BG Reads | News You Need to Know (January 14, 2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
NEW // BG PODCAST - Episode 123: Austin Infrastructure and Public Finance with Nicole Conley, Managing Director, Siebert Williams Shank & Co., LLC
Nicole most recently served as Chief Financial Officer at Austin Independent School District where she managed a $3 billion budget and capital program for the 80,000-student, 129-school community. In August 2020 she joined Siebert Williams Shank (SWS), the nation’s No. 1 minority- and woman-owned investment bank, as Managing Director in Infrastructure and Public Finance Department in Texas.
THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE:
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (1184)
[AUSTIN METRO]
Vaccine registration system goes down on Day 1 as Austin Public Health ramps up distribution (KUT)
The director of Austin Public Health is asking for patience as a new online system for people to see whether they quality for the COVID-19 vaccine rolls out.
“We have to emphasize: [Supply] is very limited. As you all know, we only received 12,000 doses to provide our community,” APH Director Stephanie Hayden said, adding there had been more than 20,000 sign-ups to get the current allocation of doses.
The system, which went up Tuesday night, was having technical issues due to the high number of people trying to register.
APH said the agency is focused primarily on distributing doses to older adults and those with limited access to health care, as well as the remaining 1A population of long-term care facility residents and frontline health care personnel… (LINK TO STORY)
How did non-priority Austin residents get vaccines ahead of 1A and 1B patients? (KXAN)
Austin Public Health is tightening up their vaccine distribution after dozens of non-prioritized people received their first COVID-19 vaccine dose.
KXAN began receiving photos on Tuesday from people showing long lines at the Delco Center. One person estimated around 800 people were present at 7 p.m.
Austin Public Health admitted on Wednesday that they gave a vaccine to people who waited in line all night “out of common courtesy” — these people were not in the priority 1A or 1B groups.
“We’re not going to waste vaccines. We had people that were in the line and had stayed in the line. So out of common courtesy, we decided to go ahead and provide the vaccine to them,” said Austin Public Health Director Stepahnie Hayden… (LINK TO STORY)
Potential strong-mayor system in Austin would be 'weakest of any big city in the country,' supporters say (Community Impact)
According to city documents, since 1924, Austin has operated under council/manager form of government, which makes the mayor the leader of the City Council but affords the position no additional voting or executive powers. The mayor and City Council hire the city manager, who presides as the executive over the city's bureaucracy. The city manager is the most powerful person within City Hall but is accountable to the mayor and City Council, who are accountable to the voters.
According to Austinites for Progressive Reform, the strong-mayor amendment would eliminate the city manager position and turn the mayor into the city's bureaucratic executive. The mayor would no longer sit on City Council, and and 11th City Council seat and district would be added to the dais.
Houston is the only other big Texas city to operate under a strong-mayor government; however, the mayor in Houston has much broader authority than a strong mayor would have in Austin. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner is the city's top bureaucratic executive but is also wholly responsible for the City Council's agenda, which means City Council members can only approve or object to mayoral initiatives and cannot bring their own initiatives to the agenda. There is even a parallel push underway to decrease the Houston mayor's power to give City Council members more say over the agenda… (LINK TO STORY)
Blanton Museum of Art's outdoor space is about to become work of art (Austin American-Statesman)
The Blanton Museum of Art has revealed a dramatic plan to transform the grounds around its three buildings on the University of Texas campus at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Avenue.
What looks in renderings like a garden of 15 gigantic, perforated flowers was designed by the award-winning firm, Snøhetta, whose New York-based leaders are Texans and is also based in Oslo, Norway.
As part of the projected $35 million project, Cuban-American abstract painter Carmen Herrera will add a signature mural to what is becoming a grand southern gateway to the campus that directly faces the state Capitol and the major Capitol Complex expansion already underway along Congress.
More than 25,000 new plants will be added to the grounds, 95% of them native species…(LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
Texas AG Ken Paxton declines to join 50 attorneys general in condemning Capitol riot (Houston Chronicle)
Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is the only state attorney general to decline to join letters over the past week condemning the Capitol riot. In a Jan. 12 letter, 50 state and territorial attorneys general who belong to the National Association of Attorneys General denounced the “lawless violence.” The three remaining state attorneys general not included in that letter wrote their own Wednesday, leaving Paxton as the only holdout. Paxton is a staunch Trump supporter who co-chaired the re-election group Lawyers for Trump. He spoke at the “Save America” rally at the Capitol in the hours prior to the riot last week, telling the crowds “we will not quit fighting” to overturn the election results. Neither Paxton’s office nor his campaign spokesman responded to requests for comment.
“The events of January 6 represent a direct, physical challenge to the rule of law and our democratic republic itself,” the Jan. 12 letter read. “Together, we will continue to do our part to repair the damage done to institutions and build a more perfect union. As Americans, and those charged with enforcing the law, we must come together to condemn lawless violence, making clear that such actions will not be allowed to go unchecked.” In a separate letter Wednesday, the attorneys general of Indiana, Montana and Louisiana wrote: “In all forms and all instances, violent acts carried out in the name of political ideology have no place in any of our United States.” Paxton did join a statement from Republican Attorneys General Association last week that condemned the “the violence, destruction, and rampant lawlessness” at the Capitol. “I call on protesters in our state and our nation’s Capital to practice their constitutional right in a peaceful manner. I stand for election integrity and the democratic process,” Paxton said. “I will not tolerate violence and civil disorder.”
Yet, at the same time, Paxton has also been perpetuating a falsehood about the day: that Antifa was behind the riot. There is no evidence to support that. “Those who stormed the capitol yesterday were not Trump supporters. They have been confirmed to be Antifa,” Paxton wrote on Facebook, which flagged the post as “false information” per independent fact-checks. “Violence is not the answer.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas Senate changes rules so Republicans can still bring bills to floor without Democratic support (Texas Tribune)
The Texas Senate on Wednesday approved a fundamental alteration of its rules, ending the minority party’s ability to block legislation it unanimously opposes in the Republican-controlled upper chamber.
In a 18-13 vote, lawmakers voted to lower the threshold of support that legislation needs to make it onto the Senate floor. In past sessions, the Senate required a three-fifths supermajority, or 19 votes, to bring legislation to the floor. But after the defeat of Sen. Pete Flores, R-Pleasanton, reduced the number of Republicans from 19 to 18, lawmakers lowered the threshold to 18 members — a move Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had been pushing for.
Passage of the rule required a simple majority — or 16 members. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, tweeted that the resolution passed on a party-line vote.
Republicans on the floor hailed the move. Patrick, who presides over the Senate, first floated the idea of lowering the threshold last January, later contending in December that the 2020 election proved voters support conservative candidates and that he planned on “moving a conservative agenda forward.”… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
Can conservative media still return to business as usual? (New York Times)
On a Friday in late December, people who tuned in to “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Fox Business encountered something they had most likely never seen before: a subdued, uncertain Lou Dobbs. “There are a lot of opinions about the integrity of the election, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and voting software,” Dobbs said, his usualbombast strangely absent. “One of the companies,” he continued, “is Smartmatic.” He introduced Eddie Perez, an election-security expert, to assess “recent claims about the company.” Then the show cut to a two-minute, prerecorded interview in which Perez vouched for Smartmatic’s integrity — after which “Lou Dobbs Tonight” went straight to commercial.
This was a major departure from the norm. In the weeks after the November election, Dobbs had spent most of his prime-time hour on a farrago of conspiracy theories about how Donald Trump had actually defeated Joe Biden. Among his favorites was one involving Smartmatic, which — according to Dobbs and various guests — was founded by President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who died in 2013, and sat at the center of a plot to rig the election.
The interview with Perez lacked the usual Dobbs fervor. Perez calmly responded to questions from an unidentified interlocutor, all asked in the flat tone of an automatic voice generator. Each answer laid waste to Dobbs’s coverage of Smartmatic, and yet the segment was so grudging that it had the feel of the legal disclaimer at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial. All this was presumably prompted by the 20-page letter Smartmatic’s lawyer sent to Fox eight days earlier, detailing a “concerted disinformation campaign against Smartmatic” on Fox’s airwaves. Soon two other Fox hosts mentioned in the letter would broadcast the same Perez video.
Fox wasn’t the only network involved: The conservative cable channels Newsmax and One America News Network, which have been trying to outflank Fox by voicing even more outlandish conspiracy theories, also received legal threats, and the Newsmax anchor John Tabacco soon announced that the channel “would like to clarify its news coverage” of Smartmatic. But such clarifications evidently made little impression on the believers who, a few weeks later, stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of the election results, leaving conservative media with a question even more vexing and consequential than how to respond to the threat of a libel lawsuit: How far could it really follow its audience? Ideologically minded news organizations traditionally do well when their political rivals occupy the White House. MSNBC saw its ratings spike during George W. Bush’s presidency and again during Trump’s. During Barack Obama’s administration, Fox News rose to new ratings heights as it devoted countless hours to supposed “scandals”: Solyndra, the bankrupted California solar energy company; the I.R.S., accused of targeting conservative groups for scrutiny; Benghazi… (LINK TO STORY)
FBI report warned of ‘war’ at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of looming violence (Washington Post)
A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit internal warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s pro-Trump protest planned to do harm. A situational information report approved for release the day before the U.S. Capitol riot painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet up in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina and head in groups to Washington.
“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington. D.C.,” the document says. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.” BLM is likely a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. Pantifa is a derogatory term for antifa, a far-left anti-fascist movement whose adherents sometimes engage in violent clashes with right-wing extremists. Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free speech rights. The warning is the starkest evidence yet of the sizable intelligence failure that preceded the mayhem, which claimed the lives of five people, although one law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid disciplinary action, said the failure was not one of intelligence but of acting on the intelligence… (LINK TO STORY)