BG Reads | News You Need to Know (January 28, 2022)
Downtown Austin
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Council moves to put a stop to wage theft (KUT)
Austin is taking a step toward joining El Paso and Houston in punishing employers that engage in wage theft, with a resolution City Council approved unanimously on Thursday. A dozen people signed up to tell Council members to approve the resolution, which was sponsored by Council Member Ann Kitchen.
The resolution directs City Manager Spencer Cronk to create a system for the city to receive complaints from workers about construction employers who fail to pay wages owed to employees, fail to maintain payroll records or improperly classify employees as independent contractors. Staff members are expected to come back to Council with an ordinance establishing criminal penalties and a civil complaint procedure relating to wage theft.
At least one representative of the contractor community advised Council that he and his members had not been consulted about the proposed ordinance. Phil Thoden, president of Associated General Contractors in Austin, told Council his organization is strongly opposed to wage theft. However, he was concerned because his group was not contacted before the item went on the Council agenda.
By the end of the day when the item came up for a vote, Mayor Steve Adler had added a direction to the resolution saying, “City staff should engage with a wide range of stakeholders and differing substantive positions, engaging and soliciting input on the proposed ordinance from, without limitation, organizations that represent both labor and contractor/employer interests.”
The direction also stated that staff should consider and present options about different levels of city resources that might be needed to take on the task of enforcing any new ordinance. Council Member Mackenzie Kelly seemed concerned about incurring new expenditures, but Kitchen assured her that voting for the resolution did not entail a commitment of any new resources… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin ISD examines low enrollment; board members concerned about affordability, charter schools (Community Impact)
Austin ISD continues to face low enrollment and new data presented to the board of trustees Jan. 27 shed light on the trend.
Though the city’s population has grown speedily, the district is seeing fewer and fewer students enrolled. Enrollment has dropped by more than 8,000 students since 2013, according to data presented by Alejandro Delgado, executive director of student enrollment in the district.
Because funding for the district is based on enrollment and the state recapture—locally collected tax revenue from school districts with high property values—Austin ISD continues to pay locally collected tax revenue to the state while losing funding due to low enrollment, Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
As Austin reimagines public safety, new police findings emerge (Austin Monitor)
Arrests made by Austin police declined 51 percent from 2017 to 2020, yet use-of-force incidents increased 58 percent, according to an independent review of the Austin Police Department.
A city-retained consulting firm, Kroll Associates, spent 48 months reviewing Austin’s police practices, particularly as they relate to race and ethnicity, and provided the second phase of its findings to City Council on Tuesday.
The report comes at a time when the city is shouldering the massive undertaking of reimagining public safety. A new cadet class will graduate today, Friday – the first class to graduate under the reimagined training program that is still being refined.
At Council’s work session Tuesday, one of the most striking revelations of the Kroll report came midway through a PowerPoint presentation, when consultant Rick Brown identified Austin as a “stop-and-frisk” city – a controversial practice that has carried a much higher profile in large cities such as New York and Chicago.
Brown, a nationally recognized police expert with 28 years in law enforcement, focused his presentation on a six-month period between June and November of 2019, drilling down on 1,321 incident reports involving 2,960 uses of force.
Brown and his team identified issues of concern in 112 incidents, or 8.5 percent. He found that 88 individuals were subjected to inappropriate force or unnecessary escalation. Of these 88 individuals, nearly 48 percent were Hispanic, 28.4 percent were Black, 21.6 percent were white, and 2.3 percent were identified as Asian or other… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
SparkCognition becomes Austin's newest unicorn with $123M funding round (AustinInno)
Artificial intelligence has been touted as the way of the future for years. But AI is still in its infancy, and that's one of the reasons big dollars are flowing to startups with promising solutions.
Among them is Austin-based SparkCognition, which has been making waves in the local startup scene since its launch in 2013. Since then, the company has evolved in many ways as it finds new avenues to apply AI to the problems faced by big businesses and the government.
Now the company is poised to accelerate its growth. It announced Jan. 25 it has raised $123 million in series D funding at a $1.4 billion valuation. The company says that's more than double the valuation it reached in its $100 million series C funding round in 2019… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Abbott turns to bitcoin miners to bolster the grid and his re-election (Bloomberg)
Last fall, Texas Governor Greg Abbott gathered dozens of cryptocurrency deal makers in Austin where they discussed an idea that, on its face, seemed almost upside down: Electricity-hungry Bitcoin miners could shore up the state’s power grid, a top priority after a deep freeze last winter triggered blackouts that left hundreds dead. The industry’s advocates have been making that pitch to the governor for years. The idea is that the miners’ computer arrays would demand so much electricity that someone would come along to build more power plants, something Texas badly needs. If the grid starts to go wobbly, as it did when winter storm Uri froze up power plants in February 2021, miners could quickly shut down to conserve energy for homes and businesses. At least two Bitcoin miners have already volunteered to do just that.
There’s no guarantee anyone will build more generation or switch off just because they’re asked. There’s even a chance the idea could backfire and put more strain on the grid overall. But at last October’s meeting at the governor’s mansion, Abbott made it clear that he was going to count on the miners’ assistance when the electricity grid faced colder months ahead. Help me get through the winter, the governor said, according to four people who attended the meeting. Getting through the winter may be key to Abbott’s political fortunes as he stands for re-election. He faces two main opponents in a March 1 Republican primary and a tougher fight in November against Democrat Beto O’Rourke. The grid is one of the governor’s few weak flanks: The most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, from October, showed that 60% of Texans disapprove of how state leaders have handled the reliability of the grid. “There has to be a really thoughtful approach to bringing gigawatts worth of Bitcoin onto the system,” said Doug Lewin, an energy consultant in Austin. He said regulators need to require miners to shut down during a crisis, instead of making it voluntary.
“We’ve got to make sure that if we’re getting close to scarcity, people aren’t mining Bitcoins anymore.” Abbott is embracing an industry that sees itself as a libertarian form of finance free from meddling by banks and governments -- an ideal that appeals to his core GOPvoters. That support, and Texas’s cheap electricity and near-zero regulation, helped spur big companies like Riot Blockchain Inc., Singapore-based Bitdeer Group and the U.K.’s Argo Blockchain Plcto build some of the world’s largest Bitcoin mines in the state. In all, there are seven big miners and more than 20 smaller ones in Texas, according to the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council. Abbott and Republican lawmakers have taken some of the most aggressive steps in the U.S. to lure the industry. Last May, Texas became one of a few states to make it easier for businesses to hold crypto assets and use them as collateral for loans. Abbott also created the Work Group on Blockchain Matters, staffed by industry experts and insiders… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas lobbyist asks for $2.8 bil after 12,000 companies never got Restaurant Revitalization money (Dallas Morning News)
Army veteran David Jordan, owner of Patriot Sandwich Company in Denton, says he got an email in 2021, telling him he’d receive about $86,000 of Restaurant Revitalization Fund money within seven to 10 days. The $28.6 billion rescue package was implemented by the Small Business Association (SBA) in mid-2021 to help those who own restaurants or bars and were struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first three weeks of funding were earmarked for veterans, women, and those who are socially or economically disadvantaged. “I checked my account every single day,” Jordan says. The money didn’t arrive. And it wouldn’t be coming, Jordan says he was later told in an email from the SBA. His funds were blocked by anti-discrimination lawsuits filed in Texas and Tennessee. While 6,370 businesses in Texas did receive Restaurant Revitalization funds, the Texas Restaurant Association reports that another 12,055 were promised grants and never received them. “Once the dollars were gone, they just didn’t get funded,” says Emily Williams Knight, president and CEO of the TRA.
Knight launched a campaign this week to pressure Congress to put another $50 billion into the Restaurant Revitalization Fund during budget talks scheduled in February. Knight wants $2.8 billion of that to go to Texas small businessowners. “The ask here is not to create a new program,” she says. “This is really about finishing the job they already started.” The promised funds meant life or death for some Dallas-Fort Worth restaurants. By the time the Restaurant Revitalization funds were supposed to be in Patriot Sandwich Company’s bank account, Jordan was already late on his rent. If the restaurant was going to survive, he needed to double the customers coming into his business. And he needed cash. Without either, he closed the sandwich shop in November 2021. He still needs at least $30,000 to pay back his landlord. The dozens of military medals, pictures and artifacts he used as decoration for Patriot Sandwich Company are locked inside the shop, now the property of the landlord until Jordan can catch back up on rent. “That shop was my life,” he says… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Anthony Fauci is up against more than a virus (Washington Post)
The doctor opens the front door. Never mind introductions. “I know who you are. Do you think these guys would let you get this close to me, if we didn’t know who you are?” Across the street is a security agent in Nikes, a badge on his belt. He’s not the only one watching. “I mean, isn’t it amazing?” the doctor says. “Here I am, with cameras around my house.” The house is modest for Washington: stucco and brick, cozy and cramped. No obvious tokens of celebrity or esteem. Icicles on the dormant hot tub out back. Bottles of red wine and olive oil on the kitchen counter. “It’s messy because, as you know, in covid times, nobody comes over. So nobody cares.” People are coming by outside, though. They are snapping photos. Thousands of marchers are descending on the capital to rally against vaccine mandates. Are some of them staking out Anthony Fauci’s home?
The security agents “usually leave at a certain time,” the doctor says. “But tonight they’re going to sleep in our guest room.” Year 3 of covid times. Nearly 900,000 Americans are dead. An average of 2,000 (mostly unvaccinated) Americans are dying every day now, even though there is a simple measure to limit such suffering — made possible in large part by the Vaccine Research Center founded under Fauci. And yet many Americans would rather take their chances with a virus than a vaccine, because there’s more than just a virus going around. There’s something else in the air. Symptoms include rage, delusion, opportunism and extreme behavior — like comparing Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele (as Lara Logan did on Fox News in November), or setting out for Washington with an AR-15 and a kill list of “evil” targets that included Fauci (as a California man did last month). “Surrealistic,” the doctor says. He has not had a day off since the beginning. “I would say I’m in a state of chronic exhaustion.” He quickly adds: “But it’s not exhaustion that’s interfering with my function.” He is a precise man whose tour in the information war has made him extra-vigilant about his words. “I can just see, you know, Laura Ingraham: ‘He’s exhausted! Get rid of him!’” Fauci has been a doctor and public servant for more than 50 years. He’s been the country’s top expert on infectious diseases under seven U.S. presidents. George H.W. Bush once called him his personal hero. Under George W. Bush, Fauci became an architect of an AIDS-relief program that has, according to the U.S. government, saved 21 million lives around the world… (LINK TO FULL STORY)