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BG Reads 1.8.2024

BG Reads 1.8.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - January 8, 2024

January 08, 2024

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January 8, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

✅ Application process opens for Austin’s next city manager

✅ How a tiny home village helped ease homelessness in Austin

✅ Appeals court rejects AG Paxton’s bid to avoid testifying in whistleblower case

✅ Offices around America hit a new vacancy record

✅ BG Podcast Weekly Recap (Week of 1.1.2024) - Listen Here

Read on!

[CITY HALL WATCH]

🔎 City of Austin Public Meetings (Week of 1.8.2024)

(Hearings with agenda links)

🔎 City Manager Search

The application process for Austin’s next city manager officially opens today.

Click Here to review the posting

(As of 6:30AM the posting is shown but not live on Mosaic Public Partners’s site)

The application process will close on February 12th.

🔎 2024 Austin Council Meeting Schedule

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Economic forecasters see local climate as ‘strong, but uncertain’ in 2024 (Austin Monitor)

After years of financial shocks and ongoing government spending to offset the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, financial analysts expect 2024 to be less volatile but still somewhat uncertain for the nation and state. The good news for the Austin area is strong growth trends and the state’s unexpected budget surpluses in recent years will provide a cushion for local municipal budgets, even if a small recession takes place late in the year.

Those were some of the forecasts offered last month at the Austin Chamber of Commerce’s economic outlook event, which put banking and municipal finance leaders in front of the area’s biggest business leaders… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

How a tiny home village helped ease homelessness in Austin (Texas Tribune)

In the next few years, Community First is poised to grow to nearly 2,000 homes across three locations, which would make it by far the nation’s largest project of this kind, big enough to permanently house about half of Austin’s chronically homeless population.

Tiny-home villages for people who have been homeless have existed on a small scale for several decades, but have recently become a popular approach to addressing surging homelessness. Since 2019, the number of these villages across the country has nearly quadrupled, to 124 from 34, with dozens more coming, according to a census by Yetimoni Kpeebi, a researcher at Missouri State University… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

SH 130 drives development in Austin metro (Community Impact)

Industrial, commercial and mixed-use developments along the SH 130 toll road are transforming cities such as Pflugerville, Hutto and Round Rock into thriving communities where residents can live and work without having to commute to Austin.In recent years, companies such as Tesla and Samsung Austin Semiconductor have announced or opened operations in Central Texas. While industrial manufacturing has taken off, other industries—from life sciences to information technology—have also moved in.Much of the growth, industry experts say, is due to access provided by SH 130… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

City seeing mixed results halfway through Strategic Housing Blueprint (Austin Monitor)

The city is seeing mixed results halfway through the Austin Strategic Housing Blueprint adopted by City Council in 2017. After five years, the city is on track to meet goals aimed at preserving affordable housing and building new housing in some areas of town. However, the city continues to be far behind on its district-based goals related to the production of new affordable housing and the creation of permanent supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness.

Council recently received its 2022 scorecard from the nonprofit HousingWorks, which evaluates the city’s progress on these goals annually. Council adopted the 2017 plan with the hope of creating 135,000 new housing units over 10 years, including 60,000 affordable housing units evenly dispersed throughout the city’s 10 Council districts. But as recently as this summer, HousingWorks found in a district-by-district analysis that most of the new units created are within the city’s Eastern Crescent… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

(Click above for meeting times and agendas of this week’s Austin public meetings)

[TEXAS NEWS]

How Texans helped plot, foment and carry out the Jan. 6 insurrection (Texas Tribune)

The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection would not have been possible without the help of a number of key Texans. That much is clear on the two-year anniversary of the attack and in the wake of a massive congressional report that exhaustively details how former President Donald Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, despite knowing there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

Released late last month, the report and accompanying interview transcripts — which together span more than 10,000 pages — read like a who’s who of Texas conspiracy theorists, conservative activists and extremists. From those who planted the seeds of Trump’s strategy to try to challenge the election to others who sowed doubt and anger by spreading baseless theories on election fraud, Texans played major roles in fomenting, planning and, eventually, carrying out the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Most states are rolling out a new summer food assistance program for kids. Texas isn’t one of them (Texas Public Radio)

Texas officials said the timing of the rollout of the USDA program made it difficult to implement this summer. Lena Wilson is the assistant commissioner for food and nutrition at the Texas Department of Agriculture.

“Based on the time that this program was released, it was already after our [regular] legislative session had concluded in the state,” she said.

That presented a challenge because the USDA requires states that are participating in Summer EBT to cover 50% of the administrative costs for operating the program and agencies had not requested that funding, Wilson said. However, the governor and the Legislative Budget Board do have the ability to transfer funds between programs within an agency or between different agencies.

Ultimately, said Wilson, the three Texas agencies that would have a role in implementing the program determined it would not be possible to participate in 2024.

The Texas Department of Agriculture, for its part, would be responsible for working with the Texas Education Agency to identify students who may be eligible for the program. The majority of the work to run the program would fall on the Texas Health and Human Services Commission… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Appeals court rejects AG Ken Paxton’s bid to avoid testifying in whistleblower case (Dallas Morning News)

A state appeals court has denied Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to avoid testifying in a lawsuit by four top officials who were fired from the attorney general’s office in 2020 after reporting him to the FBI. The late-Friday ruling from the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin was a setback for Paxton, who has fought efforts to compel his testimony about allegations of bribery and official misconduct on behalf of Nate Paul, an Austin real estate investor now under federal indictment. The ruling likely sets up a legal showdown at the Texas Supreme Court. The state’s highest civil court could be his last chance to avoid answering questions under oath about why he marshaled an extraordinary amount of his agency’s resources to help Paul, a friend and campaign donor.

In a one-sentence ruling, a three-justice panel in the Austin appeals court — all Democrats — provided no explanation for the ruling, which came little more than two weeks after a Travis County district court judge ordered Paxton and several of his top deputies to testify in the case. “This is another failure by Ken Paxton in his quest to hide from accountability for his corrupt conduct,” whistleblower attorney Tom Nesbitt said. Paxton’s campaign and the attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The four whistleblowers in the case are James “Blake” Brickman, Paxton’s former policy director; David Maxwell, former head of law enforcement; Mark Penley, former head of criminal justice; and Ryan Vassar, former deputy attorney general for legal counsel. Their testimony and accounts from other former top executives at the attorney general’s office formed the foundation of numerous articles of impeachment approved overwhelmingly by the Texas House last year. All four also testified in Paxton’s impeachment trial in September… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US/WORLD NEWS]

Offices around America hit a new vacancy record (The Wall Street Journal)

America’s offices are emptier than at any point in at least four decades, reflecting years of overbuilding and shifting work habits that were accelerated by the pandemic.

A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in 1986 and 1991 and the highest number since at least 1979, which is as far back as Moody’s data goes.

The new record shows how remote work has upended the office market. But that is only part of the story. Much of the market’s current malaise traces its roots to the office-market downturn of the ’80s and ’90s… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

The Lloyd Austin fallout is growing: ‘Someone’s head has to roll’ (Politico)

At a White House meeting last week, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, noticed that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was absent. A top Pentagon official, Sasha Baker, was there in his place.

There was nothing obviously unsettling about this. Austin was scheduled to work from home and lower-level aides often sit in for their boss.

But what neither Sullivan nor Baker knew at that moment was that Austin was already hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, with complications from an undisclosed surgical procedure.

Days later, Austin’s secret hospitalization has spiraled into a drama engulfing the upper echelons of the Biden administration. Senior White House officials are struggling to answer questions about who knew what, and when, about the former general’s medical emergency. Criticism is pouring in from Congress and the media.

And since the Pentagon went public with the situation Friday night, new reports are coming in, including POLITICO’s disclosure on Saturday evening that the Pentagon had not informed President Joe Biden or the National Security Council for days that Austin was indisposed… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

First US lunar lander in more than 50 years rockets toward moon with commercial deliveries (Associated Press)

The first U.S. lunar lander in more than 50 years rocketed toward the moon Monday, launching private companies on a space race to make deliveries for NASA and other customers.

Astrobotic Technology’s lander caught a ride on a brand new rocket, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan. The Vulcan streaked through the Florida predawn sky, putting the spacecraft on a roundabout route to the moon that should culminate with an attempted landing on Feb. 23.

The Pittsburgh company aims to be the first private business to successfully land on the moon, something only four countries have accomplished. But a Houston company also has a lander ready to fly, and could beat it to the lunar surface, taking a more direct path… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[2024 Austin City Council Race Watch]

Next fall will see elections for the following Council positions, District 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, and Mayor. Candidates can’t file for a place on the ballot until July 22, 2024.

Declared candidates so far are:

District 2