BG Reads 11.4.2024

Bingham Group Reads - November 4, 2024

November 04, 2024

Bingham Group Reads

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www.binghamgp.com

November 4, 2024

➡️ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 City of Austin executive leadership team and organizational changes announced (City of Austin)

🟪 Why are some Austin Democrats supporting a conservative for city council? The answer is housing. (KUT)

🟪 Dan Patrick debunks claims about Texas voting machines switching votes (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Biden’s chips achievement is losing support before the money actually rolls out (Politico)

Read On!

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

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 (3) regular meetings left in 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: Mayor - Video (10.3.2024)

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

➡️ Why are some Austin Democrats supporting a conservative for city council? The answer is housing. (KUT)

For Democrats running for office in Texas, David Butts has long been the go-to guy.

He’s worked on the campaigns of now-U.S. Congressman Lloyd Doggett, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and Austin Mayor Kirk Watson. In an Austin-American Statesman story about Butts’ career from 2014, he is termed the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” of Austin politics and a “liberal warlord”.

But now Butts has turned his support, this time personal instead of professional, to a conservative candidate. He and about two dozen longtime Democrats have thrown their clout and money behind a Republican seeking reelection to the Austin City Council. They’re calling themselves “Democrats for Mackenzie Kelly”.

While council races are non-partisan, Kelly is a bonafide conservative on a liberal body. As the representative for the city’s northernmost district, she’s often the lone objector in a sea of yeses. That’s especially true when the vote is on an issue such as abortion, transgender healthcare or financial assistance programs… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Austin reopens applications for people who need help paying rent (Austin Monitor)

Low-income renters struggling to afford their monthly rent can now apply to get help from the city. Austin has about $3.6 million to dole out, after City Council members approved a new budget earlier this year.

Applications opened this past Friday, Nov. 1, and will stay open for about a week, closing at 5 p.m. Nov. 7.

To qualify, households must earn less than the local median family income. For a home of four people, that’s no more than $97,800 a year. Tenants must also prove they have struggled to pay rent, which could include a copy of an eviction notice or proof of a recent job loss. Renters must live in the city of Austin.

Renters who qualify will be chosen through a lottery system, and each household can receive up to $6,000. The money will be paid directly to the landlord, so renters’ landlords also need to be willing to participate in the program.

The city, which is partnering with the nonprofit El Buen Samaritano, anticipates helping 480 households pay their rent with this latest round of funding.

The money is available as rent prices in the city have been falling for more than a year. Yet despite this drop, many renters still live in housing they struggle to afford… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Judge says pro-Palestinian student groups can sue UT Austin, other university leaders (KUT)

A federal judge said pro-Palestinian student groups have a right to sue top officials at several public universities in Texas for allegedly violating their First Amendment rights, as first reported by the Austin American-Statesman. However, in his order this week, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, who is based in Austin, said the groups could not sue Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who earlier this year ordered universities to change their free speech policies.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations first filed the lawsuit back in May against Abbott, university leaders and the Board of Regents for the University of Texas System as well as the University of Houston System. Pitman said this week the plaintiffs have standing to sue board members in their official capacities.

The Muslim civil rights group is representing student groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee at UT Austin as well as Students for Justice in Palestine at UT Dallas and the University of Houston. Law enforcement arrested students on all three campuses during the spring 2024 semester while they were protesting against Israel's war in Gaza. Gadeir Abbas, a senior litigation attorney for CAIR, said public universities in Texas cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests in response to an executive order Abbott issued in March.

The Republican governor told public colleges and universities to update their free speech policies to include a definition of antisemitism and create punishments for “antisemitic rhetoric.” Abbott’s order also singled out the student groups that are plaintiffs in the lawsuit. He directed universities to ensure the new free speech policies “are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.” Abbas said Abbott’s order incorrectly conflates antisemitism and criticism of Israel… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

➡️ Dan Patrick debunks claims about Texas voting machines switching votes (Texas Tribune)

​Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick publicly debunked claims that voting machines in the state are changing the selections voters make.

Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump, whose father-in-law is GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, posted on social media that Texas had looked into claims about voting machines in Tarrant County switching voters' selections and the "error has been corrected with the voting machines."

But Patrick, who is also a Republican, quickly corrected the national party leader on social media. The lieutenant governor said fewer than 10 people out of the nearly 7 million Texans who had already cast ballots across the state claimed that their selections were changed, but officials could not confirm a single instance of that happening.

"There were actually no errors to correct once we investigated those few cases," Patrick wrote on X… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Dallas cuts wait time in half to get commercial construction permit, launches new project (Dallas Morning News)

Getting a commercial construction permit in Dallas now takes less than half the time it did three years ago, according to a city memo. The city took more than 300 days to approve a permit in 2021. That number had dropped to 122 days in October. Dallas closed half of its 9,800 stale or inactive permits languishing in the system and launched a project to remove bottlenecks from the workflow and speed up the permit application intake and processing time.

“These inactive permits clog the permitting system and skew data outcomes,” said Assistant City Manager Robin Bentley.

Interim City Manager Kim Tolbert teased the permitting department’s progress during Wednesday’s State of Downtown event. “As a city, we needed to learn how to be more customer-centric,” Tolbert said at the event. Dallas is working with the Toyota Production System Support System. Bentley said the new planning and development department assembled a team of division representatives with expertise in building code, sanitation, zoning and transportation.

The team is collaborating with the city’s business and analytics department. In its preliminary research, the team reviewed a sample of 36 multifamily housing permits issued between October 2023 and September 2024. It found permits related to drainage, paving engineering, water and wastewater engineering, zoning, building code, and landscape reviews took the longest to be approved... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Texas to see lowest number of opioid overdoses since 2020 as the U.S. sees 15% decline (Community Impact)

An increase in the distribution of fentanyl-laced substances is among the deadliest drug threats for Texans right now, said Wendell Campbell, a drug intelligence officer with Houston High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, a federal agency focused on reducing drug trafficking.“About seven out of 10 pills that we seize off the streets and send to the [Drug Enforcement Administration] lab ... are all fake pills,” Campbell said.Over the last year, the U.S. has seen a 15% decline in the number of drug overdose deaths reported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Texas, while improving, only saw a 1.67% decline. Just nine states nationwide saw an increase in the number of overdose deaths in that time.Dr. Allen Dennis, the medical director of Round Rock Surgery Center and a member of the Texas Medical Association, said states such as Florida, Kentucky and Wisconsin have seen higher levels of opioid use in the last few decades… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

➡️ Trump, preparing to challenge the results, puts his 2020 playbook into action (New York Times)

Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are rolling out a late-stage campaign strategy that borrows heavily from the subversive playbook he used to challenge his loss four years ago, this time with reinforcements from outside groups built on the false notion of a stolen election.

With Election Day only three days away, Mr. Trump is already claiming the Democrats are “a bunch of cheats,” as his allies in battleground states spread distorted reports of mishaps at the polls to push a narrative of widespread fraud. Mr. Trump and his most prominent supporters have pointed to partisan polling and betting markets to claim that he is heading for a “crushing victory,” as his top surrogate Elon Musk recently put it. The expectation helps set the stage for disbelief and outrage among his supporters should he lose. And in a direct echo of his failed — and, prosecutors say, illegal — bid to remain in power after the 2020 election, some of his most influential advisers are suggesting he will yet again seek to claim victory before all the votes are counted, a move that ushered in his efforts to deny his defeat four years ago and helped set the stage for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In many respects, though, the effort that led to Jan. 6 never ended. “It’s been four years of spreading lies about elections and recruiting volunteers to challenge the system, filing litigation,’’ said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works with state officials to bolster confidence in their elections.

“What we’re seeing today is all of that coming to fruition.” The Trump campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment. In a statement, Dana Remus, a top lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, said, “It isn’t surprising that he is already questioning the results of a still ongoing election” and added, “He failed when he tried this in 2020, and he will fail again.” Polls show the race is effectively tied, leaving the possibility that Mr. Trump will win and have no reason to dispute the outcome. In that case, the question of whether to accept the results would fall to Ms. Harris, who has said she would uphold “free and fair elections” and the “peaceful transfer of power.” 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Biden’s chips achievement is losing support before the money actually rolls out (Politico)

Progressives and pro-labor Democrats are souring on President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act as the administration appears to be loosening some of the environmental and transparency guardrails initially attached to its $39 billion in subsidies. The 2022 law is a historic piece of industrial policy intended to boost the American high-tech sector by funneling money into semiconductor manufacturing. To sell the program to fellow Democrats, the Biden administration had promised it would come with a broad set of environmental rules, worker benefits and public reporting expectations.

But early in October, Biden signed a law rolling back a key environmental review standard that companies would have been required to follow.

And the first binding award to be issued — $123 million to the Minnesota-based chipmaker Polar Semiconductor — came under sealed terms, leading many initial supporters to worry that tech companies will get what they want without any real public oversight. With former President Donald Trump attacking the CHIPS program in a recent interview, a signature Biden achievement now has an opponent who could take the White House next week and radically reshape how the law is being administered.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that if Trump wins and the GOP takes Congress, they could try to eliminate the law’s industry-unfriendly rules. The criticism on both sides of the political aisle raises the question of what will happen to one of the president’s biggest longterm policy legacies. “Whatever the administration does, it’ll be inadequate,” said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former top Treasury official. He predicts “blowback” from both sides as the law continues to roll out…

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