BG Reads | News You Need to Know (April 18, 2022)
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[BG PODCAST]
Episode 155: Discussing Austin's Diversity and Ethnic Chamber Alliance w/Tina Cannon, CEO, Austin LGBT Chamber
Today’s episode (155) features Tina Cannon, CEO, Austin LGBT Chamber of Commerce. She and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discussed the recently formed Diversity and Ethnic Chamber Alliance ("DECA")
Comprised of the Austin LGBT Chamber, Greater Austin Asian Chamber, Greater Austin Black Chamber, Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, DECA will facilitate their shared vision to create a Regional Economic Equity Development Plan (“REED Plan”).
The vision of the DECA collaboration is to better the integration of individuals, firms, and communities who have not shared proportionately in the overall rise in local prosperity.
The REED Plan, according to DECA, will reduce barriers and create equity for the small businesses and the workforce communities served by the Chambers.-> EPISODE LINK
[HEARINGS]
Monday, 4/18
Tuesday, 4/19
Wednesday, 4/20
Thursday, 4/21
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Austin pilot program to give struggling residents $1,000 per month (KXAN)
The city’s Equity Office on Friday declined to give KXAN further details as to how the recipients would be selected, what qualifications would need to be met and when the application process could open.
An office spokesperson indicated more information would be revealed when the program goes before city council at next Thursday’s regular meeting.
Austin City Council included the $1.1 million in funding for the initiative in last summer’s budget. The idea came from the city’s Reimagining Public Safety (RPS) task force.
“A lot of the research we did showed us that increasing police does not make the city safer,” RPS co-chair Paula X. Rojas told KXAN. “But there are many other programs that can actually prevent the need for policing. One of those is this guaranteed monthly income.”
Mayor Steve Adler, a proponent of the program, highlighted the high costs associated with treating and caring for those who find themselves on the Austin’s streets.
“It’s really expensive for our community when that happens,” Adler told KXAN. “Maybe if we can give somebody some assistance just before that happens, we can keep them in their homes.”
The initiative will compliment and expand on another guaranteed income pilot that just wrapped up in the area, this one funded through charitable groups and the California-based nonprofit UpTogether, which advocates for people in “historically undervalued communities.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin jobless rate down to 2.7%, matching pre-pandemic level (Austin American-Statesman)
Chalk up a new pandemic-era milestone for Austin's red-hot economy.
The unemployment rate in the metro area fell to 2.7% in March — identical to March 2019 and the first time that a monthly figure for the region has matched the level it had achieved just prior to the pandemic, when the local economy also was booming.
The benchmark was reached despite what has been a huge influx of new residents to the Austin area. The number of people working in the region has increased by nearly 140,000 since March 2019, according to figures from the Texas Workforce Commission that haven't been adjusted for seasonal factors.
A 2.7% jobless rate "is really just an incredibly strong number — it tells you the greater Austin area is back completely" from the pandemic-induced downturn, said Dirk Mateer, an economist and University of Texas professor… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Public Health Committee hears update on $11 million child care investment (Austin Monitor)
Staff members leading city and county efforts to expand child care services gave City Council’s Public Health Committee an update last Wednesday on the impacts of last year’s budget cycle.
Last summer, Council approved the investment of $11 million in federal grant money into child care services as part of its 2021-22 budget. Child care scholarship programs, essential worker hazard pay and public pre-K programs will all benefit from the influx of funding, which includes an additional $4.6 million from Travis County.
“Child care is the single greatest cost to families in Austin behind housing,” Success by Six Coalition Vice President Cathy McHorse said. “Access to child care can enable families to work, and stay in their homes safely.”
Around 1,700 children are currently on the waitlist to receive subsidized care through Workforce Solutions Capital Area, which channels federal, state and local funding into child care programs for low to moderate-income families in Austin. Staff hopes that the $1,965,104 in city funding will help to address this gap in resources, allowing for 300 more children to move into subsidized care in the coming months. Additionally, Travis County plans to invest $906,399 of its own budget into the program… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Abbott ends inspections that clogged commercial traffic at U.S.-Mexico border for more than a week (Texas Tribune)
Gov. Greg Abbott reached a fourth and final deal — this one with Tamaulipas’ governor on Friday — to end state troopers' increased inspections of commercial vehicles at international bridges that gridlocked commercial traffic throughout the Texas-Mexico border for more than a week.
The latest deal should bring trade back to normal after Abbott-ordered enhanced inspections at key commercial bridges caused over a week of backups that left truckers waiting for hours and sometimes days to get loads of produce, auto parts and other goods into the U.S.
At a press conference with Abbott in Weslaco, Tamaulipas Gov. Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca said his state will continue its five-part security plan, launched in 2016, that includes stationing police every 31 miles on state highways, personality and polygraph tests for officers in the state police department, increasing salaries for police officers and offering scholarships for the children of state police officers.
Abbott said the deals with Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas were “historic,” calling them an example of how border states can work together on immigration. But three of the four Mexican governors said they will simply continue security measures they put in place before Abbott ordered the state inspections.
The fourth, Nuevo León Gov. Samuel Alejandro García Sepúlveda — whose state shares only 9 miles of the 1,200-mile Texas-Mexico border — agreed to set up new checkpoints for commercial trucks.
Abbott said he was relying on the Mexican governors to reduce the number of migrants crossing the Rio Grande.
“If those expectations are not fulfilled, and we see an increase or even a continuation of the illegal immigration traffic we're currently seeing, Texas can reinstate the enhanced security measures for [commercial] vehicles coming across the border,” Abbott said at the news conference with Cabeza de Vaca… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Contractors are making millions with little oversight due to Gov. Abbott's border 'emergency' (Houston Chronicle)
Gov. Greg Abbott’s border crackdown is producing a private contractor bonanza, showering tens of millions of dollars on staffing companies, technology firms and builders, including one business that sold Texas hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unreliable COVID tests. None of the contractors are going through a formal solicitation process, potentially raising costs for a border security program that is already eating up more tax dollars than advertised. The company that sold the state the costly, questionable COVID tests, Gothams LLC, also got a $43 million “emergency” purchase order in January to build and staff a state-run migrant detention center in Hebbronville in Jim Hogg County, just east of Laredo near the U.S.-Mexico border, records obtained by the Houston Chronicle show.
The company’s owner, a soldier-turned-Silicon Valley entrepreneur, disputes that the COVID tests were faulty but says that Gothams eventually pulled them to appease the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As with the COVID deals, Gotham’s latest government deal to build the migrant detention center and the border purchases are being awarded without the burden of formal bidding by the Texas Division of Emergency Management, or TDEM, which falls under the management of the Texas A&M University System. There were no formal contracts for the hundreds of millions spent on COVID tests, and there aren’t any for the border outlays either, according to TDEM. Officials are purchasing millions of dollars at a time in goods and services, sometimes tens of millions, using simple 30-day purchase orders. Making it all possible: Abbott’s monthly renewal of his disaster declaration along parts of the southern border, allowing him to suspend normal contracting procedures that officials say slow the response but that critics say drive up costs and promote cronyism. Same goes for the COVID-related purchases… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas Gov. Abbott may benefit politically from border inspections despite costs, criticism of effort (Dallas Morning News)
Gov. Greg Abbott maybe had to dodge some rotten grapefruits — a few, lofted from normally friendly faces in the gallery. But the Texas governor’s on-again, off-again inspections of incoming trucks from Mexico, that snarled traffic and bungled international trade, probably helped him politically in the short term, experts said Friday. The inspections and the free bus rides for migrants to Washington, D.C., may have yielded Abbott several desirable outcomes, one said: The governor got a prime time slot on Fox News’ most-watched show talking about an issue that’s wildly popular with GOP voters. His flurry of border-related activity appeared to avert any long-lasting, deleterious effects from the “enhanced safety inspections” he ordered state police to conduct. And four Mexican border-state governors came forward to show Abbott details of what they were doing to deter a widened flow of undocumented immigrants headed northward through their states toward Texas.
Even if the Mexican leaders added very little of substance to what their state governments already were doing, the optics were great for the Republican governor, who is seeking re-election to a third term in November, said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “It looks like he’s taking the fight to Mexico and he looks very — dare I say it — statesmanlike, right?” Henson said. “I’m purposefully not using the word presidential. But you know what I mean, right? This breaks his way. The pushback is outweighed by the fact that border security is the great Republican unifier. He gets to present himself as doing something productive.” Though Abbott hasn’t said if he’s interested in running for president in 2024, University of Texas at San Antonio political scientist Sharon A. Navarro dared to use the “P word” — even as she rated his latest border moves as “a political strategy to mobilize his base and to look tough.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
The elusive politics of Elon Musk (New York Times)
The opinions poured in, 280 characters at a time, as to whether it was good or bad that Elon Musk had offered to buy Twitter for more than $40 billion and take it private.
A person’s politics typically dictated how they felt: Conservatives cheered it as a victory for free speech. Liberals fretted that misinformation would spread rampantly if Mr. Musk followed through with his plan to dismantle how the social network monitors content.
But what no one seemed to be able to say with any certainty was what kind of political philosophy the enigmatic billionaire believes himself.
That’s because Mr. Musk, 50, who was born in South Africa and only became an American citizen in 2002, expresses views that don’t fit neatly into this country’s binary, left-right political framework.
He is frequently described as libertarian, though that label fails to capture how paradoxical and random his politics can be. He has no shortage of opinions on the most pertinent and divisive issues of the day, from Covid-19 lockdowns (“fascist,” he called them) to immigration restrictions (“Very much disagree,” he has said).
There is not much consistency in the miscellany of his public statements or his profuse Twitter commentary — except that they often align with his business interests. And despite the intense partisan reaction to his unsolicited bid to buy Twitter, his opaque politics make it difficult to say whether the elation and fear about how he would run the company are justified.
He has railed against federal subsidies but his companies have benefited from billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives from federal, state and local governments. He has strenuously opposed unionization, criticizing the Biden administration for proposing a tax credit for electric vehicles produced by union workers… (LINK TO FULL STORY)