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- BG Reads 10.2.2024
BG Reads 10.2.2024
🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - October 2, 2024
Bingham Group Reads
Presented by:
www.binghamgp.com
October 2, 2024
Today's BG Reads include:
🟪 Austin first city in Texas to require composting from apartments, other multifamily units (CBS Austin)
🟪 As Austin police get closer to new contract, chief responds to oversight concerns (KVUE)
🟪 PepsiCo to buy Siete Foods (Austin Business Journal)
🟪 Unionized restaurant and retail workers at Austin airport win $25 minimum wage (Austin Business Journal)
Read On!
[BINGHAM GROUP]
⚽️ Last Thursday the 4ATX Foundation, Austin FC’s nonprofit arm, held it’s 4th Annual Night in Verde. This year's gala raised over $1,058,000 in support of our mission, closing the opportunity gap and creating Austin's next generation of leaders. That includes Austin ISD’s Bedichek Middle School, which I attended. It’s been a joy to serve as the 4ATX Board Chair this year!
🟪 Bingham Group represents and has represented a wide range of clients in the Austin Metro and Texas Capitol at the intersection of government and business.
🟪 Learn more about Bingham Group’s experience here, and review client testimonials here.
[CITY OF AUSTIN]
🟪 The Austin Council has seven (5) regular meetings left in 2024
Mayor - Tomorrow
Austin City Hall Council Chambers, 301 W. 2nd St. Austin 78701
District 6 - October 7th
Hope Presbyterian Church, 11512 Olson Drive, Austin 78750
📺 City Council Candidate Forum: District 10 - Video (9.30.2024)
📺 2024 UT LBJ School / Austin PBS Mayoral Forum (9.26.2024)
📺 City Council Candidate Forum: District 2 - Video (9.26.2024)
📺 City Council Candidate Forum: District 4 - Video (9.19.2024)
📺 City Council Candidate Forum: District 7 - Video (9.5.2024)
✅ All candidate forums will are scheduled from 6:30pm to 8pm.
✅ All forums will be streamed live and archived on ATXN.
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Austin first city in Texas to require composting from apartments, other multifamily units (CBS Austin)
Austin is now the first city in Texas to require apartments and other multi-family complexes to provide composting to its residents.
The move is part of an effort by the city to reach a zero-waste goal by 2040.
It may just start as trash, though the end product is anything but.
"We started in 2009 out of my front yard with a half-ton Nissan pickup truck. Just a vague idea, a lot of naive optimism," Break It Down owner Jeff Payne said.
"What are we what are we doing with that food waste? How much value are recreating with it?"
Break It Down provides recycling and composting services to close to 1000 customers, mainly businesses like restaurants, and turns it into compost or fertilizer instead… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
As Austin police get closer to new contract, chief responds to oversight concerns (KVUE)
After a year and a half of waiting and negotiations, Austin's police contract could finally come to a vote.
New Police Chief Lisa Davis is ready for it.
"At the end of the day, we're working toward the same goals, and so I think that is when you come to a contract and those resolutions can be made. That's when we can start recruiting and that's when we're going to start bringing that talent here to Austin," Davis said.
One of the sticking points during contract talks stemmed from the confidential "G file," which contains information on officers accused of misconduct.
"It's a weird position to be in and it's not a political one, but unfortunately you have to be there to support both sides, and I support both and an agreement coming," Davis said… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
PepsiCo to buy Siete Foods (Austin Business Journal)
PepsiCo Inc. has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Austin-based Siete Foods for $1.2 billion.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2025, although the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.
Siete Foods, legal name Garza Food Ventures LLC, was founded in 2014. The family-run company came to popularity as a maker of gluten-free tortillas, and it has built an empire on better-for-you food options — free of grain, gluten and dairy — and continues to grow its product line. Its offerings range from its signature tortillas to tortilla chips, potato chips, cookies, seasonings and more.
Siete products sit on 40,000 retail shelves in North America, including major stores such as Costco, H-E-B, Whole Foods and others… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin reveals most detailed plans yet for parks over I-35 (KUT)
The City of Austin has unveiled its final vision of what Interstate 35 could look like after parks are installed on top of the highway — an ambitious and expensive project made possible by the Texas Department of Transportation's (TxDOT) once-in-a-generation expansion of the biggest road in Central Texas.
TxDOT will lower the main lanes of I-35 up to 40 feet beneath ground level from Holly Street to Airport Boulevard. The city wants to install almost 30 acres of deck parks over those sunken lanes, much like Klyde Warren Park in Dallas — but more than five times larger. That doesn't even include 17 acres of deck parks UT Austin plans to build over the highway.
"We're really excited about the vision plan, because it really is going to set the tone for how we move forward," said Brianna Frey, an urban planner overseeing the city's deck park project dubbed Our Future 35.
To clarify some terminology, the city refers to these highway lids as "caps and stitches." Caps are more than 300 feet wide, and require advanced ventilation and fire suppression technology for the lanes below. Stitches are essentially caps that are less than 300 feet wide and don't require as much equipment… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Unionized restaurant and retail workers at Austin airport win $25 minimum wage (Austin Business Journal)
Some food service and retail workers at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport are getting a bump in minimum wage a few weeks after authorizing a potential strike.
Unite Here Local 23, a union representing the workers, announced Sept. 30 that it successfully negotiated the increase — from $20.80 an hour to $25 an hour — for ABIA workers employed by Delaware North Co., one of the airport's independent concessionaires that operates restaurants and other businesses at the facility.
The increase in the minimum wage was a top priority in the union’s ongoing negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement with Delaware North.
“This is a major victory for our union, for our members, and for the city of Austin,” said Willy Gonzalez, secretary-treasurer for Unite Here Local 23, in a statement. “Local 23 members are often overlooked as cooks, servers, bartenders and retail workers, but without them, the airport and Delaware North would not be as successful as they are.”
For a full-time employee, a wage of $25 an hour translates to $52,000 a year, compared with about $43,000 a year at $20.80 an hour.
Under the agreement, 85% of Delaware North’s ABIA employees will have a $25 minimum wage. The deal also creates a path for the other 15% to get up to that minimum within the next year, according to the announcement… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
New book details how Austin, Texas, lost its ‘magic’ — and the larger threat its trajectory may represent (The Hill)
Austin’s “magic” has slipped away thanks to poorly planned development run amok, a new book argues.
In “Lost in Austin,” out Tuesday, journalist Alex Hannaford details how spiking rents have sent development sprawling into the Texas city’s ecologically sensitive hinterlands — increasing traffic, sucking up the source of its water and potentially spelling a warning for its doom.
When Hannaford moved to Austin in 2003, it was still “an affordable city that artists and musicians and people of all backgrounds and economic statuses could live in: line cook, cleaning lady, artist, full-time musicians,” he told The Hill.
From about 2015, however, prices began to spike, driven by the city’s embrace of a tech industry diaspora whose expansion in the area was driven in part by rising costs in Northern California — a trend the COVID-19 pandemic only further fueled.
During the same period, the city’s supposed position as a music mecca has slowly eroded, Hannaford writes… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
A battered child care industry’s latest challenge? Competing for 4-year-olds. (Texas Tribune)
Texas schools started offering half day of state-supported pre-K in 1984 to help ready low-income children for school. In 2019, Texas made it mandatory for public schools to offer a full day of pre-kindergarten, but the last-minute move caught child care advocates by surprise, Kaminski recalls, and providers like him immediately saw the threat to their own industry.
Less than a year after full-day pre-K passed, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, closing child care centers and homes, along with schools. So the competition between the two was slow to emerge.
By 2021, child care operators struggled to reopen, some closed entirely and those that remained were able to do so with emergency federal funding — $126,869 on average for centers and $17,678 for homes — which helped providers pay their own business mortgages or rent and staff salaries.
Overall, about one-third of Texas child care centers and homes closed at some point during the pandemic, according to an 11-state study by the Bipartisan Policy Center... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[US and World News]
The US could see shortages and higher retail prices if a dockworkers strike drags on (Associated Press)
U.S. ports from Maine to Texas shut down Tuesday when the union representing about 45,000 dockworkers went on strike for the first time since 1977.
Workers began walking picket lines early Tuesday, picketing near ports all along the East Coast. Workers outside the Port of Philadelphia walked in a circle and chanted, “No work without a fair contract.”
A lengthy shutdown could raise prices on goods around the country and potentially cause shortages and price increases at big and small retailers alike as the holiday shopping season — along with a tight presidential election — approaches.
The International Longshoremen’s Association is demanding significantly higher wages and a total ban on the automation of cranes, gates and container-moving trucks that are used in the loading or unloading of freight at 36 U.S. ports. Those ports handle roughly half of the nations’ cargo from ships… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
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We are proud to represent and have represented a wide range of clients in the Austin Metro and Texas Capitol at the intersection of government and business.
Learn more about Bingham Group’s experience here, and review client testimonials here.
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