BG Reads | News You Need to Know (March 30, 2022)
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
AGENDA - Regular Meeting of the Austin City Council (Thursday, April 7, 2022)
OF NOTE
Sponsors: Mayor Pro Tem Alison Alter, Mayor Steve Adler, Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, Council Member Paige Ellis.
[BG Podcast]
Episode 153: Discussing the City of Austin's cryptocurrency study
Today’s episode (153) features Austin Council Member Mackenzie Kelly (District 6). She and Bingham Group CEO discuss her recently passed resolution "directing the City Manager to conduct a fact-finding study on the adoption, use, and holding of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies by the City of Austin."
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Internal investigation confirms staff error led to Austin's three-day boil-water notice last month (KUT)
Employee error was largely to blame for Austin issuing a three-day citywide boil-water notice in February, an internal investigation finds.
The Austin Water report, released Tuesday, confirms two initial findings by the city-owned utility: that the overnight shift at the Ullrich Water Treatment Plant didn't respond to repeated alarms that water was becoming sludgy, and that they didn't reach out to higher-ups to avoid the plant's mandatory shutdown Feb. 5.
The investigation lays out a clearer timeline of what led to the city issuing the boil-water notice. It was the city's third notice in four years and ultimately led to the resignation of Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Local affordable housing investor raises $300M (Austin Business Journal)
Austin-based Comunidad Partners announced this month it has closed a $300 million discretionary fund just seven months after it opened. The funding will go to purchasing, renovating and developing affordable and workforce housing throughout the Sun Belt, with projects already underway in Austin.
The funding came from a mix of pension funds, university endowments, nonprofits and family offices, far surpassing its goal of $200 million. This is the first such fund for the company, which previously funded its projects through individual joint ventures.
“We grew the company brick by brick with that strategy … but as we started to grow, we realized that the fund vehicle was a more efficient way to distribute capital,” said Antonio Marquez, managing partner of Comunidad Partners.
The company has bought 11 properties totaling 1,832 units with the funds so far, using about a third of the available funding. Two of those properties are in Austin, and Marquez said others are under contract… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Vela seeks new solutions for housing the homeless (Austin Monitor)
Council Member Chito Vela has proposed that the city request the cash equivalent of on-site affordable housing upon approval of the Statesman planned unit development on Lady Bird Lake. Under his proposal, the money would go toward temporary shelter for people experiencing homelessness.
“Getting our neighbors off the street today would do far more good than a relatively small number of affordable units sometime in the future when the project is finally built,” Vela wrote in a City Council Message Board post this week.
As Vela worked with the Homeless Services Division to close the encampment in the St. Johns neighborhood where 30 people were living, he was struck by how few resources the city has to immediately shelter homeless people.
“The HEAL initiative is overstretched and capable of providing housing for only a fraction of the people who need it,” he said. “We simply don’t have enough immediate, temporary housing available to help everyone experiencing homelessness – even when a camp has been prioritized due to an approaching sweep.”
HEAL, or the Housing-Focused Encampment Assistance Link, is a city initiative that aims to move people out of encampments and into housing.
He added, “While I am excited that the city of Austin and Travis County have jointly committed over $215 million to build enough housing for about 3,000 people, those units are being contracted or constructed right now and will not be available for months or years. Long-term help is on the way, but we need immediate, short-term solutions.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin airport issues 2nd low fuel alert this year on Monday as air travel soars (KXAN)
On Monday, the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport issued its second fuel shortage alert this year due to heightened travel volumes — both of which occurred this month, linked to the 2022 South by Southwest Conference & Festivals and this past weekend’s NASCAR and PGA tour events.
As part of the fuel alert, airlines were asked to fly into AUS with more fuel than typical, in an effort to make sure flights had enough for takeoff. The fuel issue alert followed a morning inundated with security lines out the door and rental cars snaked throughout the rental drop off zone, as thousands of passengers made their way through AUS.
Fuel supply levels link back to AUS’s limited storage capacity, officials said. On an average day, AUS has between two and three days’ worth of fuel on hand; by comparison, most U.S. airports retain a five-to-seven-day supply each day.
Low fuel alerts are issued by fuel facility operators when AUS dips below a two-day supply. What that signifies to airlines is to travel with extra fuel in store so they can efficiently take off from AUS.
“The fuel facility operator puts in daily fuel orders based on projected flights,” an AUS spokesperson said in an email. “Fuel supply levels can be impacted by supply chain issues and are exacerbated by the airport’s limited storage capacity to have adequate fuel levels.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin-based Next Coast Ventures raises $310 million to invest in startups (Austin American-Statesman)
More money will be flowing to Austin startups.
Next Coast Ventures — an active investor in Central Texas companies — said it has closed on $310 million across three funds. This brings the amount raised by the Austin-based firm to more than $500 million in six years.
“These new funds will support entrepreneurs along different paths, whether building businesses from scratch or through the entrepreneurship-through-acquisition or ‘search fund’ model," said Mike Smerklo, Next Coast Ventures’ co-founder and managing director.
A search fund is an investment vehicle in which an entrepreneur raises funds from investors in order to acquire a company and take an active leadership role.
Next Coast Ventures III raised $195 million to invest in and support early stage tech businesses and entrepreneurs. A $50 million opportunity fund, NCV Select I, will enable the firm to continue to support companies from Funds I, II and III. Next Coast ETA raised $65 million for entrepreneurs to acquire, manage and eventually exit small and medium-sized businesses… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Lina Hidalgo aides are accused of steering a contract to an ally. Internal communications paint a murkier picture. (Texas Monthly)
The doorbell of Alex Triantaphyllis’s townhome in Houston’s Museum District began to ring repeatedly at 6:50 a.m. on March 11. So did his cellphone. When he opened his door he saw a Texas Ranger and two officials from the Harris County district attorney’s office standing at the locked gate, seeking entry. According to Triantaphyllis’s attorney, Marla Poirot, the Ranger’s vehicle was parked diagonally across his driveway, as if to prevent an escape, and its lights were flashing, drawing the attention of neighbors who emerged to see what the ruckus was about. Triantaphyllis, the chief of staff to Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, spoke to three officers at his gate. As his wife and two daughters looked on, he examined a search warrant the officers had given him. Triantaphyllis retrieved and handed the officers a laptop computer and a smartphone; a separate team of investigators seized a second computer from his office in the county administration building downtown. Early that same morning, other teams from district attorney Kim Ogg’s office and the Rangers executed warrants seizing similar devices from the homes and offices of Aaron Dunn, a senior policy adviser to Hidalgo who transferred to another county department a few days after the raid, and Wallis Nader, Hidalgo’s policy director.
The raids were part of an intensifying criminal investigation into the county’s awarding of an $11 million vaccine outreach contract last June to Elevate Strategies, a firm led by Democratic consultant Felicity Pereyra, despite another bidder having rated higher in an initial assessment by a review committee. The contract was canceled in September after Republican county commissioners alleged that Hidalgo’s team had steered it to Elevate in a bid to nurture likely Democratic voters. The investigation threatens some of Hidalgo’s senior aides, and conceivably the county judge herself, a rising Democratic star who faces reelection in November, though she has said publicly that she was not personally involved in the selection process. The search warrant for all three aides and lengthy affidavit supporting it, prepared by Texas Ranger Daron Parker, states that Parker believes information in the seized devices will show that Dunn, Nader, and Triantaphyllis committed misuse of official information, a third-degree felony, by “providing an advantage to a competitor” in a bidding process. It also says Parker believes they presented false statements on a governmental record—which can be either a felony or misdemeanor—by signing documents last year stating that they had complied with county ethics policies in awarding the contract. The affidavit shows that weeks before the public bidding process for the contract began, Hidalgo’s aides were communicating about COVID-related work with Elevate, and that Pereyra had access to details of the services the county wanted from the vaccine outreach vendor weeks before competing bidders saw advertised requests for proposals… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Biden signs into law first anti-lynching bill in U.S. history (AXIOS)
President Biden signed into law Tuesday a historic bill to make lynching a federal hate crime in the U.S. for the first time.
Why it matters: The new law comes after more than 200 attempts to codify federal anti-lynching legislation.
The absence of a statute allowed the vast majority of perpetrators to go unpunished in cases of nearly documented 6,500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950.
Details: Under the new law, a crime would be prosecuted as a lynching when death or serious bodily injury results from a conspiracy to commit a hate crime.
A convicted perpetrator would face up to 30 years in prison.
The bill was named in honor of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy whose brutal 1955 torture and murder in Mississippi helped spark the civil rights movement… (LINK TO FULL STORY)