BG Reads | News You Need to Know (January 19, 2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
NEW // BG PODCAST - Episode 123: Austin Infrastructure and Public Finance with Nicole Conley, Managing Director, Siebert Williams Shank & Co., LLC
Coming tomorrow
BG Podcast Episode 124: Opposing Strong Mayor Reform with Austin for All People
BG Podcast Episode 125: Shifting to a Strong Mayor System with Austinites for Progressive Reform
THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE:
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (1249)
[AUSTIN METRO]
Texas DPS closes state Capitol after intelligence shows evidence of 'violent extremists' (Austin American-Statesman)
The Texas Department of Public Safety abruptly announced the closure of the state Capitol on Friday evening after uncovering new intelligence that intensified safety concerns and prompted the agency to further tighten up security.
The closure affects the building and the Capitol grounds, which only reopened to the public this month after being closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic and damage that officials said protesters did to state property during protests in May and June.
The closure begins Saturday and continues through Wednesday.
In a statement, DPS Director Col. Steve McCraw said that "the Texas Department of Public Safety is aware of armed protests planned at the Texas State Capitol and violent extremists who may seek to exploit constitutionally protected events. As a result, DPS has deployed additional personnel and resources to the Capitol and are working closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Austin Police Department to monitor events and to enforce the rule of law."… (LINK TO STORY)
Ethics commissioners request more evidence in complaint against Save Austin Now (Austin Monitor)
Save Austin Now, the nonprofit that is gathering signatures to reinstate the city’s ban on homeless camping, faced an ethics complaint at last week’s Ethics Review Commission meeting. The complaint, brought by political consultant Mark Littlefield, alleges that the organization overstepped the bounds of its 501(c)(4) status by engaging in unauthorized political activity and failing to disclose donors.
“We all knew what they were doing and why they were doing it,” Littlefield said. “We knew that they were starting with the nonprofit in order not to disclose their donors.”
In last week’s preliminary hearing, the commission’s job was to judge whether the complaint merited a final hearing.
Donna Davidson, counsel for Save Austin Now, requested dismissal, arguing that the commission did not have jurisdiction to rule on the status of the organization. “Whether Save Austin Now is a political committee is not a decision that can be made by this commission,” Davidson said.
Commissioners disagreed. “I don’t buy the jurisdictional argument,” Chair Luis Soberon said. Commissioner Jaustin Ohueri said that the commission can use the “facts and circumstances” of the case, just as a federal court would, to determine whether the organization is a 501(c)(4) or a political action committee and whether it violated city code.
According to federal law, only some of a 501(c)(4) organization’s activity can be political. Davidson insisted that Save Austin Now does more than just advocate for the ballot measure; it tries to offer help for the homeless and work with other groups that do so… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin Expected to be Nation's Hottest Housing Market in 2021, Leading a Sunbelt Surge (Yahoo! Finance)
After outpacing all other large markets by the end of 2020, Austin's housing market is again expected to be the nation's hottest in 2021, leading a list of mostly Sun Belt cities expected to continue heating up faster than the nation's large coastal markets.
The booming Texas destination heads a lineup of sunny and relatively affordable metro areas — Phoenix, Nashville, Tampa and Denver — that are most likely to outperform the nation in home value growth, according to a panel of economists and real estate experts recently surveyed by Zillow.
The Q4 2020 Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey, sponsored by Zillow and conducted quarterly by Pulsenomics LLC, asked a large panel of economists, investment strategists and real estate experts for their predictions about the U.S. housing market. The Q4 survey also asked about their expectations for 2021 home value growth in 20 large markets compared to the nation… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
DATA: Texas has vaccinated about 9% of estimated Phase 1 recipients (Community Impact)
Just over a month after the first COVID-19 vaccines became available in Texas, the state became the first in the nation to administer over 1 million doses. That figure means that just over 9% of the estimated Phase 1 population has received at least one dose, according to state health data.
As of Jan. 17, Texas had administered almost 1.28 million doses of the vaccine, about 62% of the 2 million doses that had been allocated at that time. All 254 Texas counties have received at least one allocation.
A total of 166,834 people in the state have been fully vaccinated, and over 1.1 million individuals from the Phase 1 population, which is estimated to include 13.5 million individuals total, have received at least one dose. The Phase 1 population includes Phase 1A, which includes health care workers and nursing home residents, and Phase 1B, which includes everyone over age 65 and people over age 16 with certain medical conditions.
About 5% of the entire state population of people age 16 and over—almost 22.5 million—has received at least one dose. Children under age 16 are not yet allowed to take the vaccine…(LINK TO STORY)
Texas lawmakers aren’t all eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. Austin’s top health official is trying to get them vaccinated anyway. (Texas Tribune)
An Austin public health official working to get Texas lawmakers access to the COVID-19 vaccine — regardless of whether they are currently eligible — made a request to a local hospital to administer the shots to members gathering in the capital city for the 2021 legislative session, the official said late Friday.
In an attempt to defuse what he considers to be a public health risk to the city, Dr. Mark Escott, the interim medical director for Austin Public Health, told The Texas Tribune that he asked Ascension Seton hospital system “if they would be willing to vaccinate lawmakers and key staff if they had availability.”
He said he believes five to 10 legislators in both parties have taken advantage of the arrangement in recent weeks. He did not say when he made the request, how Ascension Seton responded or how lawmakers were notified… (LINK TO STORY)
Embattled Texas AG Paxton’s fundraising was drying up before he filed lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden victory (Dallas Morning News)
Campaign contributions to embattled Attorney General Ken Paxton all but dried up last fall after senior staff accused the Republican of abusing his office to help a friend and political donor. But Paxton’s fortunes reversed in December when, cheered on by President Donald Trump, he filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn election results in four key battleground states. In the days after mounting the unsuccessful legal bid, Paxton raked in nearly $150,000 — roughly half of his entire campaign haul in the last six months of 2020. Still, Paxton raised just $305,500 in total, a tiny amount compared to other statewide elected officials who raised millions of dollars to support their campaigns.
Paxton’s own fundraising reports have typically been in seven figures. Campaign spokesman Ian Prior did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The low fundraising numbers show Paxton’s political career “is on life support,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “He went all in to back Trump and the far right and it was a losing play,” Rottinghaus said. Paxton, in his second term, is up for reelection in 2022. His campaign account has about $5.5 million cash on hand. Some of Paxton’s biggest campaign expenses in the second half of 2020 were legal fees, including $75,000 paid to two attorneys. Those lawyers are representing Paxton in his five-year battle against a securities fraud indictment, but they said the payment was unrelated to that case.
“The funds are for a legal matter occurring while in office, unrelated to the securities fraud case,” said one of the attorneys, Philip Hilder, though he did not elaborate. Paxton cannot use campaign funds to pay the attorneys in his securities fraud case because the felony charges he faces do not relate to his duties as an officeholder. After he was indicted in summer 2015, Paxton created a separate legal account funded by friends and family meant to pay for these lawyers. He’s raised more than half a million dollars for that fund… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
Biden's inauguration unprecedented in US history (The Hill)
President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday will look like no inauguration before it in American history.
Biden will take the oath of office in front of a sparse crowd amid a global pandemic, and with an unprecedented military mobilization in Washington, D.C., aimed at security a U.S. Capitol where police were overwhelmed just two weeks ago by a mob whipped up over conspiracy theories about his electoral win.
The inauguration was going to look and feel differently even before the disastrous events of January 6 given the dangers of COVID-19.
Biden’s team had urged people to stay home and the 200,000 tickets that would go out in a normal year have been reduced to only about 1,000 members of Congress, past presidents and dignitaries.
But the inauguration has taken on a much darker tone since the ransacking of the Capitol, which has once again exposed the deep political fissures in the nation while raising the degree of difficulty for Biden to tackle the challenges facing the country.
Trump, who is facing a second impeachment trial in the Senate over his role in the riots, will be the first sitting president since 1869 to not attend the inauguration. A not insubstantial portion of the Republican Party still refuses to recognize the victory by the incoming president, who in his address is expected to plea for the nation to unite to meet the challenge of the pandemic and other issues, and to move beyond the political warfare that has dominated the last four years.
Historians say there has never been an inauguration to take place under such extreme circumstances in the modern political era.
They point back to Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration during the Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt’s swearing in during the Great Depression as the last time an incoming president took the oath of office facing these levels of discord and uncertainty.
“It doesn’t get more unique than this,” said Julian Zelizer, a political history professor at Princeton University… (LINK TO STORY)
Records: Trump allies behind rally that ignited Capitol riot (Associated Press)
Members of President Donald Trump’s failed presidential campaign played key roles in orchestrating the Washington rally that spawned a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to an Associated Press review of records, undercutting claims the event was the brainchild of the president’s grassroots supporters. A pro-Trump nonprofit group called Women for America First hosted the “Save America Rally” on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse, an oval-shaped, federally owned patch of land near the White House. But an attachment to the National Park Service public gathering permit granted to the group lists more than half a dozen people in staff positions for the event who just weeks earlier had been paid thousands of dollars by Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.
Other staff scheduled to be “on site” during the demonstration have close ties to the White House. Since the siege, several of them have scrambled to distance themselves from the rally. The riot at the Capitol, incited by Trump’s comments before and during his speech at the Ellipse, has led to a reckoning unprecedented in American history. The president told the crowd to march to the Capitol and that “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
A week after the rally, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives, becoming the first U.S. president ever to be impeached twice. But the political and legal fallout may stretch well beyond Trump, who will exit the White House on Wednesday before Democrat Joe Biden takes the oath of office. Trump had refused for nearly two months to accept his loss in the 2020 election to the former vice president. Women for America First, which applied for and received the Park Service permit, did not respond to messages seeking comment about how the event was financed and about the Trump campaign’s involvement. The rally drew tens of thousands of people. In a statement, the president’s reelection campaign said it “did not organize, operate or finance the event.” No campaign staff members were involved in the organization or operation of the rally, according to the statement. It said that if any former employees or independent contractors for the campaign took part, “they did not do so at the direction of the Trump campaign.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Pressure grows for states to open vaccines to more groups of people (New York Times)
Just weeks into the country’s coronavirus vaccination effort, states have begun broadening access to the shots faster than planned, amid tremendous public demand and intense criticism about the pace of the rollout. Some public health officials worry that doing so could bring even more chaos to the complex operation and increase the likelihood that some of the highest-risk Americans will be skipped over.
But the debate over how soon to expand eligibility is intensifying as deaths from the virus continue to surge, hospitals are overwhelmed with critically ill patients and millions of vaccine doses delivered last month remain in freezers. Governors are under enormous pressure from their constituents — especially older people, who vote in great numbers and face the highest risk of dying from the virus — to get the doses they receive into arms swiftly.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decision, announced Friday, to release nearly all available doses to the states when he takes office on Jan. 20, rather than holding half to guarantee each recipient gets a booster shot a few weeks after the first, is likely to add to that pressure. Some states, including Florida, Louisiana and Texas, have already expanded who is eligible to get a vaccine now, even though many people in the first priority group recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the nation’s 21 million health care workers and three million residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities — have not yet received a shot.
On Friday afternoon, New York became the latest state to do so, announcing that it would allow people 75 and over and certain essential workers to start receiving a vaccine on Monday. But reaching a wider swath of the population requires much more money than states have received for the task, many health officials say, and more time to fine-tune systems for moving surplus vaccine around quickly, to increase the number of vaccination sites and people who give the shots, and to establish reliable appointment systems to prevent endless lines and waits… (LINK TO STORY)