BG Reads | News You Need to Know (April 26, 2022)
Spring Cleaning Your Inbox? Subscribe to BG Reads on LINKEDIN
Spring Cleaning Your Inbox? Subscribe to BG Reads on LINKEDIN
[BG PODCAST]
Episode 156: Managing Growth in the City of Leander with Mayor Christine DeLisle
Today’s episode (156) features City of Leander Mayor Christine DeLisle. She and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discuss the growth and associated challenges with one the fastest growing cities in the nation.
Elected Mayor in May of 2021, Mayor DeLisle previously served a three-year term as Place 4 on the Leander City Council.
Located just 30 minutes northwest of downtown Austin, Leander has experienced substantial growth in its population over the past decade. In May 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Leander, Texas was the fastest-growing large city in America between 2018 and 2019 -> EPISODE LINK
[HEARINGS]
Tuesday (4/26)
Wednesday (4/27)
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Economic rebound, spending efficiency point to rosier budget picture (Austin Monitor)
The city’s immediate financial outlook is looking more optimistic due to a strong rebound in sales tax collections, increased development, and City Council and city management’s efforts to slow the growth of city cost drivers over the last three years, according to Budget Officer Kerri Lang.
However, city budget writers are also anticipating a budget shortfall for Fiscal Year 2026-27. As Lang wrote in a memo to the mayor and Council, “Fundamentally, while the city has made important strides in bending its cost curve to a more sustainable level, and record levels of sales tax receipts are helping to delay imbalances in the short term, work remains to be done to achieve long-term structural stability in the General Fund.”
In 2019, state law reduced the amount by which cities, counties and other taxing entities could increase property tax rates without voter approval from 8 percent to 3.5 percent. Lang anticipates the city’s General Fund expenditures will increase by 4 percent annually over the next five years without adding any programs or significant increases in staff… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
The best job markets aren’t in the biggest cities (Wall Street Journal)
The hottest job markets in America are in five different states, but they have a lot in common. They’re in midsize cities, all with a population under 2.3 million. They’re in states with fairly low income taxes, or none at all. And their climates allow for outdoor activities all year round.
They are: Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tenn.; Raleigh, N.C.; Salt Lake City; and Jacksonville, Fla.
To find the areas with the strongest job markets, The Wall Street Journal, working with Moody’s Analytics, assessed 300 metro areas. The rankings measured five factors: the unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, job growth, labor-force growth and wage growth in 2021. An average of those rankings was used to determine the hottest labor market in the U.S. Larger areas, with more than one million residents, were ranked separately from smaller ones.
All of the top five cities are home to large universities, state capitals or high-tech employers. Florida, Texas and Tennessee have no personal state income tax, while North Carolina and Utah have income and corporate tax rates of roughly 5% or less. Here are some of the other trends that emerged in the Journal’s fourth annual survey of the job market.
Austin—a tech hub with a thriving restaurant and music scene—had the highest share of people working or looking for jobs and the highest growth in payroll employment. It also saw strong wage growth. A number of companies, including software giant Oracle Corp. and electric-car maker Tesla Inc., moved headquarters to Austin during the pandemic. The Internal Revenue Service is also hiring more workers there… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Metro Atlanta leaders headed to Austin on 2022 LINK trip (Saporta Report)
Metro Atlanta leaders are heading to Austin for the annual LINK trip on May 4 — only six months after going to Chicago to learn how other cities are coping with the same issues as we are.
But the three-day Austin trip will stand out in one special way. It will be the first time since 2012 that an Atlanta mayor will be one of the 120 business, government and nonprofit leaders on the trip.
The presence of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who took office in early January, points to a more regionally engaged capital city. Dickens already has attended two board meetings of the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC). His predecessor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, never attended one ARC board meeting in her four years in office. She also never went on a LINK trip, canceling a visit to Pittsburgh the night before… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Would Elon Musk move Twitter's headquarters to Austin? (Austin American-Statesman)
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, the CEO of Austin-based automaker Tesla, lhas reached a deal to acquire social media platform Twitter. That raises an obvious question: Once the deal is completed, might Musk move Twitter's corporate headquarters to Austin, which has increasingly become a center of operations for him and his companies? Musk's pursuit of Twitter has been ongoing for weeks, and on Monday Twitter's board agreed to the sale, which is worth about $44 billion. With Twitter owned by Musk, industry analysts and Austin-area tech officials say it's not a stretch to think that he might move the company's headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, or at least create a much-larger corporate presence for the company in Central Texas, which has become a focal point for Musk's companies.
Musk late last year announced that he was moving Tesla's corporate headquarters from California to Travis County, on the site of the automaker's $1.1 billion manufacturing plant, which recently began production. Musk also moved the headquarters of his tunneling and infrastructure company, the Boring Company, to Central Texas, either in Pfluergerville if you go by filings in California and Texas, or Bastrop if you go by the company's own job listings. Musk is also involved with a likely expansion of his aerospace company SpaceX in Austin, a potential Neuralink office in Austin, and the relocation of the headquarters of his private foundation to Austin. Monday, after news of the deal, broke, Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged the idea of the company moving to Texas. "@elonmusk. Bring Twitter to Texas to join Tesla, SpaceX & the Boring company," Abbott said in a tweet. Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, said once Musk acquires Twitter it's likely the deal will result in a significant Twitter presence in Austin… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Waterloo Greenway gets $9M federal grant for second phase of parks system (Austin Monitor)
The parks system that is expected to rehabilitate Waller Creek and create a series of parks through downtown Austin has received a $9 million federal grant to reconstruct and enhance a portion of parkland between Lady Bird Lake and Fourth Street.The grant comes from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with funding from the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It represents a part of the $80 million total cost of restoring the creek that has deteriorated due to repeated flooding. The section, which will be known as the Confluence, is the second phase of the Waterloo Greenway system, a $260 million effort to create a series of parks from 15th Street to the lake.
In addition to the reconstruction, which will go through the city’s bidding process with an expected start in October, Army Corps engineers will work to bring 1,550 trees, 200,000 mature plants and 10 acres of seed mixes to the Confluence area.
Jesús Aguirre, CEO of Waterloo Greenway, said the federal dollars are a welcome addition to the fundraising efforts of the conservancy for the park system that is halfway toward its $100 million goal. Another $110 million is being contributed via the city from a tax increment financing program that channels property taxes raised from the increase in property values throughout the Waller Creek District made possible by the flood mitigation capacity of the Waller Creek tunnel.
“From a pragmatic standpoint we need money to complete the project, and when you see everything that’s going on with development prices you know that bringing in this kind of money is absolutely critical,” Aguirre said. “The infusion of federal dollars like this is symbolic and transformational and it will help us bring the project to fruition. While we’re working with the conservancy and the city, the only way we are going to be able to see this through is by securing these kinds of federal dollars.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin business travel remains in recovery mode (Axios Austin)
Austin business travel is expected to remain stuck in recovery mode for years to come — and worries about cost coupled with COVID-19 variants could keep the industry in limbo even longer. Why it matters: Conventions and lodging are significant driving forces behind the local economy, with millions of dollars flowing into city hotels, shops, restaurants and bars. Even SXSW, a massive money maker for the city and hotel industry, didn't return to full capacity this year. Driving the news: Local hotels are expected to generate $243 million less from business travel this year compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to a new report from the American Hotel & Lodging Association.
With the projected 28% decline, Austin ranks 16th among the top 50 hotel markets with the biggest deficits in 2022 in business travel revenue, the study found. The big picture: Companies are reassessing and reprioritizing when and why employees travel, Axios' Joann Muller reports. Many corporate leaders want to maintain the financial savings they saw during the pandemic when employees worked remotely and corporate travel was rare. Meanwhile, business travel typically requires weekday trips, which have been more negatively impacted than weekend travel — largely driven by leisure travelers, according to Visit Austin. Zoom in: Steve Genovesi, executive vice president of Visit Austin, told Axios that the tourism group has already seen promising signs of a business travel rebound in Q1. While weekday hotel occupancy citywide is off by 12%, he said: "We are cautiously optimistic the numbers will be better than what the report is predicting." Meanwhile, Q1 weekday downtown hotel demand level has improved 20% from 2021, to just over 60% occupancy… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
The pandemic showed some Texas universities that they didn’t need the SAT. They might never go back. (Texas Tribune)
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, nearly all Texas public universities responded by making the submission of an SAT or ACT score optional for college admission.
But although COVID infections are down and in-person standardized tests are widely available again, the majority of Texas public universities are keeping the SAT and ACT optional until the spring of 2023 or later.
Even before the pandemic, some universities considered themselves test-optional because of a state law that grants automatic admission to Texas students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school classes. But the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many more schools to become test-optional for all applicants... (LINK TO FULL STORY)