BG Reads 11.12.2024

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Bingham Group Reads

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November 12, 2024  

➡️ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Mayor Watson concerned about possible AI influence on Austin City Council meetings (KVUE)

🟪 When will the Austin mayoral race be called? (KXAN)

🟪 $1M for lobbyists, $17M for lawyers: Who profited as a Texas agency used an affordable housing loophole (Houston Chronicle)

🟪 Chairman of the Texas Democrats resigns after election losses, controversial comments (Texas Public Radio)

🟪 Texas shines bright earning 15 Stars in inaugural MICHELIN Guide selection (MICHELIN)

🟪 Round 2 in the Trump-vs-Mexico matchup looks ominous for Mexico (Associated Press)

Read On!

🟪 LINK TO THIS WEEK’S CITY OF AUSTIN HEARINGS + AGENDA

[CITY OF AUSTIN/TRAVIS COUNTY]

🟪 [NEW] Austin City Council Regular Meeting Agenda, 11.21.2024

🟪 MEMO: City of Austin Executive Leadership Team and Organizational Announced (Effective November 4, 2024)

In an October 30 memo, City Manager T.C. Broadnax announced several key additions to the city leadership team, effective November 4.

You can view the memo here: CITY OF AUSTIN MEMO: Executive Leadership Team and Organizational Announcements. An org chart is included on page 3.

We particularly wanted to flag the creation of a Grants Division within the Intergovernmental Relations Office to focus on creating a centralized grant funding strategy and governance for the City that advances City Council’s strategic priorities, leverages local resources, and targets investments for Austin. 

The memo notes “the City lacks a centralized grants function causing us to potentially leave federal and state funding on the table. Staff from across the organization are currently being identified for potential reassignment to the Grants Division.”

🟪 The Austin Council has three (2) regular meetings left in 2024:

• November 21

• December 12

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

➡️ Mayor Watson concerned about possible AI influence on Austin City Council meetings (KVUE)

Some city of Austin leaders are raising concerns about the potential influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on future city council meetings.

It seems to stem from a call council members took during public comment last Thursday.

It's unclear if the call itself was AI-generated, but it featured a voice who called themselves a "Zionist" and said that pro-Israel Austinites are organizing and plan to use AI software to sign people up for public comment at future council meetings to "take all the spots going forward."

The call claimed they are fighting all the public comments and protests over the past year from pro-Palestine and antiwar groups who want Austin leaders to pass a resolution that condemns the fight in Gaza and join calls for a cease-fire.

As the conflict between Hamas and Israel has ramped up since October 2023, there has been nothing on the Austin City Council's agendas to pass any kind of a similar resolution.

But that call from Thursday's meeting sparked concern from Mayor Kirk Watson.

He posted on the city council's message board over the weekend, saying he and the city clerk met after Thursday's meeting to talk about how to prevent AI-generated calls in the future.

Watson wrote, "Our priority is protecting the ability of our public to communicate with us and to prevent misuse and abuse of the system."… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

When will the Austin mayoral race be called? (KXAN)

Even with unofficial results fully tabulated in the Austin mayoral race, KXAN is still unable to make a projection nearly one week later.

That’s because there are still ballots outstanding that could push Incumbent Mayor Kirk Watson — who currently has 50.01% of the vote, into a runoff with second-place Carmen Llanes Pulido. Those outstanding ballots include some late mail-in ballots, provisional ballots and overseas and military mail-in ballots. Watson needs more than 50% of the vote to win outright.

At the very latest, the Texas Secretary of State election law calendar shows those results must be posted no later than Nov. 19. However, KXAN reached out to the Travis County and Williamson County clerk’s offices to figure out when they intend to have their canvass and finalize results. Hays County also has some Austin voters that may play a role, but those numbers are expected to be much lower… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Former Austin city manager paid two consultants $554K in 2023, violating city ethics rules (KUT)

Former interim City Manager Jesús Garza violated Austin's ethics rules when he hired two former City Hall staffers to serve as consultants after the 2023 winter storm, a report has found…

The report, commissioned by the City Auditor, found Laura Huffman and Joe Canales were paid $200 and $190 an hour respectively over their 10 months at City Hall. Garza pushed to hire them, the audit found, skirting city rules requiring a vote from the Austin City Council on contracts over $76,000 a year. The audit found both were effectively full-time assistant city managers.

Canales was paid a total of $268,375; Huffman received $285,800. Both worked with Garza during Watson’s first stint as mayor in the late 1990s.

Garza was appointed interim city manager in February 2023 after the City Council fired Spencer Cronk in the wake of a winter storm that led to widespread power outages. After he was hired, Garza approved contracts for Canales and Huffman through her firm Civic Solutions Partnerships.

The consultants were brought on to tackle the fallout from the 2023 storm and the scuttling of a labor contract with police, but the report found their responsibilities exceeded that initial scope. Previous reporting from KUT and The Austin Chronicle highlighted the influence they asserted, as well as their pay. Canales and Huffman were two of the highest-paid people on the city's books in 2023, though they weren't technically employees… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Working group to study feedback, surveys for city’s $4.5M Live Music Fund (Austin Monitor)

The Music Commission has formed a working group to evaluate the execution of the second year of the Live Music Fund, which recently awarded $4.5 million to just over 100 musicians, promoters and music venues throughout the area.

The group was formed partially in response to early feedback on the program collected by the advocacy group Austin Texas Musicians, which presented a sample of the more than 200 anecdotes and social media posts it has gathered from some of the more than 1,200 applicants for the awards. The group is also conducting a survey about the grant program, which is expected to be examined along with a forthcoming survey from the Economic Development Department regarding the application and scoring process and how the awards will be used.

In a substantial change from the pilot version of the program, artists and promoters selected for awards received $15,000 or $30,000 this year, compared to the $5,000 and $10,000 amounts given last year. While the amount of funding was increased to open the process to music venues for the first time, the larger award amounts have received criticism in the creative community because fewer total awards were available… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

➡️ $1M for lobbyists, $17M for lawyers: Who profited as a Texas agency used an affordable housing loophole (Houston Chronicle)

In 2019, the Texas Legislature granted a handful of Central Texas businessmen permission to form their own small government to develop a plot of agricultural land near the Austin airport. So-called special purpose districts typically raise money from residents or landowners to improve the property inside their boundaries. The SH130 Municipal Management District, named for the nearby highway, was expected to start building roads, sewer systems and other basic infrastructure on about 1,100 acres in eastern Travis County.

Instead, the obscure government leveraged a controversial way to make piles of money off taxpayers. Rather than lay the foundation for a new local community, it spent the last two years raking in more than $30 million — and then spending much of it to keep the money machine churning. In some instances, it spent like a flush private corporation. Operating out of a large $25,000-a-month office in downtown Austin, the district of undeveloped farmland last year paid its director more than a half-million dollars in salary and commissions.

That makes the head of SH130 district — consisting of five employees and a single building — one of the highest-compensated government administrators in the state. Harris County Administrator Diana Ramirez earns $100,000 less to oversee a staff of 20,000 servicing a county of nearly 5 million residents.

Credit card statements show Executive Director Aundre Dukes — nephew of former Austin state Rep. Dawnna Dukes — also spent thousands of dollars at high-end restaurants such as Capital Grille and the Four Seasons on the public agency’s dime. In other ways, the small district’s bulging bank account permitted it to behave like a government many times its size. Over the past two years, invoices show the district — with no residents and no popularly elected representatives — paid some of Texas’s top lobbyists $1 million to influence lawmakers. Rather than installing streets and water lines, the district paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a renowned design firm to create fanciful plans — some not even on its land. Blueprints show soccer and baseball stadiums, a convention center and five new museums. A proposed music museum was depicted as nearly the same size as Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the largest museum in Texas’s largest city… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Texas shines bright earning 15 Stars in inaugural MICHELIN Guide selection (MICHELIN)

The first MICHELIN Guide Texas selection has been revealed, and it features 15 one-MICHELIN-Star establishments and two MICHELIN Green Star eateries. The full selection was announced Monday night at 713 Music Hall in Houston… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

➡️ President-elect Trump is expected to nominate Marco Rubio

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to nominate Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to serve as secretary of state, according to a source familiar with the selection. If confirmed, Rubio would become the first Latino to ever serve as the nation's top diplomat.

The selection officially brings Rubio into Trump's fold and offers a new chapter in the evolving relationship between the former rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. In the years since, Rubio has become a close adviser to Trump on foreign relations, and was even a top contender for vice president up until the day Trump announced Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Round 2 in the Trump-vs-Mexico matchup looks ominous for Mexico (Associated Press)

Mexico is facing a second Donald Trump presidency, and few countries can match its experience as a target of Trump’s rhetoric: There have been threats to close the border, impose tariffs and even send U.S. forces to fight Mexican drug cartels if the country doesn’t do more to stem the flow of migrants and drugs.

That’s not to mention what mass deportations of migrants who are in the U.S. illegally could do to remittances — the money sent home by migrants — that have become one of Mexico’s main sources of income. But as much as this second round looks like the first round — when Mexico pacified Trump by quietly ceding to his immigration demands — circumstances have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Today, Mexico has in Claudia Sheinbaum a somewhat stern leftist ideologue as president, and Trump is not known for handling such relations well.

Back in 2019, Mexico’s then-President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador was a charismatic, plain-spoken, folksy leader who seemed to understand Trump, because both had a transactional view of politics: You give me what I want, I’ll give you what you want. The two went on to form a chummy relationship. But while López Obrador was forged in the give-and-take politics of the often-corrupt former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Sheinbaum grew up in a family of leftist activists and got her political experience in radical university student movements.

“Claudia is more ideological than López Obrador, and so the problem is that I see her potentially responding to Trumpian policies, whether it’s, you know, organized crime or immigration or tariffs with a much more nationalistic, jingoistic view of the relationship,” said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico’s former ambassador to the U.S. from 2007 to 2013. Sheinbaum made a point of being one of the first world leaders to call Trump on Thursday to congratulate him after the election, but during the call Trump did two things that may say a lot about how things will go… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

_________________________

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