent annually. Deaths jumped 23 percent in 2020. Considering that the pandemic reached Texas in March, deaths over the next 12 months jumped 32 percent over the previous year. Of the 285,108 Texas deaths between March 2020 and March 2021, 17 percent were from COVID-19, according to state health records… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas Democratic Party names two executive directors to ‘try a new approach’ (KXAN)
The Texas Democratic Party named two co-executive directors Monday, chairperson Gilberto Hinojosa said.
Hinojosa said Jamarr Brown and Hannah Roe Beck are the new leaders “in order to build stronger coalitions, reach more Texans and create an inclusive, collaborative movement.”
Hinojosa said the party is “trying a new approach,” with two executive directors.
Brown is the party’s first Black executive director, and Beck is the party’s youngest. Beck has served in an interim executive director role previously.
The Republican Party of Texas, meanwhile, is set to name a replacement for Allen West, who resigned his chair position June 4. West’s resignation will take effect July 11 when the party selects a new chair.
West hinted at possibly running for office when he announced his resignation, saying “maybe something Congressional.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Dear Austinites, you have permission to move to an affordable, weird city: Houston (Texas Monthly)
Finally, there’s the politics. If the public vote to re-criminalize homelessness didn’t already deflate Austin’s sense of moral superiority, the fact that the city’s leadership can’t find a way to make housing affordable should be an indictment of anything related to self-proclaimed progressiveness.
Politics is about power, and if Austin politicians can’t use their power to improve the fundamental living conditions of not only the most vulnerable but also a reasonably privileged middle class, then they should just admit the city is becoming a resort town for celebrities and a techno-oligarchy and spend their time arguing about plastic straws. Say what you will about Houston’s relationship with the oil and gas industry; at least pollution here has abated. Austin still hasn’t figured out how to mitigate the collateral consequences of tech wealth and Hollywood tourism… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
How a SoftBank-backed construction startup burned through $3 Billion (Wall Street Journal)
Venture-backed startup Katerra Inc. aimed to revolutionize the construction business by mastering every element of the trade at once. Instead, its June bankruptcy filing made clear just how difficult it is for Silicon Valley to disrupt this complex industry.
The firm’s downfall wiped out nearly $3 billion of investor money, making it one of the best-funded U.S. startups ever to go bankrupt. Katerra thought it could save time and money by bringing every step of the construction process in-house—from manufacturing windows to factory-built walls to making its own lightbulbs.
It sold the idea to a deep-pocketed roster of financial backers, including SoftBank Group Corp. , Soros Fund Management LLC and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. At its peak, the company was valued at nearly $6 billion.
But Katerra never managed to do very well at all the aspects of construction it hoped to master, former employees say, leaving some of them exasperated at its recent demise.
“You guys had the golden goose, you had all that money from SoftBank and at the end of the day it was all pissed away,” said Chris Severson, a former construction-cost estimator at Katerra… (LINK TO STORY)
House GOP bristles as a Jan. 6 investigation lands in its lap (Politico)
In the days after the deadly Capitol attack on Jan. 6, tension among House Republicans was so high that one of them privately suggested some GOP colleagues be punished for their roles in encouraging the riot.
This GOP lawmaker drafted a list of about half a dozen fellow Republicans who had cheered on the pro-Donald Trump rally that turned violent that day, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the maneuver. The sources said Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) were on the list but declined to identify its author — a sign that the scars from the insurrection remain deeply painful for members of both parties.
But the fact that the list even made the rounds, in hindsight, shows how sharply the political winds have turned for Republicans reckoning with Trump's legacy and future. Only 10 House Republicans voted to impeach the former president for his role in the Jan. 6 riot, and most have said little since on the matter. There is close to zero appetite within their party now to break with Trump.
And Trump is once again the GOP's undisputed kingmaker, holding rallies and flexing his grassroots fundraising might as he seeks to influence Republican primary campaigns. House Democrats are likely to take full advantage of that political reality as they move ahead with a select committee to examine the siege on Congress.
Which leaves Republicans with a big challenge: how to discredit and distance themselves from that investigation — which moderates and conservatives alike are criticizing as a partisan setup — and retake the House in 2022, a tantalizingly close possibility that would doom President Joe Biden's domestic agenda… (LINK TO TO STORY)