BG Reads | News You Need to Know (September 21, 2022)
[HEARINGS AND MEETINGS]
Today (9.21)
ON THE HORIZON
[AUSTIN METRO]
Austin ISD is considering turning two properties into teacher and staff housing (KUT)
Austin ISD is considering turning two of its properties into housing that teachers and other staff could afford as rising housing costs make it harder to retain and recruit employees.
District officials have been holding public meetings on proposals for the Anita Ferrales Coy Facility in East Austin, the former Rosedale School in Central Austin, and Pease Elementary in downtown Austin, which closed in 2020.
Jeremy Striffler, Austin ISD’s director of real estate, said it’s important to the district to invest in the three sites by finding new ways of using them.
“Whether or not a campus is actively being used, it has value to us as an asset in terms of how we can serve the community,” he said. “And it’s something we’ve been really challenging ourselves to think about in the past few years.”
Austin ISD wants to convert the Anita Ferrales Coy Facility and Rosedale School into housing staff can afford. The district has been zeroing in on affordable housing as one way to retain employees because its salaries are not keeping up with the rising cost of living.
“We think everyday about — how do our actions impact our students?" Striffler said. "So, being able to attract and retain quality teachers — that impacts our students."
Over the summer, AISD advocated for $50 million to be included for teacher housing in the 2022 bond package, but some were concerned because the plan included few concrete details. Striffler said the district didn't want housing to distract from other parts of the bond package, so it ultimately withdrew its recommendation… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Candidates for District 1 City Council seat chat with the ‘Monitor’ (Austin Monitor)
Four years ago, Natasha Harper-Madison won a runoff election to become the second-ever representative of City Council District 1. That year, the entrepreneur and mother of four bucked conventional wisdom by winning at the expense of better financed candidates.This cycle, the dynamic is completely different. Incumbent Harper-Madison has raised $113,973, while only one of her three challengers has surpassed $1,000. Each challenger says they would be the true “community quarterback” for District 1 that Harper-Madison promised to be.
The Austin Monitor sat down with Harper-Madison and the three challengers to evaluate the direction of the current leadership and discuss how they would attack the biggest issues facing District 1 and the rest of the city… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Clock is ticking on Texas' Chapter 313 incentives — and major projects may lose out (Austin Business Journal)
A flood of applications for a sunsetting and controversial tax abatement program has Texas officials wading through requests for what are known as Chapter 313 incentives — and unlikely to review all of them before a looming deadline.
Hundreds of applications are still being reviewed by the Texas comptroller's office for Chapter 313, which has been used to lure manufacturing and energy projects to the state in the past two decades.
That means companies such as NXP Semiconductors NV and Tesla Inc. could run out of time on their applications when the program expires at the end of this year. At stake are tens of billions of dollars in potential capital expenditures being floated by scores of businesses.
"We will not be able to review all applications by the end of the year," Korry Castillo, associate deputy comptroller for operations and support, said at a Sept. 8 interim hearing of the Texas House of Representatives' Ways & Means Committee in Austin. "... We are working our best to make sure we get to all of them. Some of the projects are more complex, very large. It is going to depend on the quality of the application, when it came in, on how quickly we can get through it."
The Chapter 313 program, authorized in 2001, allows Texas school districts to cap the taxable value of a property for some new projects, saving companies tens of millions of dollars in taxes, or more. It is set to expire at the end of December, after a bipartisan coalition in 2021 stopped efforts to reauthorize the program… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin Council districts not meeting 10-year goal on affordable housing (KVUE)
New data shows Austin is off track on its goal of creating affordable housing.
The City of Austin and nonprofit HousingWorks revealed their Strategic Housing Blueprint Scorecard for 2021. It shows where we're at on building 135,000 affordable units by 2028 – a plan adopted by the council five years ago.
According to the latest progress report, the City is not meeting the 10-year goal toward building affordable homes in each council district. Only districts 4 and 9 are making progress, but are on pace to meet more than 60% of that 10-year goal.
Officials say delays in hitting some of these goals are because of the time and resources necessary to launch the projects.
“Realistically, the slower pace of constructing new affordable units is understandable when you consider the time and resources required to build both rental and home ownership units,” said Housing and Planning Department Executive Director Rosie Truelove. “We are currently looking at more than 2,000 rental and home ownership units in the construction pipeline within the next two years from funds made possible in large part by the voter-approved $250 million affordable housing bond in 2018.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Here’s what a San Antonio and Austin metroplex should be called, according to Reddit (San Antonio Express-News)
On the heels of Austin Mayor Steve Adler saying that he wants Austin and San Antonio to become “the next great U.S. metroplex,” a viral post on Reddit is speculating what the sprawling metropolitan area could be called.
Adler’s comments came during his last State of the City address on Aug. 25. The mayor touched on the mounting feeling that the corridor between Austin and San Antonio is evolving into a massive region similar to Dallas-Fort Worth… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
New York Times names Austin restaurant one of 50 best in country (Austin American-Statesman)
It's been a heck of a week or so for Canje (and for major publications dropping national dining lists). A week after being named one of the 10 best new restaurants in the country by Bon Appetit, the Caribbean restaurant that opened in East Austin in fall 2021 was named one of the 50 best restaurants in the country by The New York Times.
This is the second consecutive year the Times has made a national list; last year's included Birdie's (also in East Austin). The Times list includes some restaurants that have opened recently and others that have been around for decades. The publication describes its list as "50 places in America we're excited about right now."
So, what got them excited about the restaurant from chef Tavel Bristol-Joseph and his Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group partners? "The food is a tangy, spicy, bright, coconutty dreamscape," Priya Krishna writes.
Bristol-Joseph, whose life and career we chronicled in a profile earlier this year, a story that ran the same week as our review of Canje, was named a Food & Wine best new chef in 2020 for his work at Emmer & Rye and Hestia… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS]
El Paso scrambles to move migrants off the streets and gives them free bus rides as shelters reach capacity (Texas Tribune)
EL PASO — Soon after a Border Patrol van dropped off Albeleis Arteaga, his wife and 4-month-old baby downtown on a recent Monday evening, it began to rain. Arteaga and his family didn’t know where to go, so they joined dozens of other migrants, most of them fellow Venezuelans, who have been sleeping outdoors next to a charter bus station.
The couple had spent nearly two months traveling with their baby from Chile to the Texas-Mexico border, passing through the treacherous Darién Gap in South America. Now they were using borrowed bed sheets to cover themselves from the rain as they tried to sleep. But the drenched sheets made it hard to rest, Arteaga said.“If I had any money right now, I wouldn’t be out here putting my family through this,” said Arteaga, 29, wearing sweatpants and a black T-shirt as he sat on a sidewalk, leaning against an abandoned brick building. “My head throbs not knowing what to do next or how to get out of here.”
Less than two weeks before the end of the federal fiscal year, encounters between migrants and Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico border have already surpassed 2 million — a new record. According to federal government statistics, immigration agents encountered nearly 154,000 Venezuelans along the U.S.-Mexico border in the first 11 months of this fiscal year — a 216% increase from the entire previous fiscal year.
In recent weeks, Venezuelans have arrived in increasing numbers to the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region. Shelters are so full in El Paso that Border Patrol officials have released migrants on the street. Migrants who are apprehended or surrender at the border are processed and held while agents determine whether they can be sent to Mexico under the emergency health order known as Title 42.
But Venezuelans can’t be sent across the border because they’re on the list of nationalities Mexico won’t accept. And they can’t be deported back to their country because the U.S. severed diplomatic ties with Venezuela in 2019. Instead, they are released to local shelters… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Criminal investigation is opened after migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard (New York Times)
A county sheriff in Texas announced on Monday that he had opened a criminal investigation into flights that took 48 migrants from a shelter in San Antonio to the island resort of Martha’s Vineyard last week.
Sheriff Javier Salazar of Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, said that he had enlisted agents from his office’s organized crime task force and that it was too early to determine which laws might have been broken. But he said it was clear that many of the migrants had been misled and lured away from Texas to score political points.
The migrants, caught in a mounting political fight between Republican governors of border states and Democratic officials, were flown to Massachusetts by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida last week. A day later, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATION]
The NTSB wants all new vehicles to check drivers for alcohol use (NPR)
The National Transportation Safety Board is recommending that all new vehicles in the U.S. be required to have blood alcohol monitoring systems that can stop an intoxicated person from driving.
The recommendation, if enacted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, could reduce the number of alcohol-related crashes, one of the biggest causes of highway deaths in the U.S.
The new push to make roads safer was included in a report released Tuesday about a horrific crash last year in which a drunk driver collided head-on with another vehicle near Fresno, California, killing both adult drivers and seven children.
NHTSA said this week that roadway deaths in the U.S. are at crisis levels. Nearly 43,000 people were killed last year, the greatest number in 16 years, as Americans returned to roads after pandemic stay-at-home orders.
Early estimates show fatalities rising again through the first half of this year, but they declined from April through June, which authorities are hoping is a trend.
The NTSB, which has no regulatory authority and can only ask other agencies to act, said the recommendation is designed to put pressure on NHTSA to move. It could be effective as early as three years from now… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[BG PODCAST]
Episode 165: Discussing water supply and conservation with Taylor O'Neil, CEO, Richard's Rainwater
Today's episode (165) features Taylor O'Neil, CEO of Richard's Rainwater.
Headquartered in Austin, Richard's Rainwater is the U.S. leader in capturing and bottling pure rainwater, and is the nation’s first FDA approved cloud-to-bottle company.
He and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discuss Richard's history, the rain harvesting process, water supply and conservation, and regulatory hurdles in the industry.
Taylor is also a fellow Wake Forest University alum (Go Deacs!).
-> EPISODE LINK <-
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