BG Reads | News You Need to Know (March 9, 2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
NEW// BG Podcast EP. 132: 2021 Sector Outlook with Ed Latson, CEO, Austin Regional Manufacturers Association
Ed and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discuss the 2021 outlook for Central Texas’s manufacturing sector, including impacts of the February blackouts, incentive programs, and the competition for Samsung’s $17 billion chip plant.
See also, Viewpoint: Austin Energy made semiconductor crisis worse (Austin Business Journal)
You can listen to this episode and previous ones on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Please like, link, comment and subscribe!
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
[THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE]
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (3,638)
LINK TO FILED SENATE BILLS (1,337)
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Austin sees resurgence of anti-Asian, COVID-19 racism (KXAN)
The City of Austin’s Equity Office is seeing another surge of COVID-19 related anti-Asian racism in the local community.
“There have been occurrences of verbal harassment, people being spit on, business owners receiving death threats,” Rocío Villalobos said.
Villalobos, the Immigrant Affairs Coordinator at the city’s Equity Office, sees similarities to cases they’re hearing about from the West Coast.
“This mirrors incidents that also started to increase in [California’s] Bay Area, in particular, with elderly Asian residents being attacked and someone being murdered,” Villalobos said. “We’ve seen that reflects what’s happening here as far as seeing a surge in incidents. Maybe not to that severity but incidents of harassment, of physical threat.”
Villalobos calls the resurgence “horrific.”
“People are already experiencing a lot of trauma right now thinking about COVID in Texas, but then you layer on top of that the winter storm, you layer on top of that a range of crises that communities are already experiencing and it makes it even more difficult to try and just survive and get through both COVID, get through the storm and to feel safe and ultimately, I want for people to feel safe. They deserve to have safety just as much as everybody else.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Travis County vaccine providers receive nearly 75,000 doses for week of March 8 as eligibility expands (Community Impact)
There are 74,940 coronavirus vaccine doses en route to Travis County providers during a pivotal week for Texas’ vaccination effort. The March 8 vaccine allocation from the Texas Department of State Health Services includes 19,500 doses of the recently authorized Johnson & Johnson vaccine, a single-shot option that local health authorities have said could speed up Travis County’s vaccinations. This is also the first full week that educators and child care professionals have been eligible to receive a dose.
Regional hub provider Austin Public Health will receive 12,000 Moderna doses this week. APH announced an updated appointment scheduling process on March 8: Going forward, first-dose appointments will be released on Monday evenings with additional appointments released Thursday evenings if additional doses are available.
Individuals who receive the Moderna vaccine are recommended to have their second dose 28-42 days after their first, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with second doses administered as close to 28 days as possible. Second doses can still be administered after 42 days, although the CDC does not have complete data about how an extension of that window affects efficacy… (LINK TO STORY)
Businesses, individuals donate $12.5M on Amplify Austin Day (Austin Business Journal)
Amplify Austin Day raised more than $12.5 million March 4-5, a groundswell of giving after a draining pandemic year and February's damaging winter storm.
I Live Here I Give Here, the nonprofit organizer of Amplify Austin, announced that 34,415 unique individual donors, many of them businesses or business leaders, contributed to the 24-hour day of giving. That money will go to 686 nonprofits in seven counties.
More than $191,000 was raised for a disaster relief fund set up by I Live Here I Give Here in the wake of Winter Storm Uri slamming into Texas in mid-February. The fund was created to funnel money to organizations performing critical missions such as disaster relief and emergency response and housing.
The business community provided more than $1.6 million in matching and direct donations this year. Businesses cited for their philanthropy included C3 Presents, Netspend, Zoom Video Communications, Enverus, Google, Social Solutions, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, NXP, Moreland Properties, Rowing Dock, Germania Insurance, Circuit of the Americas and Vinson & Elkins LLP.
The nonprofits that raised the most money and had the most donors in the 24 hours included Central Texas Food Bank, Highland Lakes Canine Rescue, Good Work Austin, Austin Pets Alive!, Austin Siamese Rescue, and Central Texas Tortoise Rescue… (LINK TO STORY)
Long-awaited 600-room hotel checks into Austin with restaurants and market (CultureMap Austin)
After years of delays, downtown Austin’s newest hotel is finally checking in guests.
The Austin Marriott Downtown, the 31-story, 613-room hotel located at 304 E. Cesar Chavez St. just steps from the Austin Convention Center, is now open, with 60,000 square feet of meeting space, several new eateries and bars, and a rooftop pool terrace with expansive downtown views.
Aiming to augment the offerings of the existing JW Marriott Austin hotel at Second Street and Congress Avenue, the new Austin Marriott Downtown was originally scheduled to open in the summer of 2019, a date that was eventually pushed back to summer 2020. But thanks to the many challenges that arose because of the pandemic, that date got pushed back again.
Now up and running, the Austin Marriott Downtown is celebrating its grand opening with a special offer: Through May 30, guests can get a 15 percent discount on guest rooms plus two complimentary cocktails from any of the property’s restaurants and bars… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Abbott, Texas Republicans want to prohibit ‘political censorship’ by social media platforms (Dallas Morning News)
Republican leaders in Texas are “taking a stand” and supporting a popular conservative cause by pushing legislation to prohibit social media platforms from “political censorship,” Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday during a news conference. Other states are considering similar legislation, but Democrats and many legal experts are questioning whether those bills run counter to existing federal law. Abbott and state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, met in Tyler to discuss Senate Bill 12, which would “help prohibit social media companies from censoring Texans based on the viewpoints they express,” according to an Abbott press release. “The United States of America was built on freedom of speech and healthy public debate,” Abbott said Friday. “Big tech’s efforts to silence conservative viewpoints is un-American, it’s un-Texan and it is unacceptable. “And soon enough, it’s going to be against the law in the state of Texas,” he added.
The bill would also allow Texans whose accounts are restricted to file lawsuits against social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. While several states have filed similar legislation, many lawyers are poking holes in the bills, citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The CDA states that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” “Before even reaching the free speech issue, a lawsuit filed under the FL or TX social media bills would be dismissed as preempted by Section 230 of the CDA,” Max Kennerly, a trial lawyer, said in a tweet. “And if it did reach free speech, it’d lose; social media companies can choose what content they allow.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Twitter sues Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, asks court to halt his investigation of the social media company (Texas Tribune)
Twitter filed a lawsuit against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a California federal court Monday and asked a judge to halt the state’s top lawyer from investigating the company.
The social media giant’s court filings include a request for a temporary restraining order that would keep Paxton and his office from enforcing a demand that seeks documents revealing the company’s internal decision making processes for banning users, among other things.
Paxton, a fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump, sent the company a civil investigative demand after it banned Trump from its platform following January’s deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol.
Twitter wrote that it seeks to stop Paxton from “from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights.” The company claimed Paxton’s “retaliatory” investigation violated the First Amendment as an inappropriate use of government authority.
A spokesperson for Paxton did not immediately respond for comment… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas lawmakers consider making ERCOT a state agency for better oversight (WFAA)
After the deadly statewide power outages last month, Texas leaders are considering making ERCOT a state agency in order to have more direct oversight of it. “I think we may see a move to bring ERCOT back in as a state agency or, if it’s still a private company, we’ll have many more controls, including who sits on the board, because we want to know who those people are,” said Lt. Governor Dan Patrick on Sunday’s Inside Texas Politics. “We, as elected officials, are held responsible for those actions. I don’t like being held responsible to a company that I have little to no control over.”
ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, manages the state’s power grid and has become the face of the deadly power outages in below freezing temperatures last month, though privately-owned power plants are the ones that actually failed in the crisis. Lawmakers accuse ERCOT of failing to imagine such a weather scenario and not preparing enough to have extra electricity in the days ahead of the storm. In 1999, ERCOT was established as its own non-private corporation. The Texas Public Utility Commission, with a three-member appointed board, regulates the state’s electric, water and telecommunication utilities. But under the current structure, ERCOT is too far removed from direct public accountability, Patrick said. “This private company, they have been electing their own board members, and as we know from outside of Texas. When one board member steps down, they kind of pick their successor. You know, it’s worked for 20 years this way. Well, it crashed several weeks ago. And it’s not going to work that way anymore,” Patrick said on the television program… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATIONAL]
Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People (CDC)
This is the first set of public health recommendations for fully vaccinated people. This guidance will be updated and expanded based on the level of community spread of SARS-CoV-2, the proportion of the population that is fully vaccinated, and the rapidly evolving science on COVID-19 vaccines… (LINK)
They Created the SPAC in 1993. Now They’re Reaping the Rewards. (Wall Street Journal)
The flashiest trend in finance traces back three decades to a pair of old law-school buddies. Now, they are finally cashing in.
Investment banker David Nussbaum and lawyer David Miller —known to each other as “Nuss” and “Miller”—invented the special-purpose acquisition company in 1993 to give private firms another way to access everyday investors. SPACs were rarely used and obscure for much of their careers, but are now all the rage—attracting the biggest names in finance, technology and entertainment. Messrs. Nussbaum and Miller have never been busier.
“It’s taken me 27 years to become an overnight sensation,” said Mr. Nussbaum, a 66-year-old from Roslyn, N.Y., on Long Island, who co-founded the SPAC-focused investment bank EarlyBirdCapital Inc.
Also called blank-check companies, SPACs are shell firms that list on a stock exchange with the sole purpose of combining with a private company to take it public. They have become a popular way for startups to access individual investors and a cash cow for the wealthy individuals who create them. SPAC founders now include everyone from hedge-fund manager William Ackman to former baseball player Alex Rodriguez.PACs have raised more than $70 billion this year and now account for roughly 70% of all initial public offerings, up from 20% two years ago and a negligible total for much of the past 20 years, according to Dealogic.
The products’ sudden ubiquity has been jarring for Messrs. Nussbaum and Miller, who watched their product struggle for nearly three decades. Many on Wall Street were suspicious of SPACs because their predecessors were called “blind pools” and tied to penny-stock fraud in the 1980s.
Messrs. Nussbaum and Miller met at New York University Law School in the late 1970s before going on to work at law firms. Mr. Nussbaum decided to open his own brokerage in the late 1980s, then was involved in a blind-pool deal that inspired him to begin work on the SPAC.
In the early 1990s, the Davids spent over a year working with regulators to install protections for investors and other changes to prevent fraud before completing the first blank-check firm. Among them were the right for a SPAC’s investors to get their money back before a merger with a private company goes through. They also beefed up disclosure requirements ahead of such deals. Those features are now touted by blank-check company bulls.
Still, SPACs struggled to compete with traditional initial public offerings and other methods for raising money until splashy names like sports-betting firm DraftKings Inc. started using them to go public in recent years and more startups began using them to make forward-looking projections to investors—something that isn’t allowed in a traditional IPO.
“It’s become bigger than anyone expected,” said Mr. Miller, a 66-year-old from Queens, N.Y., who is managing partner at law firm Graubard Miller and still has stacks of regulatory documents from the first blank-check companies because they were created before Securities and Exchange Commission filings were digitized… (LINK TO STORY)