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- BG Reads 11.22.2024
BG Reads 11.22.2024
🟪 BG Reads - November 22, 2024
Bingham Group Reads
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November 22, 2024
➡️ Today's BG Reads include:
🟪 Austin mayoral candidate Carmen Llanes Pulido's request for recount is denied (KUT)
🟪 ACC announces plan to extend semiconductor training nationally (Austin American-Statesman)
🟪 Council approves updated Water Forward, Conservation and Drought Contingency plans (Austin Monitor)
🟪 State Board of Education says it wants more control over public school library books (Texas Tribune)
🟪 President-elect set to shape 'Trump judiciary' for next generation (NPR)
Read On!
[CITY OF AUSTIN]
🟪 The Austin Council has one (1) regular meeting left in 2024:
December 12
Jesús Aguirre
Oscar Carmona
Angela Means
🟪 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.”
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
➡️ Austin mayoral candidate Carmen Llanes Pulido's request for recount is denied (KUT)
A request for a recount in the November general election by Austin mayoral candidate Carmen Llanes Pulido has been denied, city officials said.
Llanes Pulido had filed a request Thursday for a recount of the votes in the city's 11 precincts in Williamson County. Officials said under state law, a recount must be for the entire jurisdiction. Austin stretches across Travis County into Williamson and Hays.
Llanes Pulido has until Monday to decide whether to appeal. She told KUT she is weighing her options.
"The particular sections of the code they are referencing, it's inconsistent with what was told to us by the legal representative at the Secretary of State’s Office," she said. "Because we did ask this specific question several times before we submitted this petition.”
Incumbent Mayor Kirk Watson earned the most votes in the Nov. 5 election, but he needed a majority of the vote, or 50% plus one vote, to win outright and avoid a runoff with Llanes Pulido. He declared victory last week, with just 13 votes to spare.
Llanes Pulido said because the margin was razor thin, she felt the community deserved reassurance that every vote was properly counted. She cited irregularities in the vote count.
Earlier this week, Travis County reported it found 75 provisional ballots that had not been fully processed. Twenty were added to the county's total — 13 of those included votes in the mayor's race… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
➡️ ACC announces plan to extend semiconductor training nationally (Austin American-Statesman)
Austin Community College ― a semiconductor workforce training leader in Central Texas that has been recognized with federal grants secured by U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett and gifts from major manufacturers NXP and Samsung ― is partnering with other companies to share its semiconductor training curriculum nationally, officials announced Wednesday.
"We're about Central Texas, but we're about to be central to the country and the world," ACC Chancellor Lowery-Hart said. "A world that the CHIPS Act and semiconductor work is reimagining."
With America's Frontier Fund, the workforce development nonprofit Merit America and the Texas Institute for Electronics, ACC is part of the Opportunity Coalition that will offer the college's Advanced Manufacturing Production training program nationally at no up-front cost. The new initiative will help low-wage workers around the country transition to high-demand advanced manufacturing jobs through quick-turn programs.
The program will first be piloted at Temple College and Central Texas College, Lowery-Hart said, and it then will expand to Arizona, New Mexico and Ohio. The pilot program, which is sponsored by the Dell Foundation, will launch in January with the goal of expanding nationally next fall, said Garrett Groves, ACC vice chancellor for strategic initiatives.
The coalition hopes to reach 20,000 learners and drive wage-gains of $2 billion total by 2030, ACC said in a news release, which will in turn help meet the country's growing workforce needs as manufacturing grows in the U.S… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
➡️ Council approves updated Water Forward, Conservation and Drought Contingency plans (Austin Monitor)
On Thursday, City Council approved updates to Austin’s Water Forward Plan and to the related Conservation and Drought Contingency plans.
Water Forward, Austin’s 100-year integrated water resource plan, was first adopted by the city in 2018, after the record-breaking, nearly decadelong drought in Central Texas that ended in 2016. This plan was designed to incorporate five-year updates, with significant stakeholder engagement. The updated plan includes new projections for changes in population, climate trends and streamflow. It builds off of the original plan’s strategies for resiliency with managing Austin’s water supply (the combined storage in lakes Buchanan and Travis).
Some of Water Forward’s strategies fall under the umbrella of reducing overall water use by incentivizing native landscaping and mitigating utility and customer-side water loss; relatedly, Austin Water is nearly finished with its citywide installation of smart residential water meters.
The plan also aims to stretch existing water supply to plan for population growth, drought and climate change by expanding water reuse such as the city’s Go Purple Program, which expands our reclaimed water system. It also would explore new water storage options like borrowing space in a neighboring aquifer. Water Forward also identifies longer-term strategies for adding new water supply, like treating salty groundwater until it is safe for use… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
➡️ Austin’s police chief Begins “100-Day” initiative to engage community, develop solutions to department problems (Austin Chronicle)
Austin’s new chief of police, Lisa Davis, has launched a 100-day action plan which she hopes will lay the foundation for her tenure as leader of the Austin Police Department.
The plan, packaged in a sleek document shared with reporters last week, includes four objectives aimed at addressing three key priorities for the department identified by Davis: “recruitment, retention, and morale;” “community trust and crime prevention;” and “capacity for excellence and innovation.”
“Our goal at the end of this,” Davis said on Oct. 14, “is to use all of the information we gather from connections we’ve made through the 100 days and start building strategies around recruitment, retention, community engagement, and other areas.”
The four objectives Davis hopes to accomplish over the 100-day period include community outreach, assessment and evaluation of existing department strategy and initiatives, communitywide collaboration on updates to those strategies, and initiation of the new plan and public communication around it.
She’ll work with the usual stakeholders, of course – the Austin Police Association, business owners, and local elected officials – but, Davis said, a vital piece of the project is working with people who have, historically, been critical of APD... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
➡️ State Board of Education says it wants more control over public school library books (Texas Tribune)
A majority on the Republican-dominated State Board of Education said Thursday that it wanted more control over whether school library books are considered sexually explicit or not.
Ten members on the board responsible for determining what Texas' 5.5 million public schoolchildren learn in the classroom voted to call on the Texas Legislature, which convenes in January, to pass a state law granting them authority to determine what books are appropriate for school-age children. Local school districts currently manage that process.
Republican members said granting the board control would alleviate the state’s more than 1,200 public school districts of the burdensome task. They also said it could offer a solution to a recent court ruling stopping Texas from fully enforcing a state law requiring booksellers to rate their materials for appropriateness — based on books' depictions or references to sex — before selling them to school libraries… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
➡️ New study: Women of color the majority of Texas' female population, gender wage gap significant (Texas Public Radio)
Texas’ female population is projected to surpass 18.5 million in less than 20 years — with women of color already making up the majority.
Women make up 46% of the workplace in Texas, with more than one million joining the workforce in the last 10 years.
But women earn 83% of what their male colleagues earn — a wage gap costing Texans more than $47 billion annually.
Those are among the findings in a study the Texas Women's Foundation released on Thursday found over the last two years.
The foundation published its fifth edition of Economic Issues of Women in Texas, examining women’s role in the workforce and economic growth — and the economic challenges they continue to face.
It focuses on statewide research, first beginning its research in 2014 and updated every two years. It’s conducted by non-profit group Every Texan and includes U.S. Census Bureau data, federal and state agency data, studies by policy organizations and academic research.
Texas has the eighth strongest economy globally, according to the study. Women-owned businesses alone in Texas generated $42 billion in wages and employed more than one million people... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[US and World News]
➡️ President-elect set to shape 'Trump judiciary' for next generation (NPR)
During Donald Trump's first term in office, appointing federal judges became one of his biggest accomplishments.
Legal experts predict Trump will move quickly next year to cement and extend that legacy—and they said he will enjoy some substantial advantages this time around: being able to see how his initial picks performed.
"The president will have a ready pool of nominees who he already knows, and is comfortable with," said Jesse Panuccio, a former top official in the Trump Justice Department who now works in private legal practice… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
➡️ Trump chooses loyalist Pam Bondi for attorney general pick after Matt Gaetz withdraws (Associated Press)
President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday he will nominate former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead the Justice Department, turning to a longtime ally after his first choice, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration amid scrutiny over sex trafficking allegations.
Bondi has been an outspoken defender of Trump. She was one of his lawyers during his first impeachment trial, when he was accused — but not convicted — of abusing his power as he tried to condition U.S. military assistance to Ukraine on that country investigating then-former Vice President Joe Biden. And she was among a group of Republicans who showed up to support Trump at his New York hush money criminal trial that ended in May with a conviction on 34 felony counts.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans - Not anymore,” Trump said in a social media post. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
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