BG Reads | News You Need to Know (March 9, 2022)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
Bingham Group CEO A.J. has been appointed to the Strategic Housing Finance Corporation (SHFC) of Travis County by the Travis County Commissioner’s Court.
SHFC works with private developers and public entities to research and create opportunities to provide affordable housing. The primary business activity of SHFC is the issuance of revenue bonds for affordable multi-family housing projects that will be owned by SHFC or a controlled entity.
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Travis County blames new law for election crash — but other counties had no such problems (Austin American-Statesman)
The Travis County clerk’s office says the crash of its election results website on Tuesday's election night was due to an overtaxed web server, and it pointed the finger of blame at six new video feeds that are required as a measure of transparency under the state's new elections laws. However, county clerk's offices in Williamson and Hays counties — which faced the same new requirements and had the same amount of time to implement them — reported no such problems with their websites due to the cameras. There have been no similar reports from any other major Texas counties since the just-completed primary election. The Travis County clerk’s office website was down for about 40 minutes starting at 7 p.m., just as initial results in the Democrat and Republican primaries were expected, and caused angst among candidates and voters who had no idea how the various races were unfolding.
The clerk's office said the problems with the website had no impact on the counting of ballots for the primary races on Tuesday. Unable to revive the site until later in the night, the clerk's office posted the first batch of results on Travis County's main website. Those results captured all of the ballots submitted during the 11-day early voting period. Scott Flom, head of information technology for the clerk's office, said the problem was a combination of more people trying to use the site than the staff had anticipated, as well as the system underperforming compared with earlier tests. He said the usual backup measures to keep the server stabilized were not in place but will be added back into the system. “The wild card in this election was we had very little time to set up the camera infrastructure,” Flom said. “My team had to come up to speed on the technology and the technologies available. There are a lot of ways to do this. We had to find the right one. We felt we did. We know we did. And once that was done, then we had to implement it, set it all up.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Southeast Austin residents want city to move planned jet fuel tank farm (Austin American-Statesman)
More than 40 people packed the Travis County Precinct 4 courtroom Monday night to demand that the city of Austin and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport move the site of a new airport jet fuel storage facility away from nearby homes or businesses.
One of the attendees, 75-year-old Gilbert Rivera, said he and his family had lived in East Austin near Springdale Road and Airport Boulevard in the early 1990s, right across the street from a similar fuel tank farm.
Six oil companies stored enough gasoline at the tank farm — located in a predominantly Latino and Black neighborhood — to fuel all of Austin, he said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Grocery chain Kroger breaks into Austin with e-commerce service (Austin American-Statesman)
Although it doesn't have any stores in Austin, Kroger Co. — the country’s largest grocery retailer — is breaking into the Austin market with a new e-commerce delivery service that is expected to create more than 160 jobs.
The Cincinnati, Ohio-based chain said it will build a 70,000-square-foot facility in Northeast Austin that will start operations this year. The site is expected to employ up to 161 people, Kroger said.
The Austin facility will be powered by a fulfillment center in Dallas. The service is part of a partnership between Kroger and Ocada, a UK-based leader in technology for grocery e-commerce.
To use the delivery service, customers place an order on Kroger.com or the Kroger app for food and household products. Using bots, which are operated by software to perform automated, repetitive tasks, the products are retrieved from facilities and are then sorted for delivery. After being packed, groceries are delivered via refrigerated vans to customers… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Hotel partner, new look revealed for Second St. skyscraper (Austin Business Journal)
Intracorp Texas, a division of Vancouver-based Intracorp Homes, is vying to build the tallest residential tower and hotel in the city, and the developer on March 8 revealed new renderings and project details.
Conrad Austin and Conrad Residences Austin will loom 750 feet over East Second Street and Trinity Street, just north of the Austin Marriott Downtown and west of the Austin Convention Center. Conrad Hotels & Resorts is a luxury brand of Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (NYSE: HLT), the hotel partner for the project. There are Conrad properties under development in other major markets, including Nashville and Los Angeles.
The tower will include 136 condos, 330 hotel rooms and approximately 11,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space on the ground floor.
The condos will be a mix of one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom options. According to Brad Stein, president of Intracorp Texas, the developer has not yet set prices for the condos, as they are still determining the full construction cost.
Tulsa-based Flintco LLC, which worked on Intracorp’s 44 East tower, will again be the general contractor for this project… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Developer off to rocky start with unpermitted demolition of former Frisco Shop (Austin Monitor)
Developers of a new housing complex may find themselves in hot water after forgoing approval to demolish the last remaining fixture of a historic restaurant chain on Burnet Road.
The Frisco Shop was sold to developer Oden Hughes following its closure in 2018. On account of the building’s association with an 86-year-old family business, Oden Hughes initially followed protocol in seeking city approval to move forward with its plans. While staffers did not anticipate resisting the demolition, the Historic Landmark Commission was flummoxed to find the site already razed.
“Whoever took this down knew that they didn’t have a permit, which really is not acceptable,” Commissioner Carl Larosche said. “All they had to do was wait a week.”
The Frisco opened in 1953 as a spin-off of the Night Hawk restaurant chain founded by the legendary Harry Akin in 1932. Akin, who was legendary for his fair treatment and just compensation for his workers, was one of the city’s first business owners to hire Black employees years before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Confused bystanders wrote to city staff after receiving notification that the application for demolition was underway. “I have no issue with the repurposing of the land, and no intention of opposing anything, but I am concerned that this developer would demolish everything before the permit hearing,” neighbor Tyler Faust said. “If they’re already cutting corners, it makes me worry what they might do when they actively start building.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Harris County election chief resigns as political parties demand answers over fumbled vote count (Texas Tribune)
With counting holdups and missed ballots marring what amounted to a low-turnout election, Harris County's election administrator has announced she is resigning amid pressure from local leaders of both political parties to explain what went wrong in last week’s primary.
Houston-area voters saw relatively few issues on election day, but days later the state’s largest county faced a 10,000 vote-sized problem.
Over the weekend, Harris County election officials announced that thousands of mail-in ballots — 6,000 Democratic and 4,000 Republican — had been mistakenly left off the county’s vote tally. This came after unofficial results were significantly delayed in part because more than a thousand ballot sheets were damaged as voters tried out the county’s new voting machines… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
GLO discriminated against minorities when denying flood aid to Houston and Harris County, feds say (Houston Chronicle)
In a decision that could redirect millions of dollars in flood relief to Houston, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found the Texas General Land Office discriminated against minority residents and ran afoul of federal civil rights protections when it denied flood mitigation aid last May to the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Harvey. At issue is the process used by the state agency to dole out more than $2 billion in federal funds, awarded to Texas in early 2018, to pay for projects aimed at tempering the effect of future storms. Because there were not enough funds to cover every project sought in the 49 eligible Texas counties, the GLO held a competition and developed scoring criteria to find the best applicants. Though Houston and Harris County expected to receive roughly half the funds, matching their share of the damage, the land office — led by Land Commissioner George P. Bush — initially awarded nothing to the city and county. Bush, facing bipartisan criticism from Houston-area officials, later asked federal officials to send Harris County $750 million in flood mitigation aid.
The total still fell short of the funding sought by local officials, however, and it remains unclear when the money will arrive. Prompted by a complaint filed last year by two local advocacy groups, the Biden administration investigated the GLO’s distribution of the Harvey funds, focusing on the complaint’s allegation that Bush’s agency “discriminated on the basis of race and national origin through the use of scoring criteria that substantially disadvantaged Black and Hispanic residents.” In a 13-page finding, HUD said the exclusion of Houston and Harris County “caused there to be disproportionately less funding available to benefit minority residents than was available to benefit white residents.” The federal agency singled out a scoring metric that effectively penalized large jurisdictions, such as Houston, by measuring what percentage of an applicant’s residents would benefit from a project. “The City of Iola applied for a project benefitting 379 people. This project received 10 points out of 10, because Iola has only 379 residents,” the finding raised as one example. “The City of Houston applied for a project benefitting 8,845 people in the Kashmere Gardens neighborhood. This project received 0.37 out of 10 points, because Houston has approximately 2.3 million residents.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
San Antonio lawyer Thomas J. Henry can no longer advertise $1.25 billion verdict (San Antonio Express-News)
San Antonio personal injury lawyer Thomas J. Henry can no longer advertise a $1.25 billion “verdict/judgment” that he secured for an alleged sexual assault victim without disclosing that the client didn’t actually get anything. In response to a Henry billboard trumpeting the verdict, the Texas Supreme Court recently amended a rule on lawyers’ advertising. It now requires attorneys who obtained a verdict but never collected anything to disclose that fact. Last fall, Henry began advertising the $1.25 billion result for an alleged sexual assault victim on a billboard just north of downtown. The plaintiff subsequently told the San Antonio Express-News that he never got so much as a penny from the judgment, though that was omitted from the billboard.
The verdict was actually a 2018 default judgment, meaning the case wasn’t adjudicated on its merits because neither the defendant nor his lawyer appeared at trial. Henry and attorney Travis Venable, who both represented the plaintiff, didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday. Henry has replaced the advertisement on the billboard with another promoting a $50 million “recent result.” The client, who suffered a brain injury in a trucking accident, pocketed $27 million, according to the billboard. The Supreme Court issued a Jan. 31 order amending a rule dealing with “communications concerning a lawyer’s services” after receiving a recommendation from the State Bar of Texas’ Committee on Disciplinary Rules and Referenda. The committee took up the matter in early January after Vincent R. Johnson, a member and professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law, read about the billboard in an Express-News article in December… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
A list of companies still doing business in Russia circulated. McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Starbucks soon pulled out. (Washington Post)
Among executives, board members, analysts and others in the business world in recent days, a “who’s who” list has been floating around, showing which companies have pulled out of Russia amid its attack on Ukraine — and which ones have stayed put. The spreadsheet, compiled by Yale University professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his research team, has become a naughty-or-nice list of sorts, with CEOs trying their best to avoid being placed on the roster of “Companies That Remain in Russia With Significant Exposure.” Sonnenfeld, who founded the nonprofit Chief Executive Leadership Institute, said he has fielded calls from CEOs asking “why we didn’t have them on the right list, and what they needed to do to either clarify or actually take a more strong stance.” On top of skyrocketing inflation and a plummeting ruble, Russians have been left with a dwindling marketplace: Prada stores have shuttered, TikTok has suspended operations in their country, and car companies including Rolls-Royce, Toyota and Volkswagen have stopped shipping vehicles to Russia. Even WWE, the wrestling entertainment company, said it would halt operations there.
The gutting of the Russian economy has shattered the image that President Vladimir Putin had created, portraying himself as an all-powerful leader with things under control, Sonnenfeld said in a phone interview Monday with The Washington Post. And with Russian state media echoing Putin’s framing of the war as a “special military operation,” Sonnenfeld added, the corporate pullouts provide a tangible message that the attack “isn’t just some little military operation.” Even among those on the list of “Companies That Have Curtailed Russian Operations,” some are taking a stronger position against the invasion than others, Sonnenfeld said. According to the list, BASF SE, a German chemical company, said it would “suspend new Russian relationships,” while other companies including Apple and Chanel have closed stores or cut off supply chains. FedEx is halting all shipments to Russia, and major oil companies including ExxonMobil have said they will exit operations there, leaving billions of dollars on the table… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Angry Putin set to 'double down' in Ukraine, intel chiefs warn lawmakers (The Hill)
Intelligence experts Tuesday painted a picture of an increasingly determined Vladimir Putin set to “double down” on his invasion of Ukraine despite being ill-prepared for the consequences to Russia’s economy and with little prospect for long-term success.
“I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now. He's likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties," CIA Director William Burns told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee during the yearly worldwide threats hearing.
"But the challenge that he faces, and this is the biggest question that's hung over our analysis of his planning for months now … is he has no sustainable political end game in the face of what is going to continue to be fierce resistance from Ukrainians.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)