BG Reads | News You Need to Know (September 3, 2021)
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
Mayor Adler's State of the City Address - FULL SPEECH HERE
COVID-19: Press Q & A Virtual News Conference - Friday, 10:30AM
[BINGHAM GROUP]
OUT NOW - BG PODCAST EP. 145: Talking Austin's FY22 Budget and Beyond
The team discuss the City of Austin's recent FY22 budget season, and challenges ahead in FY23 and on.
Featuring Bingham Group CEO A.J., and Jimmy Flannigan, Bingham Group Advisory Board Member and former Austin Council Member.
CASE STUDIES
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Council OKs new ballot language for Prop A (Austin Monitor)
As directed by the Texas Supreme Court, City Council on Thursday approved new language for Proposition A, the ordinance that would increase Austin’s police force to two officers per every 1,000 residents.
Although the political action committee Save Austin Now claimed victory in the court ruling, the city also emerged victorious because the state’s highest court recognized the necessity of adding the cost of the ordinance to the ballot language. With a price tag estimated at between $271.5 million and $598.8 million over five years, voters who might otherwise have voted yes may decide the price is too high.
Council unanimously adopted the language proposed by the court. Council Member Alison Alter was absent.
Voters will now be asked to answer this question: “Shall a petitioned ordinance be approved to enhance public safety and police oversight, transparency and accountability by adding new chapter 2-16 to establish minimum standards for the police department to ensure effective public safety and protect residents and visitors to Austin, and prescribing minimal requirements for achieving the same, at an estimated cost of $271.5 million – $598.8 million over five years?”
The language tracks the wording of the caption of the petition that was used to get the item on the November ballot – with the addition of the phrase about the cost… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin City Council unanimously approves community arts center in East Austin (Austin American-Statesman)
On Thursday, Austin City Council unanimously approved a resolution to bolster the cultural vitality of Austin's African American Cultural Heritage District. The district covers an area of East Central Austin that is the historic heart of culture and commerce for the city's Black residents.
The resolution was authored by council member Natasha Harper-Madison in coordination with a group of Black artists, creatives and community leaders called the East Austin Creative Coalition. It calls on the city manager to develop place-making actions, such as historical markers, branded street signs and public art, for the African American Cultural District and explore ways of using the city's Live Music Fund to support African American culture-based music industry projects in the district.
It also directs the city manager to develop a plan to solicit proposals for the development of a community arts center on the 1100 Block of East 11th Street, the lot where jazz artist Harold McMillan has been operating Kenny Dorham's Backyard for 14 years… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin crime, police staffing take priority as APD receives record budget (Community Impact)
One year after Austin leaders approved a historic reduction to the city’s police budget, City Council approved record funding for the Austin Police Department at a time when officer staffing has stalled and citywide murders have spiked.
The passage of House Bill 1900, a new state law penalizing local governments “defunding” their police departments, has hobbled flexibility over the police budget, city leaders said. The legislation targeting reduced police budgets came months before a new ballot measure developed by the Save Austin Now political action committee could also inflate the department’s budget by tying police staffing to the city population if approved by voters Nov. 2.
local governments “defunding” their police departments, has hobbled flexibility over the police budget, city leaders said. The legislation goes into effect two months before a new ballot measure developed by the Save Austin Now political action committee could further inflate the department’s budget, if approved by voters Nov. 2, by tying police staffing to population.
Alongside those recent policy updates, Austin has seen more homicides as of late July than in all of 2020 while APD’s headcount remains dozens of officers short, according to department data. Both interim Police Chief Joseph Chacon and supporters of the ballot measure have labeled the department’s staffing a crisis.
“At this point we need more officers. At this point we need our officers to be properly trained when they walk into a situation not to immediately see it as threatening,” said Bill Spelman, a former University of Texas urban policy and criminal justice professor and Austin council member. “We need to change police [training], but we also right now need a few more police than we’ve got.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Texas Legislature adjourns second special session after passing more of Gov. Greg Abbott’s priorities (Texas Tribune)
The Texas Legislature adjourned its second special session Thursday evening, ending a nearly 30-day stretch that was called to pass a GOP elections bill after House Democrats carried out a weekslong quorum break to block the passage of that legislation during the summer’s first overtime round.
The two chambers gaveled out minutes apart after giving final approval to a number of Gov. Greg Abbott’s agenda items, including so-called critical race theory legislation and a bill that will, among other things, restore funding for the Legislature itself.
The House adjourned first, with House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, wishing members a happy Labor Day weekend before gaveling out.
Over in the Senate, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told senators he was proud of their work and nodded to another yet-to-be-called special session that will focus on the redistricting process in the coming weeks — where lawmakers will draw new political maps for the state’s congressional delegation, the Legislature and the State Board of Education.
“We’ll be back soon,” he said. “There’s a little bit of unfinished business yet to be done.”
Earlier Thursday, state lawmakers passed legislation that restores funding for the Legislature — including salaries and benefits for some 2,100 state employees — that was set to run out at the end of the month after Abbott vetoed those dollars earlier this summer. The governor’s veto was intended as retribution for House Democrats who walked out of the Capitol in the final hours of the regular legislative session to block a GOP elections bill in May.
In addition to restoring the funding, the Legislature this week passed a similar version of that controversial GOP elections bill. State lawmakers also reworked the process for releasing accused criminals on bail, beefed up border security funding, expanded virtual learning for students, restricted use of abortion-inducing drugs and banned the storage or disposal of high-level radioactive waste in Texas… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas schools are surveilling students online, often without their knowledge or consent (Dallas Morning News)
Texas schools are rapidly scaling up the use of technology that monitors email, web history and social media posts of potentially millions of students, often without their knowledge or consent, a Dallas Morning News investigation has found. Legal and privacy experts have long raised concerns about this technology and questioned its effectiveness in detecting potential threats. Despite those worries, Texas’ schools have spent millions of tax dollars on these services since 2015. The proliferation of student surveillance has been fueled by nationwide fears about school shootings, suicides and cyberbullying. Among school districts, no state has more contracts with digital surveillance companies than Texas, according to GovSpend, a company that tracks government spending. Using school records and purchasing data, The News examined some of the most widely used monitoring technologies in Texas schools: Social Sentinel, Gaggle, Securly and GoGuardian. In the past six years, more than 200 districts statewide have used these technologies.
At least 28 are in North Texas, including some of the largest districts — Dallas, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Carroll, Irving, Coppell and Grapevine-Colleyville ISDs have all used one of the four services. The companies offer services ranging from public social media monitoring to tracking nearly everything a student does on a device. Contracts for these services range from a few hundred dollars to six figures, depending on the service and the size of the school or district. Social Sentinel says it scans more than a billion posts on social media every day against more than 450,000 words and phrases that indicate potential harm. It then uses artificial intelligence to identify potential threats of violence and suicide. Social Sentinel co-founder Gary Margolis has said in news interviews that the service doesn’t surveil or monitor students, because it merely scans public social media posts. But Amelia Vance, the director of youth and education privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, disagrees. “It’s absolutely a monitoring or surveillance tool,” Vance said. “The privacy concerns with this are, of course, never-ending.” A spokesperson for Navigate 360, the parent company of Social Sentinel, disputed The News’ description of how its technology works but declined to specify what was incorrect… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Social media companies can’t ban Texans over political viewpoints under bill headed to governor’s desk (Texas Tribune)
Texas is about to make it illegal for big social media companies to ban users based on their political viewpoints.
The Texas House voted 78-42 on Thursday to back an amended version of House Bill 20, which the Senate passed in a 17-14 vote Tuesday. The legislation, now on its way to the governor’s desk, would require social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and YouTube — those with more than 50 million monthly users in the U.S. — to produce regular reports of removed content, create a complaint system and disclose their content regulation procedures.
Similar legislation was considered during the regular legislative session earlier this year and was championed by Gov. Greg Abbott, who said that social media companies were part of a dangerous movement to “silence conservative ideas [and] religious beliefs.”
Proponents of HB 20 say it would prohibit social media companies’ ability to silence viewpoints on their platforms and allow users who were wrongly censored to seek recourse… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Heeding Steve Bannon’s call, election deniers organize to seize control of the GOP — and reshape America’s elections (ProPublica)
One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?” When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges. The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.” Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory. Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities. In Wisconsin, for instance, new GOP recruits are becoming poll workers. County clerks who run elections in the state are required to hire parties’ nominees. The parties once passed on suggesting names, but now hardline Republican county chairs are moving to use those powers. “We’re signing up election inspectors like crazy right now,” said Outagamie County party chair Matt Albert, using the state’s formal term for poll workers. Albert, who held a “Stop the Steal” rally during Wisconsin’s November recount, said Bannon’s podcast had played a role in the burst of enthusiasm. ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge. “I’ve never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork,” said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
How progressives are preparing for battle over Dems' $3.5T megabill (Politico)
This fall marks progressives' biggest chance in years to advance their top political priorities. And their off-the-Hill allies are gearing up for an intraparty showdown.
Top Democrats are pushing to resolve lingering House-Senate disputes and have the text of their massive social spending plan ready by Sept. 15 before passing that entire bill on party lines by Sept. 27. That's the deadline Speaker Nancy Pelosi has set for a House vote on the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill the Senate passed in August — giving progressive groups only weeks to defend key elements of the up-to-$3.5 trillion package such as child care incentives and climate change action.
The party's outside activists are already planning to spend big and escalate their messaging. But matters are trickier on the Hill, where progressive lawmakers are on a collision course with Democratic centrists resistant to a price tag as high as $3.5 trillion.
Unlike their House colleagues, liberal senators are refraining from publicly criticizing their centrist counterparts, even though both Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have raised serious concerns with the $3.5 trillion number. Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) Thursday evening reiterated that there would be "no infrastructure bill without the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill" in response to an op-ed from the West Virginia Democrat about the bill, but did not mention Manchin by name.
Even so, House Democrats could end up picking the fight by opposing the bipartisan infrastructure measure this month if the social spending bill isn't done. That's exactly what one prominent outside group, Indivisible, is steeling their spines for… (LINK TO FULL STORY)