Mayor Adler's State of the City, the last of his first-term, hit on several familiar and pressing issues for Austinites. The speech was balanced, underscoring Austin's success across many categories, but offering a measure of prudence in not measuring progress by rankings. Issues such as affordability, economic disparity, mobility, and homelessness loom.

TONIGHT AT CITY HALL

Austin Mayor Steve Adler will deliver the 2018 State of the City Address at 6PM. Limited to two terms, Mayor Adler announced his bid for re-election last month. He is the first Austin mayor under the city’s new 10-1 council system (featuring 10 council members each elected by their district and an elected at-large mayor). Thus far he has drawn one challenger, former Austin Council Member Laura Morrison.

OVERVIEW: The Austin City Council at its February 15 meeting approved an ordinance requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to workers. Austin is now currently the only Texas city with such a requirement. The vote was 9-2 (Council Members Ellen Troxclair and Ora Houston dissenting). 

OVERVIEW: The Austin City Council convenes this Thursday, February 1, for its first regular meeting of 2018. The Council agenda features a resolution and ordinance (#58 and #59) relating to dockless bike share.

The City of Dallas is fed up with dockless bikeshare.  At least its current unregulated form. 

According to the Dallas Morning News, City Manager T.C. Broadnax notified LimeBike, Ofo, and Mobike, as well as Texas-based VBikes, that the firms had until February 9th to do the following:

• Clear bikes off all sidewalks narrower than 10 feet in width and out of the way of sidewalk-curb ramps;
• Remove bikes from turf, landscaping, or other unimproved surfaces; and
• Clear bikes left on trails to trail heads.

From the article:

For months the city has taken a hands-off approach to bike-share, in large part because Dallas was once desperate to get rentals on the road — preferably ones with docking stations, like you see in New York or Fort Worth. But that would have cost millions the city didn't have. So city officials gave VBikes and its well-funded competitors, most based out of China, a wide berth in the hopes that the market would sort itself out and there would be one or two companies left standing.