BG Reads | News You Need to Know (June 30, 2022)
[MEETINGS]
[AUSTIN METRO]
Austin struggled to hire summer employees. Then, it failed to pay some on time. (KUT)
At least 34 employees with Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department, including some who care for children as part of city-run summer camps, went as long as a month without pay because of a clerical error.
At least one employee’s paycheck was nearly five weeks late and he had trouble paying his car payment, KUT confirmed through emails obtained via a public information request and a brief interview with the employee.
The error occurred as the city struggles to recruit temporary seasonal workers, particularly lifeguards; some public pools remain closed because of the shortage, despite triple-digit temperatures.
“Some of these employees are missing a substantial amount of hours 50-80 hours but others are missing 13 or less hours,” Ginny McDonald, a manager in the City of Austin’s payroll department, wrote on an internal messaging system last week.
According to a list of 21 employees who had gone without pay, the city owed an average of $763 to each worker; one employee, who is listed as working for the city’s pools, was owed nearly $1,500 for more than 90 hours of work.
"The Department recognizes people depend on their checks for their livelihoods," John Nixon, a spokesperson for the Parks and Recreation Department, told KUT in an email. "The Department sincerely apologized for the error and has reviewed internal processes to help prevent any future errors."… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Music Commission wants Council to ‘expedite’ Live Music Fund activation (Austin Monitor)
The Music Commission plans to push City Council and staff to speed up the deployment of the Live Music Fund, which was approved by City Council in fall 2019 but is not scheduled to be distributed until next July.
At last week’s special meeting, commission Chair Anne-Charlotte Patterson said local musicians have been waiting years for the allocation of grants between $5,000 and $10,000 that could be used for creation and promotion of new concerts and festivals around the city. The delay is due mostly to the need for the city to hire an outside entity to handle the application process and awarding of the funds, as the Economic Development Department’s ongoing staff shortages make it unable to handle that program as well as similar Cultural Arts award programs.
After an update from EDD Director Sylnovia Holt-Rabb that showed the city’s Hotel Occupancy Tax funds have rebounded enough to put $4 million total in the Live Music Fund’s account, Patterson said the prospect of a coming national recession could limit the effectiveness of the program if it takes until mid-2023 to get awarded to musicians and event organizers.
“We have a lot of people in the community that are very interested in applying for the Live Music Fund and would like to see this money go out soon. The somewhat unfortunate part of this is that we still have over a year to wait, according to the current timeline,” she said. “As Council advisers I would like for us to reach out to Council and see if they can talk to the city manager and direct him to see if there’s a way to expedite this process. I feel bad for staff that you’ve developed a program that now has to wait so long.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
City of Austin makes plans for future heat advisories as temperatures remain high (Community Impact)
As Austin experiences summer, the high temperatures are a constant with multiple days in a row having temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The city of Austin is taking steps to address the heat and the potential issues that may arise because of it.
District 1 Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison tried to call a special meeting about the heat, and although the meeting did not meet quorum, Assistant City Manager Rey Arellano put out a memo detailing the plan the city has in the event of excessive heat or heat advisory.
“It was challenging for my office to locate information about where to go in inclement weather, cooling stations specifically,” Harper-Madison wrote on the City Council message board. “Without a comprehensive, easy-access, widely disseminated, comprehensive list of hot weather safety resources—I have deep concerns for how Austinites will survive any interruptions in electric services, local or statewide, small and temporary or complete disaster-sized emergencies.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
San Marcos City Council to reconsider Hill Country Studios incentives agreement after environmental pushback (Austin Business Journal)
In the wake of environmental concerns, the San Marcos City Council will meet next week to reconsider an economic development incentives agreement approved earlier this month for a massive film studio project.
A large group of protesters, dubbed "Protect the River," gathered outside the San Marcos City Council meeting on June 28, expressing concerns regarding the $267 million Hill Country Studios project in the La Cima master-planned community at 6202 West Centerpoint Road, arguing that the studio could potentially damage the adjacent Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone.
The development and much of San Marcos sits within the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone, which is the primary source of water for approximately two million people in the region.
While the city does not own the land and cannot stop private development, protestors suggest the June 7 incentives agreement is evidence the city supports development in the environmentally protected area. Theprotestors lobbied for smarter development in the area, and expressed concerns about gentrification, rising home prices, and losing the city's culture and heritage, according to local news reports.
"I think one of the things that I was frustrated with, and I think a lot of people here today are frustrated with, is we're literally incentivizing someone to build on the recharge zone," Councilmember Maxfield Baker, the lone representative to vote against incentives, said during the protest, according to MySanAntonio.com. "It's not that they could do it by right it's that we're giving them a big tax break to do it. So you know, when will the project be built without that tax break? We don't know, would you see the same economic benefits? Probably."… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS]
Gov. Greg Abbott unloads nearly $20 million in ad buys in race against Beto O’Rourke (Texas Tribune)
With more than four months left until election day, Gov. Greg Abbott is pressing one of his biggest advantages in his reelection campaign: money.
In recent days, the Republican governor’s campaign has announced nearly $20 million in early ad buys for the general election, emphasizing what has been a massive financial advantage over Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. The ad reservations include $2.75 million for Hispanic media, $8.8 million separately for TV and $8.15 million for digital platforms.
Abbott’s campaign has characterized all of the buys as initial and has said the early TV reservations allow it to lock down the most valued air time. The campaign has declined to comment on additional details, including when the ads will start airing... (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Chevron's offer to pay for staff to move to Houston signals growing focus on Texas (Houston Chronicle)
Chevron is offering to pay for California employees to voluntarily relocate to Houston and is selling its San Ramon headquarters campus, as the company’s center of gravity continues to shift to Texas. Last week Chevron confirmed it will remain in California, but it is inviting employees to move to Houston as it puts its 92-acre corporate campus in San Ramon on the market and plans to move its headquarters offices into a smaller leased office spaces elsewhere in the region. The 1.4 million square-foot campus is about 35 miles east of San Francisco. It's still a question though of how many of its 2,000 employees in San Ramon would actually make the move. Chevron isn’t requiring employees to move to Texas, but its offer to cover employees’ relocation is another sign that Houston is a primary center of operations for the oil major. Chevron has about 8,000 employees in the Houston area, including about 6,000 employees in downtown Houston.
Chevron’s real estate shuffle was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The energy firm has roughly 3 million square feet of office space in downtown Houston spread across three buildings. Chevron also owns two office buildings in northwest Houston that it picked up after it acquired Noble Energy. One of those 438,000 square-foot building represented one of the largest blocks of sublease office spaces available in Houston area as of the first quarter 2022, according to real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. In the past year, Chevron also moved into a leased small office space in The Ion, Rice Management Co.’s startup incubator in Midtown Houston. In February, Chevron started requiring office-based employees to physically commute to the office at least three days a week. “One of the primary reasons that we felt strongly that it was the right thing to eventually come back is we believe that every company has to preserve a strong culture and that comes from collaboration, face-to-face feedback and our ability to interact with each other on a human (level). We strongly believe that contributes to better business outcomes,” Steve Green, president of Chevron North America, in a March interview. “I’ve heard more and more people had forgotten all the positive things from being together, like the ability to go to lunch with someone, the ability to walk out of the building to go to a different restaurant, the ability to collaborate fact-to-face on a business issue, or to ask a short question without having to jockey for positions on a calendar for a Teams or Zoom call.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Greg Abbott blames Joe Biden for migrant deaths, but the governor’s own border security efforts have fallen short (Texas Tribune)
In April, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state police to inspect every commercial vehicle entering Texas through a port of entry, saying the painful step was needed because the Biden administration was not doing its job to secure the border.
Drug cartels, Abbott said, were using “dangerous commercial trucks” to smuggle “immigrants, deadly fentanyl and other illegal cargo” into the state. The “enhanced commercial vehicle inspections” at the border caused hourslong delays at the inland ports, essentially grinding trade with Mexico to a halt and costing Texas businesses millions in losses.
After a week and a half, Abbott ended the inspections, announcing what he called historic security agreements with governors from border states in northern Mexico that he said would slow the flow of drugs and immigrants across the border.
But three months later, in a harrowing reminder of the risks migrants are taking to enter the country, authorities on Monday night discovered an abandoned tractor-trailer in San Antonio that contained the bodies of 46 dead migrants — another five died after being transported to local hospitals.
To immigration experts, the astounding loss of life inside the same kind of commercial vehicle Abbott had targeted in his inspections illustrates just how difficult it is to stem migration into the country, even as he has spent the last year pouring billions of state dollars into securing the border.
“Every data point we’ve seen about migration into Texas from Mexico shows that migrants are getting to the border in the same numbers as before,” said Adam Isacson, a regional security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “There’s no numerical evidence that it’s had any numerical impact on migrant flows.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[BG PODCAST]
Episode 160: Talking Public Relations, Career advice, and Austin with Kristin Marcum, CEO of ECPR
Today's special weekend episode (160) features Kristin Marcum, owner and CEO of ECPR, Austin's preeminent public relations firm.
Kristin and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discuss her path into PR and her career leading to the C-suite and ownership of the firm.-> EPISODE LINK
Enjoyed this episode? Please like, share, and comment!
SUBSCRIBE / CONTACT US AT: info@binghamgp.com