BG Reads 11.7.2024

BG Reads - November 7, 2024

November 07, 2024

Bingham Group Reads

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November 7, 2024  

➡️ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Watson is ahead in election for Austin mayor, but it's unclear if he'll avoid a runoff (KUT)

🟪 Austin ISD’s new board is mostly decided, with one runoff to go (Austin Chronicle)

🟪 Texas Legislature will approve school vouchers and boost public education funds next year, Abbott says (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Harris concedes the election but vows to not stop fighting for a better future (NPR

Read On!

[CITY OF AUSTIN/TRAVIS COUNTY]

  • 💡Agenda Spotlight > Item 34 Approve a resolution to develop a pilot program for implementing a budget and framework for allocation of discretionary Council Member District Service Funds for use by Council offices to implement various projects within their districts to begin in the Fiscal Year 2025-2026 Budget. (Resolution Link)

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:

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

➡️ Watson is ahead in election for Austin mayor, but it's unclear if he'll avoid a runoff (KUT)

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson is ahead in the city's mayoral race with just over 50% of the vote, according to unofficial voting totals.

It appears the incumbent might be able to eke out an outright win over his four opponents and avoid a runoff election in December. But voters may not have final results for at least several more days.

"I don’t count chickens until they are hatched," Watson told KUT News at an election watch party Tuesday. "[But] I'm very excited and happy with the numbers so far."

Mayoral and City Council candidates must receive a majority of votes, or 50% plus one vote, to be declared winners. When no candidate passes this threshold, the two candidates who receive the most votes head to a second election.

In the mayoral race, there are still a few thousand provisional and mail-in ballots that need to be counted. The county has until Nov. 19 – the state's deadline to certify results – to finalize the count. Provisional ballots are those cast by a resident whose eligibility to vote is uncertain.

If it turns out Watson does not have more than 50% of the vote, he'll face Carmen Llanes Pulido in a runoff. Llanes Pulido, who runs the nonprofit Go Austin/Vamos Austin, received about 20% of the vote, according to unofficial results…

➡️ Austin ISD’s new board is mostly decided, with one runoff to go (Austin Chronicle)

LaRessa Quintana, a first-generation college graduate and an orphan taken in by her aunt, beat educator Sarah Ivory on Tuesday night to join Austin ISD’s board of trustees in District 2, which includes the Southeast Austin neighborhood where Quintana grew up.

Quintana praised the voters of District 2 after her victory for embracing the value of representation. “I’m from the district, I graduated from these schools, I was raised on the Eastside by my tía,” she told the Chronicle. “I’m just a true representation of what our kids in Southeast Austin look like and sound like.”

Quintana pledged to be a fierce champion for District 2 schools and said she’d like to bring Mendez Middle School, which has been run by the Third Future charter school network since 2022, back under district control. She also said she is consulting with Education Austin, the district’s teachers union, and board trustees on AISD’s $119 million budget deficit.

The budget deficit is the most immediate challenge facing the district. AISD officials estimate that even after Tuesday’s passage of Proposition A, which will bring an additional $41 million in funding, the district will need to cut 10% of its operating expenses over the next two years. Lynn Boswell and Kevin Foster, who ran for reelection unopposed, will be leaders in that decision-making process…  🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Austin Energy still says hydrogen power plant may be the answer to grid growing pains (Austin Monitor)

As its end-of-year deadline approaches, Austin Energy is busy crunching numbers, hoping to finally nail down a much-anticipated update to its Resource, Generation and Climate Protection Plan.

Utility staffers have spent the past month in and out of Electric Utility Commission meetings sharing modeling data on dozens of scenarios for the updated plan, which will map out the next decade of infrastructural build-outs to meet the growing demands of Austin’s electric grid. A new hydrogen-capable combined cycle gas plant, expanded transmission infrastructure, and an ambitious scaling of local solar generation and battery storage capacity are all on the table as staff weigh the costs and benefits of each hypothetical route.

The update is behind schedule thanks to controversy surrounding Austin Energy’s initial proposal, which relied heavily on a new power plant that would run on natural gas before transitioning to a more climate-friendly, hydrogen-based fuel source sometime in the next four to five years. Environmental watchdogs like Sierra Club, Public Citizen and Third Act Texas have all been critical of the approach, calling for a more dogmatic commitment to reversing course on greenhouse gas emissions… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

➡️ Texas Legislature will approve school vouchers and boost public education funds next year, Abbott says (Texas Tribune)

After a wave of Texas Republicans dominated the ballot box on Election Day, Gov. Greg Abbott expressed confidence Wednesday that he now has enough votes in the Texas House to pass a school voucher program, his top legislative priority since last year.

The governor shared his optimism during a visit to Kingdom Life Academy, a small Christian private school in Tyler, where he proclaimed that the House now has 79 “hardcore school choice proponents,” a number slightly above the simple majority the 150-member chamber needs to approve legislation.

During the same visit, Abbott also said he was committed to fully funding Texas’ public schools, providing teachers with pay raises and enhancing career training opportunities for students — all of which he refused to do last year when vouchers stalled in the Texas Legislature... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Why Y’all Street vs. Wall Street? TXSE CEO James Lee on lowering barriers, raising the bar (Dallas Morning News)

As investors and founders wandered the halls of the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University making their pitches to each other, Texas Stock Exchange CEO James Lee prepared to make a different kind of pitch. Lee closed out the Venture Dallas summit on Oct. 30 with a talk on the progress of TXSE, but really he was making a pitch: Why Y’all Street over Wall Street. His take is that it’s too costly to go public but also that too many companies are public, and TXSE aims to remedy both by lowering barriers to and raising the bar for entry.

That sounds like an oxymoron, but a discussion Lee and moderator Aaron Pierce, also Venture Dallas’ co-founder, had about Texas-based rocket company SpaceX makes the point more clear. It costs a lot of money to go public and then you’re subject to stricter regulations, but the tradeoff used to be greater access to capital and fluidity in the market. “If you’re SpaceX and you just did your last round at almost $300 billion valuation, there was no problem with capital, and there’s a fairly fluid secondary market for trading in those shares today, why would SpaceX go public?” Lee said.

SpaceX, is one of many companies staying private longer, which produces what Lee called a “troubling development” in the public markets: Though the market cap of the U.S. stock market has skyrocketed, the sheer number of public companies has decreased dramatically. Exact numbers vary based on where you look, but in the ‘90s the number of publicly traded companies stateside reached as many as 7,000 to 8,000, a far cry from today’s number.

What’s troubling about that is that it isn’t a worldwide trend. Booned by sharp growth in Asia, the number of public companies worldwide has increased relatively steadily since 1975. “What’s happening that’s stalling access to the public markets are costs. And it’s cost associated with changing rules and reporting requirements,” he says. “They don’t have, in many cases, underlying congressional mandates. Often they’re passed or adopted without shareholder consent, and often they have conflicting or overlapping purposes. ... The net effect of this has been the cost to go public is as high today as it’s ever been.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

➡️ Harris concedes the election but vows to not stop fighting for a better future (NPR)

Vice President Harris formally conceded the 2024 election on Wednesday, urging her supporters not to despair her loss to President-elect Donald Trump and to "never give up the fight for our democracy."

"The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for," Harris said. "But hear me when I say … the light of America's promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting."

Harris spoke from the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C., her alma mater and the site of what supporters had hoped would be her victory party less than 24 hours earlier. Harris has often credited the historically Black college with shaping her personal and professional identities.

Harris stressed the importance of accepting the election result, calling it "a fundamental principle of American democracy," along with loyalty to the U.S. Constitution, conscience and God… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

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