BG Reads | News You Need to Know (February 8, 2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
NEW // BG Podcast EP. 127: The Anatomy of a Digital Disinformation Campaign
On today’s episode we speak with Robert Matney, Managing Director of Government Affairs at Austin-based Yonder A.I. The firm’s software discovers the hidden groups who control and amplify online narratives, so companies can navigate an unpredictable, ever-evolving internet with confidence.
OUT WEDNESDAY // EP. 128: Talking Tech Flight and Austin with Kleiner Perkins Investor Haomiao Huang, PhD.
CITY OF AUSTIN
Austin Council Special Called Meetings:
Tuesday (9AM) - Agenda
Wednesday (1PM) - Agenda
Thursday (1PM) - Agenda
THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (1,807)
[AUSTIN METRO]
Austin approves $23M to help prevent gentrification near new transit hubs (KUT)
The Austin City Council has put $23 million toward projects to stop people from getting priced out of their neighborhoods. It's the first use of money from a larger “anti-displacement” fund set up to soften the gentrifying effects of planned rail and transportation projects.
Real estate development, property values, taxes and rent will likely rise around new train stations and transit hubs approved in last year’s $7.1 billion Project Connect transportation bond.
To help people who might be priced out, voters approved a $300 million anti-displacement fund along with the bond.
City Council Member Greg Casar, who sponsored the fund, said the initial $23 million will go to projects like permanent land trusts to help low-income homeowners stay in their houses and help "tenants actually buy out their landlords and [form] a cooperative so that people who might get pushed out by rising rents become the owners of their own apartment communities.”
Capital Metro says construction on the new rail lines could start by 2024.
Casar said he believes it’s important to start safeguarding gentrifying communities before that happens, “so that when those train lines open up folks can afford to live there and have easy access to hop on a train.”
The city is planning a community outreach campaign to figure out how to spend the remaining $267 in the anti-displacement fund… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin needs a third choice for growing homeless problem, Mayor Steve Adler says (WFAA)
Voters in Austin will get to reconsider whether to ban homeless camping in public places during an election this spring. Austin Mayor Steve Adler told Inside Texas Politics on Sunday he was uncertain just what voters will decide.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the election. My hope is that voters aren’t going to take us back to where we were before, because that that wasn’t working, and our homeless challenge was growing exponentially. At the same time, I drive around this city, too, and see the same things that are concerning a lot of people. We have to have a third choice,” the mayor said.
Later this month, non-profits, advocacy organizations, faith groups and others will brainstorm a third potential option, he added.
Homeless camps in public places have exploded downtown after city council removed a local ban in 2019. It has resulted in highly visible encampments, with unhealthy conditions.
Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to intervene if Austin doesn’t correct the issue.
But the city is struggling with affordable housing and the search for a permanent solution to a growing problem.
Last week, a group called Save Austin Now successfully got more than 26,000 signatures to force the issue back on the May ballot.
“I don’t know how it will turn out,” Adler said of the upcoming spring vote.
The mayor also discussed how his city is restructuring its police department and whether that will create problems with the majority-Republican legislature that’s in session right now… (LINK TO STORY)
East Austin to get new $50 million housing development (Austin American-Statesman)
Amid a booming Central Texas housing market, a high-profile Austin-based developer known for its central-city residential projects is about to kick off its latest – a $50 million development that will bring 116 homes to East Austin.
StoryBuilt said it plans to start construction next month on the new development, called George. It's named after an 18-year-old red-lored parrot that StoryBuilt is sponsoring at the Austin Zoo.
The project will have 80 townhomes and flats, along with 36 single-family homes. It will be located at 2211 E M Franklin Avenue, between East Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Manor Road in central East Austin, an area that is continuing to transform with new development.
Prices are expected to range from $300,000 into the $700,000s.
The first units should be ready in the first quarter of next year. The project is due to be completed in late 2022… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin City Council to discuss reinstatement of Austin's homeless camping ban Tuesday (CBS Austin)
Will voters get a say this may on reinstating Austin’s camping ban? That’s the decision Austin City Council will make at Tuesday’s Special Called Meeting.
This comes just days after city council voted to move forward with the purchase of a fourth hotel to house people experiencing homelessness.
Save Austin Now submitted over the number of signatures needed in their push to reinstate Austin’s camping ban, and now it’s city council’s decision to either adopt the ordinance changes as written in the petition or call a citywide election in May.
“I don’t anticipate the city council going backwards. We’ve already tried that, and our homeless challenge was growing exponentially. We know that that does not work,” Adler said. “I think ultimately, this is a matter that needs to go before the voters. The item that we got that concerns homelessness, I think has to go on the ballot in May,” said Mayor Steve Adler… (LINK TO STORY)
Envious Californians scrutinize Austin's success (Austin Business Journal)
Austin's gain and the Bay Area's pain is being quantified further.
Research presented by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute shows Central Texas and several other cities are welcoming key white-collar jobs at a notable pace while cities such as San Francisco wave good-bye to them by the thousands.
“The type of data we presented the other day is really the first evidence with numbers coming through. The data reporting often lags significantly,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, the research arm of the business-backed public policy group. “We had been digging for some time for evidence of this shift from high-priced metro areas to what we’re calling ‘new tech hubs.’
“We verified some of the things we had been hearing anecdotally, particularly with Austin,” Bellisario said.
Austin was the top performer in 2020 when it comes to the growth of information, finance and professional services jobs, clocking in at 5.8% year-over-year growth in December, according to the Economic Institute, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Following Austin, Boise saw job growth for those sectors of 2.9%; Dallas, 2.8%; Seattle, 2.3%; Denver, 1.7%; Nashville, 1.2%; San Diego, 0.8%; and Sacramento, 0.1%.
Both San Francisco and San Jose saw jobs decline 2.6% in the information, finance and professional services sectors.
At the bottom of the list were Chicago, down 3.9%; Los Angeles, down 6.2% and New York in last place with a 7% decline.
Top performing Austin has had several economic wins in recent years, often at the expense of the Bay Area. Oracle said in December that its headquarters had moved from Redwood City to Austin, where Elon Musk also announced that he’s building a major Tesla factory. This year, Digital Realty Trust said it too had moved its headquarters to Austin. Startups such as Chubbies Shorts Co. have also left San Francisco for Austin to take advantage of the cost difference between the two cities.
Bay Area business leaders are grappling with the migration of residents and companies out of California, with some trying to find ways to stop the exodus.
Others have dismissed the departure of residents and companies from the Bay Area as a recurring theme in the region’s economy. But remote work is changing that dynamic.
“The ability for some people to work anywhere now opens up opportunities for some regions marketing themselves as the low-cost spot to do business,” Bellisario said.
One surprise in the chart was the rather poor showing by Salt Lake City and Miami, two cities that have grabbed national headlines for their success in attracting companies to move or expand in their regions.
Miami saw a 2.7% decline in the number of jobs in information, finance and professional services while Salt Lake City saw a 3.9% decline.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is eager to have more companies relocate or expand in his city. The Miami mayor knows his audience, reportedly saying: “We’re not going to tax them to death.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Leander gives final OK to $1B mixed-use project with manmade lagoon (Austin Business Journal)
Developers have cleared the final zoning hurdle to build a massive project in Leander that is expected to be valued at $1 billion.
The development, called Leander Springs, marks a major move to add commercial activity to the largely residential suburb north of Austin. Leander Springs will include a 4-acre lagoon, up to 1,600 multifamily units, a hotel and over 1 million square feet of commercial space across nearly 80 acres.
Leander City Council gave final approval on Feb. 4 to rezone the land to a planned unit development with an emphasis on multifamily and commercial zoning. The project is planned at the southwest corner of FM 2243 and the 183A toll road, relatively close to the heart of fast-growing Leander.
This massive project has been the talk of the town since city officials announced the public-private partnership in October. The city approved last summer $22 million in performance-based tax incentives with developer Leander Springs LLC — which is controlled by Austin-based iLand Development Group — over the course of 15 years. The incentives will be in the form of rebates on the project's property taxes, sales taxes and hotel occupancy taxes.
The project will be completed in phases, with the construction of the lagoon outlined as the first priority. That work is expected to start in the second half of this year, according to a statement from the development team. Development of the entire project is expected to take over 10 years to complete, according to city documents. Officials with the development team did not respond to requests for further information by deadline… (LINK TO STORY)
Hackers leaked nearly 2,000 incidents of Austin surveillance. Here's what they found. (Austin American-Statesman)
Last summer, as mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing swept the nation, a group of high schoolers in Bee Cave planned a peaceful demonstration with chalk mural drawings along the sidewalk outside City Hall. The students requested a permit for the demonstration, even if they didn't need to — the Austin suburb doesn’t require such formalities for exercising First Amendment rights on public property. But the request itself was enough to catch the eye of someone tied to a regional citizen surveillance program run by an anti-terrorism police organization. Unknown to the high schoolers, the event was added to a watchlist and monitored for “agitators.” Several days earlier, on an overcast Wednesday morning, a man was driving near an Austin police training facility when he was approached by officers who were curious what he was up to. He was only taking pictures of flowers, he told them, pulling out his phone to snap photos of the flora growing along a fence line.
Unconvinced, the officers later looked him up on Facebook and found he had posts sympathetic toward antifa. He too was added to the watchlist, joining nearly 2,000 others whose actions have quietly drawn police scrutiny since 2013. The list, which was leaked by a hacker activist group last summer, includes cases that range from the serious — people threatening school shootings — to the seemingly benign, people expressing political views online. It’s the latter category that has elicited privacy concerns from civil liberty activists and analysts, who fear that the surveillance program is straying beyond its bounds.
The program is run by the Austin Regional Intelligence Center — a regional information gathering entity through which intelligence on terrorism activity is shared among the U.S. Homeland Security Department and a network of Central Texas police agencies. Austin’s center — which was launched in 2010 and now involves about 21 agencies in the metro area — is one of several federally funded fusion centers across the country created in the post-911 era, when sweeping national security reforms sought to prevent future terrorist attacks. Eighty such centers exist across the country today, with eight in Texas, the most of any state… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
Once considered a priority, most Texas teachers likely won’t get a vaccine until summer (Dallas Morning News)
Slowly and erratically, coronavirus vaccines are making their way to people across the country, but most Texas educators won’t be receiving them anytime soon. While nearly half of U.S. states have prioritized educators as part of their vaccine rollout, Texas did not, even though state leaders suggested that teachers be in the current wave of immunizations. Given current demand in the state and the crush on its vaccine allocations, it’s highly unlikely that all Texas teachers will be in line to get the shots until the school year is finished. “It’s clear that we’re an afterthought,” said Ovidia Molina, president of the Texas State Teachers Association. “We’re not ‘essential employees’ until you want schools back open, and then we’re not essential after they are.”
Educator groups have called the omission a “slap in the face” to the state’s 800,000 K-12 employees, while the public health experts who helped make the call say they excluded nearly all occupations based on data. Some — including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — are asking decision makers to reprioritize the list of who is eligible, trying to get vulnerable educators closer to the front of the line. Texas is in the second phase of its vaccine rollout. The first group, 1A, was front-line health care workers and those living in long-term care facilities. The second, 1B, was far more broad. That phase prioritized those who were 65 and older, as well as those 16 and older with at least one chronic medical condition that put them at a higher risk of severe illness from the coronavirus. Those chronic conditions included cancer, heart problems, obesity and diabetes. That’s a huge swath of Texans, potentially as many as 10 million, roughly a third of the state. The announcement of who would be in the second phase came as something of a surprise to educators.
“Part of restoring normalcy in our state is to make sure that we get our kids back in schools,” Gov. Greg Abbott said during a December press conference, just days before state officials announced who would be included in 1B. “Part of achieving that goal is to make sure that we will have teachers in a safe, secure situation, vaccinated, able to be in a classroom teaching without fear of getting COVID-19.” … (LINK TO STORY)
San Antonio Police Association responds to city certifying petition from Fix SAPD (San Antonio Express-News)
The San Antonio Police Association recently responded to the certified Fix SAPD petition that resulted in San Antonio residents being allowed to vote on the May ballot on whether to repeal Chapter 174, which deals with collective bargaining rights for police officers, or not. The city's clerk office announced the certification on Thursday in a news release after Fix SAPD submitted a sufficient number of valid signatures, as required by state law, on Jan. 8. Joshua Fechter, of the San Antonio Express-News, first reported the volunteer organization turned in more than 20,000 signatures.
SAPOA said in a statement released on its Facebook page that it will do its best to educate voters on the importance of Chapter 174. "SAPOA plans on working hard between now and election day to inform voters about how important collective bargaining (Chapter 174) is to recruiting top-notch police officers who will keep our neighborhoods safe and to ensuring the Police Chief and the City continue to have flexibility in hiring, promotions, discipline, and boosting diversity within the Department," the association wrote.
Fix SAPD released a statement of its own on its Facebook page, writing the verification is a "major accomplishment" for all its volunteers and the tens of thousands of San Antonians who are demanding change. "Now we, as a city, have a chance to send a clear message: Accountability is non-negotiable," EJ Pinnock, a member of Fix SAPD, said in the statement. The potential repeal of Chapter 174 will be placed before the voters on the next uniform election date, May 1. The City Council will order the election on Feb. 11… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
COVID-19’s hit to state and local revenues is smaller than many feared (Wall Street Journal)
State and local governments in early 2020 expected the pandemic-induced downturn to decimate their budgets, as millions of business closures and layoffs wiped out tax revenue. In many places, the fiscal picture hasn’t been nearly as dire as feared. A flood of federal aid for businesses and households helped prop up incomes and consumer spending. Unemployment fell and economic activity picked up much faster than expected. Unlike in previous recessions, equity and housing markets have done well.
All of those factors bolstered state and local revenues last year. But pandemic-related costs have soared in many localities, resulting in budget holes that may force states to cut back on other services, lay off workers or raise taxes, absent more federal aid. Policy analysts estimate state and local revenue losses due to the coronavirus pandemic will total about $300 billion through fiscal year 2022, though that doesn’t include rising expenses. State and local governments employ 18.6 million people, who provide services from collecting trash to teaching children.
Democrats in Congress are pushing for $360 billion in aid to cities and states as part of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, while many Republicans argue that would only encourage fiscal profligacy. Immediately after the coronavirus outbreak last March, states slashed revenue projections by an average of about 8%, with some expecting shortfalls as high as 20%. Those projections were largely based on experiences during the 2007-09 recession, when steep revenue declines lasted several years… (LINK TO STORY)
A new front in the anti-vaccine fight emerges in California (New York Times)
An out-of-work stand-up comic originally from New Jersey. An actor and conservative podcast host dressed in a white lab coat. A gadfly who has run several unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in Los Angeles. And at least a few who had been in Washington the day of the Capitol riot. They were among the motley crew of so-called anti-vaxxers who recently converged on the entrance of the mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium to protest distribution of a coronavirus vaccine. The loosely formed coalition represents a new faction in California’s long-established anti-vaccine movement. And the protest was the latest sign that Californians have become the unlikely standard-bearers for aggressive criticism of the vaccines even as virus cases continue to spread in the state. California, which has averaged 500 daily deaths tied to the virus over the past week, will soon become the state with the largest number of coronavirus deaths, surpassing New York.
For months, far-right activists across the country have been rallying against mask-wearing rules, business lockdowns, curfews and local public health officials, casting the government’s response to the virus as an intrusion on individual liberties. But as masks and lockdowns become an increasingly routine part of American life, some protesters have shifted the focus of their antigovernment anger to the Covid-19 vaccines.
Last week at Dodger Stadium, the same small but vocal band of demonstrators who previously staged anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests in the Los Angeles area disrupted a mass vaccination site that gives an average of 6,120 shots daily. About 50 protesters — some carrying signs reading “Don’t be a lab rat!” and “Covid = Scam” — marched to the entrance and caused the Los Angeles Fire Department to shut down the city-run site for about an hour. The disruption illustrates the increasingly confrontational bent of some of the state’s vaccine opponents, who have long claimed that mandatory school vaccine laws represent governmental overreach. Many were already skeptical about vaccine science, having read online disinformation sites that claimed early childhood vaccines caused autism, an allegation long refuted… (LINK TO STORY)
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez talks bitcoin & building a tech innovation hub (Forbes)
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez discusses his plans to transform Miami into a tech innovation hub, how he is embracing Bitcoin and crypto, climate change, and more. Suarez has been a strong advocate for technological innovation within Miami and has recently embraced leaders and innovators within the crypto industry… (LINK TO STORY)
Federal judge to Seattle City Council: Tread carefully with efforts to defund police or risk violating consent decree (Seattle Times)
The federal judge overseeing police reforms in Seattle fired a shot across the bow of the Seattle City Council and its efforts to defund the Police Department on Thursday, saying those actions could put the city at risk of running afoul of a federal consent decree.
U.S. District Judge James Robart said it appears the council, which imposed police budget and salary cuts in the wake of protests this summer, may have “lost sight of the fact” that the 8-year-old agreement between the city and Department of Justice (DOJ) is binding and must be followed.
Robart said he didn’t want to be put in the position of telling the council what to do and warned that its future decisions regarding defunding or stripping police of their responsibilities “need to be thought through carefully.”
Robart made his comments at a status hearing in which the new court-appointed monitor overseeing the DOJ-mandated reforms to the Seattle Police Department (SPD) submitted his plan for 2021. “I’m hearing a lot of words,” the judge said. “But I don’t measure progress by words. I measure it by action.”
The new monitoring plan and Thursday’s hearing made clear that the department will remain under court supervision for at least another year — a prospect the SPD has acknowledged and embraced, according to social media posts by interim Chief Adrian Diaz, who said unrest in the city last summer “presented unimagined challenges” for the department... (LINK TO STORY)