BG Reads | News You Need to Know (May 6, 2022)
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[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Austin becomes the first Texas city to experiment with “guaranteed income” (Texas Tribune)
Austin will be the first major Texas city to experiment with giving cash to low-income families to keep them housed as the cost of living skyrockets in the capital city.
Under a yearlong, $1 million pilot program that cleared a key Austin City Council vote Thursday, the city will send monthly checks of $1,000 to 85 needy households at risk of losing their homes — an attempt to insulate low-income residents from Austin’s increasingly expensive housing market and prevent more people from becoming homeless.
“We can find people moments before they end up on our streets that prevent them, divert them from being there,” Mayor Steve Adler said at a press conference Thursday morning. “That would be not only wonderful for them, it would be wise and smart for the taxpayers in the city of Austin because it will be a lot less expensive to divert someone from homelessness than to help them find a home once they’re on our streets.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin Habitat for Humanity to partner with Taylor Morrison to provide affordable housing for Austin ISD employees (Community Impact)
Austin Habitat for Humanity will partner with national homebuilding company Taylor Morrison to provide affordable homes for Austin ISD employees, according to a May 5 press release.
The partnership will offer 30 affordable homes in two Taylor Morrison housing developments— Loyola, located at US 183 and Loyola Lane, Austin, and Park at 51 East, located off US 183 and East 51st Street, Austin.The median home price in Austin is over $624,000, according to the press release. Austin Habitat for Humanity will recruit AISD teachers, staff and families with children attending district schools to purchase the affordable housing units. The development is located on land purchased from AISD and was intended to provide AISD employees with affordable housing in the district… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Harry Styles performing 5 nights at Austin’s Moody Center (KXAN)
Central Texas will not be the same as it was now that Harry Styles announced a five-night residency at Austin’s newest concert venue.
The singer shared on social media the five cities where he’ll take “Love on Tour 2022” later this year, and that includes five nights of shows at Austin’s Moody Center. The dates for the Austin concerts are between Sept. 25 through Oct. 2… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Boring Company gets go-ahead to begin engineering work for Kyle pedestrian tunnel (Austin Business Journal)
For the first time, Elon Musk's tunneling startup, The Boring Company, has gotten the go-ahead to start working on a public-facing project in the Austin area.
The company — which quietly moved its headquarters to Pflugerville in the past couple of years, and recently announced $675 million in funding — on May 3 was approved by Kyle City Council for a $50,000 professional services agreement to begin engineering work for a potential pedestrian tunnel.
While it marks a significant milestone for the company, many approvals remain before Boring Co. can begin work on the tunnel, which would connect the Plum Creek subdivision to the $90 million, 39-acre second phase of the Kyle Crossing mixed-use development that is expected to bring destination dining and retail to the suburb south of Austin… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Big-money Texas school board races the ‘new norm’ as conservative spending ramps up. (Dallas Morning News)
New political action committees targeting North Texas school board seats are spending big money on conservative rallying cries ahead of Saturday’s elections. Some Richardson voters, for example, received mailers decorated with baby blocks with the letters CRT. “RISD schools can’t teach the basics if they’re too busy teaching ‘critical race theory’ nonsense,” the flyers read. It’s yet another sign of how local school board races are now the frontlines of Republican culture war issues, such as those on race, gender, library books and parental choice. At least 10 conservative PACs are trumpeting “taking back” school boards as they funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence local races. Some are tapping the same consulting groups, including GOP heavy-hitter Axiom Strategies, which worked with Sen. Ted Cruz and helped on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s strategy in Virginia. Last month, Axiom received more than $100,000 from at least four local conservative PACs and a handful of the candidates they endorsed for school boards in Richardson, Keller, Highland Park and Southlake. Those funds largely went toward mailers, according to April 29 campaign finance filings.
Axiom vice president Nick Maddux said in a statement that his firm works to win tough races across the nation. “High-intensity school board campaigns have become the new norm,” he said. Patriot Mobile Action, tied to a Texas-based cellphone company, spent more than $400,000 supporting conservative candidates in four North Texas school board races, NBC News reported. The PAC endorsed 11 candidates in Keller, Mansfield, Carroll and Grapevine Colleyville, according to its website. It still has over $100,000 cash on hand, finance records show. Meanwhile, several PACs are collectively spending tens of thousands with a group called Edgerton Strategies, a group with little online presence. It is registered to a lawyer in Wyoming but run by Erik Leist, a Keller father who does marketing work. He said he got involved with the different groups based on word-of-mouth. Leist previously did communications work with a KISD parent who challenged a library book and disputed the district’s process for reviewing it… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Are pipeline companies too powerful? Texas' unusual gas market faces fight over winter storm costs (Houston Chronicle)
On a February morning in 2021, a trader at the San Antonio utility CPS Energy messaged his counterpart at the pipeline company Energy Transfer to get a price for natural gas to run CPS power plants over the coming weekend. On a typical day, CPS might have expected to pay $2 or $3 per million British thermal units. But 90 minutes later, the Energy Transfer trader wrote back, “Ok, are you sitting down?” before quoting $150 per mmbtu — five times Texas’s previous record for gas, according to a court document filed by CPS in September. Nine minutes later, before the CPS trader had even responded, Energy Transfer — Texas’s largest gas supplier — raised the price to $225. Three days later, with a frigid winter storm sweeping across Texas and leaving millions of Texans without electricity, Energy Transfer raised the price to $500 per mmbtu.
The massive increase in natural gas prices during last winter’s blackout has set off a wave of litigation in state and federal courts and prompted an investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, casting a spotlight on the workings of Texas’s complex, opaque and lightly regulated natural gas market. The Texas market, unlike any other in the United States, provides opportunities for pipeline companies such as Energy Transfer to exercise vast market — sometimes monopoly — power to demand whatever prices they want in times of gas shortages, resulting in soaring costs for customers and profits for the companies, according to experts and legal filings. In the 15 months since last February's winter storm, power companies such as CPS, Vistra Energy of Dallas and Brazos Electric Cooperative of Waco have accused pipeline firms of price gouging and other practices that contributed to billions of dollars in losses for Texas’s power sector, forcing some electricity providers into bankruptcy and others to raise rates on customers for years to come. The skyrocketing prices also left Texas natural gas customers with a $3.6 billion bill that will take a decade to pay off. Coincidentally, Energy Transfer and the Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan earned combined profits of $3.4 billion during the storm… (LINK TO FULL STORY)