BG Reads | News You Need to Know (April 6, 2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
BG Podcast EP. 136: Q1 2021 Review: Austin's Residental Real Estate Market
Today's episode (136) features a conversation with Austin Board of REALTORS® CEO Emily Chenevert.
She and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discuss the Q1 2021 performance of Austin’s residential real estate market.
You can listen to all episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. New content every Wednesday. Please like, link, comment and subscribe!
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
[THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE]
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (5,400)
LINK TO FILED SENATE BILLS (2,496)
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
City, live music advocates decry legislation that would limit noise regulations (Austin Monitor)
City leaders and live music advocates spoke out Monday against a bill in the Texas Legislature that would limit the ability of cities to regulate amplified sound from bars and music venues.
The press conference at downtown club 3Ten was held in response to House Bill 3813, which was filed by Rep. Cody Harris of Palestine and seems targeted specifically at Austin with its language covering cities larger than 750,000 residents in counties of at least 1.5 million residents.
The bill would prohibit limits on sound up to 85 decibels created by bars and venues between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., even if the business is located in a residential area.
There has been no significant movement on Austin’s regulation of amplified sound in roughly a decade. The most recent work on that front come from the “agent of change” concept that seeks to strike a balance between entertainment businesses and residential developments in close proximity to one another.
Mayor Steve Adler said music advocates and neighborhood groups have worked together for years to reach a hard-earned agreement on noise levels that will allow music venues to operate while protecting quality of life in neighborhoods.
“The issue of sound has always been an important part of our community and public conversation,” he said. “This is a community that has people from all different ends of the spectrum with respect to sound. Some people would like to keep it low and some would like to have it go really high, but in a city and community it’s important for the people to be able to get together and work through those kinds of issues.”
Without naming names, Adler mentioned that a “particular local bar owner” or interest group may have pushed Harris to file the bill.
“There’s a certain acceptance of noise that comes with moving here. There are a lot of people who may disagree with me, but the important thing about a city is that we sit down with one another to work through those issues and find something that will work,” he said. “In this instance the outside interference from the Legislature would be misguided, misdirected, not welcome and not appropriate.”
Council Member Kathie Tovo, whose district includes multiple live music and nightlife entertainment venues, said the noise ordinance passed 10 years ago has served the city well as the population has increased and put pressure on music venues around the city.
“Constituents on both sides of that issue aren’t always perfectly satisfied with that ordinance, but it has been a balance and a series of compromises to come up with an ordinance that serves the venues well and allows us to be the Live Music Capital of the World and allows us to cultivate live music throughout our city,” she said. “It also provides for neighbors who live adjacent, to make sure they have the quality of life you would expect in a city like Austin.”… (LINK TO STORY)
More than 20,000 Johnson & Johnson doses coming to Travis County providers; Austin Public Health expands registration (Community Impact)
On April 5, Austin Public Health expanded registration access for coronavirus vaccine appointments to include people age 40 and up and announced the agency's intention to expand access incrementally moving forward.
Texans age 16 and up became eligible to receive a vaccine March 29, with people ages 16-17 only allowed to receive Pfizer vaccine. APH has yet to open its supply to all eligible residents, however, and has said it will continue to prioritize vaccinations “by age and risk for severe disease” as it gradually expands access to the general public.
“APH will notify the public again when appointment scheduling expands beyond this group,” APH said in a statement.
The change comes after thousands of APH appointments remained unfilled during an April 1 registration window. Those unfilled appointments, APH said, were primarily for slots April 6 and were set to be offered to vaccine seekers again April 5, the first evening that people ages 40-49 have been admitted. The public provider continues to open its registration portal on Monday evenings beginning at 6 p.m. and also offered an advance window the morning of April 5 to high-priority registrants, including medical workers, teachers, seniors and people with high-risk medical conditions.This week, APH is set to receive 12,000 more Moderna doses as well as 1,000 Johnson & Johnson shots. The Johnson & Johnson doses are bound for direct outreach to vulnerable community members through APH’s mobile vaccination program and collaborations with community partner organizations, a representative from APH told Community Impact Newspaper. Only Moderna doses will be available at the entity’s mass vaccination events this week… (LINK TO STORY)
Foreclosures back on but World Class gets reprieve for huge Northwest Austin campus (Austin Business Journal)
World Class Holdings will not face foreclosure on April 6 for its massive 1.3-million-square-foot office campus in Northwest Austin. The lender for Silicon Hills Campus LLC, a World Class entity, has canceled the foreclosure sale scheduled for that day, World Class attorney Mark Taylor told Austin Business Journal on the evening of April 5.
In an April 5 statement, Travis County Public Information Specialist Yoojin Cho confirmed that foreclosure sales will be allowed to proceed in the county on April 6. "Foreclosure sales are not prohibited from proceeding as long as they comply with Travis County's Covid-19 precaution rules for county buildings and facilities and the Local Health Authority's rules," Cho said in a statement... (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he will boycott Major League Baseball events after the league pulled its All-Star Game from Georgia (Texas Tribune)
Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday announced he would not throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Texas Rangers' home opening game and would boycott any other Major League Baseball events, citing the league's decision to pull its All-Star Game from Georgia in response to new voting restrictions there.
In a letter to a top Texas Rangers executive, Abbott said he had been “looking forward to" tossing out the first pitch "— until [MLB] adopted what has turned out to be a false narrative about the election law reforms in Georgia.”
“It is shameful that America’s pastime is not only being influenced by partisan political politics, but also perpetuating false political narratives,” Abbott said, adding that he “will not participate in an event held by MLB, and the state will not seek to host the All-Star Game or any other MLB special events.”
The MLB announced Friday it was moving the All-Star Game out of suburban Atlanta, saying the league "fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box." Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp last month signed a new law that shrinks the window for voters to request absentee ballots, imposes new voter ID requirements and bans the handing out of water and food to people waiting in line to vote… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz opposes President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan (Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
Sen. Ted Cruz says that President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan is “really just the Green New Deal-lite masquerading as an infrastructure plan.” The Green New Deal aimed to address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Cruz strongly opposed the deal partly because of the effect it would have on Texas’ oil and natural gas industry. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, hasn’t said anything about the plan since it was released Wednesday, but when asked about the proposal recently said “I get skeptical.”
“I think we’re going to need to see how much of that is going to be paid for and how it’s going to be paid for,” Cornyn said. “It looks like they want to raise taxes.” The plan’s money would be spent over the next eight years and funded mainly by increasing taxes on corporations, not individuals, from 21% to 28%. The plan justifies this tax hike by saying that “profitable corporations should not be able to get away with paying little or no tax by shifting jobs and profits overseas.” Cruz, a Texas Republican, was not pleased.
“At a time when America’s families, small businesses, and job creators are just getting back on their feet, President Biden plans to increase taxes because he thinks he knows how to spend your money better than you do,” Cruz said Wednesday. The senators also expressed concern about the plan’s spending. “I think they’re going to try to do a lot of things and call it infrastructure which aren’t technically infrastructure,” Cornyn said last week… (LINK TO STORY)
How Baylor beat Gonzaga for the National Championship (New York Times)
Seventy-three years after it last played for a national title, Baylor ostentatiously ascended as a modern power of men’s college basketball on Monday night, winning the championship of a pandemic-disrupted season and extinguishing Gonzaga’s ambitions for end-to-end perfection.
The outcome was settled well before the scoreboard read 86-70 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. In fact, it was clear in the opening four minutes, which nearly passed before Gonzaga scored even a point. By then, Baylor had 9 — an offensive onslaught that ultimately intensified and had Baylor with a 20-point advantage midway through the second half.
Just two nights before the title showdown, Gonzaga had prevailed in one of the most sensational games in the history of the N.C.A.A.’s men’s tournament, a 93-90 thriller against U.C.L.A. But on Monday, the Bears openly overpowered the Bulldogs, who started to rally a modest defense once they switched to zone.
It was still far too much.
Baylor seized rebounds. Especially early, it seemed to score on command and control the game’s flow and capitalize on one turnover after the next by Gonzaga, which entered Monday night hoping to become the first men’s Division I team since 1976 to cap an undefeated campaign with a national title.
There were moments when Gonzaga seemed to inch back into the game. In the second half, for instance, the Bulldogs narrowed the gap to 9. Two layups, two free-throws, a 3-pointer and 94 seconds later, the Baylor lead had vaulted to 16.
Baylor’s shooting was imperfect — indeed, Gonzaga made a greater share of its shots. But it spread its scoring around. Jared Butler, a junior guard, led Baylor with 22 points, his record for this year’s tournament. MaCio Teague added 19 of his own. Baylor had 16 second-chance points and 21 from its bench.
Gonzaga, whose season-leading scorer Drew Timme became enveloped in foul trouble with more than 11 minutes to play in the game, did much of its scoring in the paint and struggled mightily with 3-pointers, making just 29 percent. Jalen Suggs, the star of Saturday’s victory, finished with 22 points, the most of any Bulldog on Monday.
Across 18 seasons under Coach Scott Drew, Baylor has risen into a juggernaut of the sport. The Bears had reached the round of 16 five times since 2010, and the round of 8 three times. It was not until this season, though, that Baylor stormed into the Final Four for the first time since 1950. And when it last played for a championship, in 1948, Kentucky set down a shellacking, 58-42, in the title game.
“Since 2008, we’ve won 18 or more,” Drew said on Saturday. “And us and Kansas are the only two Power Fives to do that. We’ve been consistently good. We just haven’t been able to get to a Final Four or national championship.”
Then they made the grandest stage of all and routed a team that had not lost since Feb. 22, 2020… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Justice Clarence Thomas takes aim at tech and Its power 'To Cut Off Speech' (KUT)
The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lower court ruling that former President Donald Trump violated the First Amendment rights of critics he blocked on Twitter.
Lawyers for those Trump blocked on Twitter argued that the former president's Twitter account functioned as an official source of information about the government, leading a federal appeals court to rule that Trump's blocking amounted to illegally silencing their viewpoints.
But Trump is no longer in office, and Twitter has permanently banned him from its platform over glorifying violence. So the lower court's ruling from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should be tossed, the Supreme Court ruled, instructing the court to dismiss the case as "moot," or no longer active.
While the case can no longer be cited as precedent, other courts have held that an elected official's social media accounts can be treated as public forums. And so the dismissal "is unlikely to affect the development of the law," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which sued Trump over his blocking of critics.
"I think public officials are and should be on notice that if they block people from their social media accounts on the basis of viewpoint, they are violating the First Amendment," Jaffer told NPR.
The decision from the high court did not surprise court watchers, but a concurrence in the ruling from Justice Clarence Thomas has drawn intense attention in technology circles.
In it, Thomas took broad aim at social media networks, attacking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the landmark law that protects technology companies from lawsuits and also provides platforms wide latitude in patrolling speech on their sites.
To Thomas, Twitter's ban of Trump exposed the potential abuses of this legal protection, noting how "applying old doctrines to new digital platforms is rarely straightforward."
Thomas went on: "As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms. The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions," Thomas wrote.
Big Tech companies Facebook and Google, Thomas pointed out, have vast and largely unchecked control over online marketplaces.
"It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail," Thomas wrote. "But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today's digital platforms, nothing is."… (LINK TO STORY)
‘Stay out of politics,’ Republican leader McConnell tells U.S. CEOs, warns of ‘consequences’ (Reuters)
U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell lashed out at corporate America on Monday, warning CEOs to stay out of the debate over a new voting law in Georgia that has been criticized as restricting votes among minorities and the poor. In a sign of a growing rift in the decades-old alliance between the conservative party and U.S. corporations, McConnell said: “My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.” McConnell warned companies there could be risks for turning on the party, but he did not elaborate. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” McConnell told a news conference in his home state of Kentucky. Big business ties with Republicans began fraying under former President Donald Trump’s leadership and the party’s focus on voting restrictions has soured businesses embracing diversity as key to their work force and customer base.
Major Georgia employers Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines have spoken out against the law signed by Governor Brian Kemp, and Major League Baseball pulled the 2021 All-Star Game out of the state over the law strengthening identification requirements for absentee ballots and making it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in line. “I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics,” McConnell said. Trump spent months after losing his reelection bid falsely claiming that his defeat was the result of widespread fraud. He failed in dozens of legal challenges. Nonetheless, lawmakers in 47 states this year have introduced 361 bills imposing new restrictions on voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The Georgia law brought a backlash from some U.S. companies with strong ties to the state. Coca-Cola Co. Chief Executive James Quincey called the law “unacceptable” and a “step backwards.”
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said: “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election.” Independent reviews have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is rare in the United States, and state and federal probes found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election which the Republican Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Corporate America has long thrown its political muscle behind Republican candidates and officeholders, often funneling more campaign contributions to conservative candidates than Democratic ones… (LINK TO STORY)
Corporations gave over $50M to voting restriction backers (Associated Press)
When executives from Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines spoke out against Georgia’s new voting law as unduly restrictive last week, it seemed to signal a new activism springing from corporate America. But if leaders of the nation’s most prominent companies are going to reject lawmakers who support restrictive voting measures, they will have to abruptly reverse course. State legislators across the country who have pushed for new voting restrictions, and also seized on former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, have reaped more than $50 million in corporate donations in recent years, according to a new report by Public Citizen, a Washington-based government watchdog group. Telecom giant AT&T was the most prolific, donating over $800,000 since 2015 to authors of proposed restrictions, cosponsors of such measures, or those who voted in favor of the bills, the report found. Other top donors during the same period include Comcast, Philip Morris, United Health, Walmart, Verizon, General Motors and Pfizer.
The money may not have been given with voting laws in mind, but it nonetheless helped cement Republican control in statehouses where many of the prohibitive measures are now moving forward. Whether companies continue to give to these lawmakers will test how far risk-adverse corporate leaders are willing to go in their increasingly forceful criticism of the restrictive efforts, which voting rights groups have excoriated as an attack on democracy. “It really is corporate America, as a whole, that is funding these politicians,” said Mike Tanglis, one of the authors of the report.
“It seems many are trying to hide under a rock and hope that this issue passes.” More than 120 companies detailed in the report previously said they would rethink their donations to members of Congress who, acting on the same falsehoods as the state lawmakers, objected to the certification of President Joe Biden’s win following the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. The tension is most evident now in Georgia, where a far-reaching new voting law has drawn an intense national scrutiny, prompting the criticism from Delta and Coca-Cola. On Friday, MLB announced it would no longer host the 2021 All-Star Game in Atlanta. Yet it’s unclear whether this aggressive new posture will extend to corporate campaign donation practices. And early indicators show there is risk. Georgia’s Republican-controlled House voted to strip Delta of a tax break worth tens of millions of dollars annually for their criticism of the new law, though the action was rendered moot after the GOP Senate failed to take it up before the legislative session adjourned… (LINK TO STORY)