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October 10, 2023

In today's BG Reads:

✅ Austin is one-step closer to a new city manager

✅ Special session on school vouchers begins with Texas Republicans in disarray

✅ Who runs the best U.S. schools? It may be the Defense of Department

Read on!

[BINGHAM GROUP]

🎙️ BG Podcast Ep. 221:

• On this episode the Bingham Group CEO A.J. Bingham welcomes returning guest, Ed Latson, CEO, Austin Regional Manufacturers Association (ARMA).

• He and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discuss the Austin City Council's recent approval of Ch. 380 agreement with NXP, and its importance to Austin and Central Texas.

• The BG Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

🔎 Jobs List

• Austin Convention Enterprises, Inc.: Project Administrator

• Austin Economic Development Corporation: General Counsel

• Cruise: Senior Government Affairs Manager, Southern California ($135,700/yr - $199,500/yr)

• Lime: Regional General Manager ($122,000/yr - $163,000/yr)

• Opportunity Austin: Vice President of Policy & Advocacy ($110,000/yr - $125,000/yr)

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Austin is seeking a new city manager. It just took a step forward in finding candidates (Austin American-Statesman)

The next steps in the hunt for Austin's new chief executive are underway.

The City Council committee tasked with initiating the process of hiring a new city manager has reached a decision on the outside firm they will be recommending to conduct the nationwide search, according to a post from Austin Mayor Kirk Watson on the City Council message board.

The committee — Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, José “Chito” Vela, Leslie Pool, Paige Ellis and Watson — will recommend Mosaic Public Partners as the search firm. Their recommendation requires council approval and is expected to be on the City Council agenda for the Oct. 19 meeting, according to Watson's post.

"The Committee ... interviewed four national firms (three in person and one virtually) and evaluated references before deciding to make this recommendation," Watson wrote. "Mosaic Public Partners is a national search firm with broad experience in recruiting public sector officials, including previously recruiting positions for the City of Austin."… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Austin releases Spanish-language emergency guide, with more languages on the way (KUT)

Spanish speakers in Austin will now have access to an emergency preparedness guide in their language. A guide that until this week was only available in English.

Last year, the city created and published its neighborhood preparedness guide. It’s a how-to manual that helps residents in different neighborhoods work together and prepare for all kinds of emergencies, such as a freeze or a wildfire.

On Thursday, the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management released the Spanish version of the document — expanding its language access resources… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

StoryBuilt's pipeline for sale (Austin Business Journal)

The $2 billion infill development pipeline of embattled real estate firm StoryBuilt is for sale.

The commercial and residential pipeline of PSW Real Estate LLC, StoryBuilt’s legal name, consists of 28 projects across Austin, Seattle, Denver and Dallas and is available for purchase in its entirety or separately through a receiver sale by A&G Real Estate Partners and Onyx Asset Advisors, according to an Oct. 9 announcement. The pipeline is to be sold by the end of the year, according to the asset sale website.

“StoryBuilt’s history, design skills and management talent are strong, as is its pipeline of well-conceived and located assets, but like many other builders in recent years, the company ran into capital constraints,” stated Mike Bergthold, managing director at the court-appointed receiver, Stapleton Group. “For real estate investors, this truly is a unique and rare opportunity to acquire the entire company, inclusive of assets, people and quality brand and IP or the outstanding assets individually.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

As Texans struggle with housing costs, cities look for new ways to spur more home construction (Texas Tribune)

From Austin to Fort Worth, local officials are eyeing proposals to blunt their city’s rampant unaffordability by loosening local regulations that housing advocates say get in the way of allowing more homes to be built. It’s a solution increasingly embraced by local and state policymakers across the country, and even the most recent three presidential administrations, as a key step, though not the only one, to solving the nation’s housing affordability crisis.

A crucial part of the equation: Texas cities are dominated by single-family neighborhoods. That’s a product of how cities developed over the course of the 20th century and a cultural attachment to having one home per large lot.

In several major Texas cities, much of the land set aside for residential construction can only be used for single-family homes.

Any push to allow denser housing in traditional single-family neighborhoods will undoubtedly encounter stiff and vocal opposition from homeowners and neighborhood groups, who often complain that such housing construction would disrupt their neighborhood’s character. In 2020, for instance, a group of Austin homeowners successfully killed a push by city officials to relax zoning restrictions. They now want to end a set of city housing reforms that encourage denser housing, including a successful affordable housing program.

There’s plenty of skepticism that allowing the market to add more homes could blunt rising housing costs and fears that it would fuel gentrification and displacement in low-income communities, though research shows such reforms may protect those communities. Critics also believe such attempts would do little more than boost developers’ profits… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Conservative PAC leader’s meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes leads to condemnations, escalates GOP infighting (Texas Tribune)

The revelation that an influential conservative PAC leader hosted a white supremacist at his office last week unleashed extraordinary criticism and infighting among Texas Republicans on Monday, calls by the House speaker and a majority of his caucus to return political donations, and a defiant demand from the lieutenant governor that the speaker resign.

The recriminations further exposed the intensifying civil war within the Texas GOP and almost entirely overshadowed the first day of a special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott to give parents vouchers to send their children to private school. By day’s end, the only thing Texas Republicans appeared to agree on was to condemn antisemitism as well as the militant group Hamas’ deadly assault on Israel on Saturday.

The day began with House Speaker Dade Phelan responding to The Texas Tribune’s reporting that Defend Texas Liberty PAC President Jonathan Stickland hosted antisemitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes at his office building for nearly seven hours on Friday. “This [is] not just a casual misstep,” Phelan said in a statement. “It’s indicative of the moral, political rot that has been festering in a certain segment of our party for far too long. Anti-Semitism, bigotry and Hitler apologists should find no sanctuary in the Republican Party. Period. We cannot – and must not – tolerate the tacit endorsement of such vile ideologies.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Special session on school vouchers begins with Republicans in disarray (Texas Tribune)

Passing school vouchers, the top legislative priority of Gov. Greg Abbott in the new special session, was always going to require a delicately assembled coalition of Republicans.

It would need to include compromise between the more conservative Senate and a faction of rural House members that have long joined with Democrats to block the idea.

But as the special session began Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan were at each other’s throats, hardly a signal of a productive lawmaking environment. And Phelan indicated his desire that any voucher program be paired with more public school funding, which could prove to be another complicating factor in the negotiations… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US/WORLD NEWS]

CNN Boss Mark Thompson to Staff: Network Is ‘Nowhere Near Ready for the Future’ (Wall Street Journal)

CNN Chief Executive Mark Thompson told staff that the network needs to step up its digital game, saying conventional TV “can no longer define us,” and said its journalists shouldn’t be distracted by debates about balance or false equivalency.

Speaking to employees in a video message on Monday, his first official day at CNN, Thompson said he would draw on his earlier experience as CEO of the 

New York Times to modernize the network. 

“For most people under retirement age, the first place they turn for news is their phones, not their TVs. And news players who can’t or won’t respond to that revolution risk losing their audience and their business,” Thompson said.

He said CNN needs to act swiftly, and that despite some progress, such as the recent launch of CNN Max—a collection of programming from the network on the Max streaming service—“this company is still nowhere near ready for the future.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Hamas attack forces Israeli reckoning over its technological prowess (Politico)

The deadly weekend attacks by Hamas have cast a nation into mourning, forced a political reckoning — and are prompting a shocked reconsideration of one of Israel’s greatest points of pride, its technical sophistication.

On Saturday, Israel’s vaunted $1 billion security barrier on the Gaza border failed, as Hamas fighters used simple bulldozers to plow through and armed paragliders to soar above it. Barrages of rockets penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. And Israel’s surveillance system — a dense network of drones, cameras and cyber snooping — was proven fatally insufficient, with Hamas able to both work around and overwhelm it.

“The most common question is, where were the Israeli surveillance drones? The answer is everyone who should have called those drones was already dead,” said Israeli tech journalist Assaf Gilead.

The attack also sent shockwaves through the defense establishment in Washington and Europe, not least because Israel has become a key supplier of security and defense technology across the West.

Within Israel, failure of the military’s security technology fed into a broader sense of abandonment among citizens and victims, who called into news programs and texted family for help while gunmen rampaged for hours, unimpeded by Israeli soldiers.

As of Monday, Israeli authorities said more than 900 people had been killed, including at least 11 U.S. citizens. At least 680 Palestinians were killed in retaliatory Israeli strikes in Gaza… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Who runs the best U.S. schools? It may be the Defense of Department. (New York Times)

With about 66,000 students — more than the public school enrollment in Boston or Seattle — the Pentagon’s schools for children of military members and civilian employees quietly achieve results most educators can only dream of.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam that is considered the gold standard for comparing states and large districts, the Defense Department’s schools outscored every jurisdiction in math and reading last year and managed to avoid widespread pandemic losses.

Their schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose eighth-grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students.

Eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school — suggesting lower family incomes, on average — performed as well in reading as students nationally whose parents were college graduates.

Defense Department schools are well-funded, socioeconomically and racially integrated, and have a centralized structure that is not subject to the whims of school boards or mayors.

There are about 50 U.S. schools for children who live on military bases and more than 100 schools internationally for students whose parents are stationed abroad, from Belgium to Bahrain… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

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