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- BG Reads 2.14.2025
BG Reads 2.14.2025
❤️ BG Reads - February 14, 2025
Bingham Group Reads
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February 14, 2025
❤️ Today's BG Reads include:
🟪 Austin just made it illegal to park in bike lanes (KUT)
🟪 The Austin Marathon is this weekend. Here's what you need to know about road closures. (KUT)
🟪 Texas House committee assignments extend power of experienced GOP leaders (Texas Tribune)
🟪 Texas' plan to expand family leave has one missing piece – participants (Houston Chronicle)
🟪 Trump signs a plan for reciprocal tariffs on US trading partners, ushering in economic uncertainty (Associated Press)
Read On!
[CITY OF AUSTIN]
📺 Yesterday: Austin City Council Regular Meeting
Video Link (Runtime: 1:54:34)
🏛️ City Memos
President Trump Executive Orders / Pause on Federal Grants, Loans and Disbursements Update (2.11.2025)
As a follow up to the January 29, 2025 Memorandum, the Intergovernmental Relations Office (IGRO)continues to review recent federal administration actions along with partner departments relating todirect and discretionary funding awarded to the City of Austin.
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
✅ Austin just made it illegal to park in bike lanes (KUT)
Austin City Council has approved a rule making it illegal to park in a bike lane. Thursday's unanimous vote means violators will be ticketed and fined. Fines could range from $50 to $300.
Council Member Paige Ellis said several people in the community had expressed concerns about bicycle safety on busy downtown roads. If a car is in a protected lane, the cyclist is forced onto sidewalks or traffic, putting the cyclist, drivers and others at risk.
Ellis said the change makes it safer for everyone. “What you see, especially in the downtown area, is food delivery drivers or other sorts of ride-share services stopping in those bike lanes,” she said. “And it's not that we don't want people to be able to do these services, we need those as well, but it's creating unsafe conditions for cyclists.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Evaluation will resume this month on proposal to consolidate and eliminate some boards and commissions (Austin Monitor)
Discussions about a proposal from Council Member Ryan Alter to revamp the city’s citizen advisory boards are set to continue.
In a City Council Message Board post on Wednesday, Alter provided an update on his December resolution (which Council unanimously approved) directing a review of the city’s boards and commissions, task forces, council corporations and intergovernmental bodies.
“As a part of the Council direction, we also asked for feedback from our staff and the public, including those boards and commissions that are affected,” Alter wrote in the post. “With much of this feedback now received, I would like to offer a narrower set of recommendations for consideration at the Feb. 19 Audit and Finance Committee meeting.”
The Audit and Finance Committee is made up of Council members, unlike the advisory boards and commissions the resolution addresses, which are made up of citizens… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ The Austin Marathon is this weekend. Here's what you need to know about road closures. (KUT)
Runners are getting ready for Ascension Seton’s annual Austin Marathon, Half-Marathon and 5K races this Sunday. Seventeen thousand runners are expected to participate in the race.
It starts at 7 a.m. on South Congress Avenue, where it also finishes. Road closures are expected starting Friday until after runners arrive around 2 p.m. Sunday. Here’s what you need to know to prepare… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Austin Economic Indicators (Dallas Federal Reserve)
Austin experienced employment growth in December, accompanied by a declining unemployment rate. Home prices and inventories rose, and single-family housing permits were up in December but down for 2024… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Austin robotics startup Apptronik lands $350M to commercialize humanoid bots (Austin Business Journal)
Robots have become highly proficient at very specific industrial uses over the decades.
But their ability to work alongside humans and adapt to new tasks has been limited. That's changing rapidly as advances in artificial intelligence become integrated into the evolving world of robotic motors and spacial reasoning. And an Austin-based company is at the forefront of the wave.
Apptronik, a startup spun out of the University of Texas in 2016, has developed a humanoid robot called Apollo that's being used by companies such as Mercedes-Benz and GXO Logistics in pilot projects. Now, the company is poised to launch its commercialization phase on the heels of a massive funding round, bringing many more robots into the workforce… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
✅ Texas House committee assignments extend power of experienced GOP leaders (Texas Tribune)
House Speaker Dustin Burrows appointed lawmakers to committees on Thursday, announcing a leadership team made up mostly of veterans who had led legislative panels under his predecessors — and appointing only Republicans to chair committees, as prescribed by the chamber’s new rules.
In a news release announcing the committee appointments, Burrows emphasized that the makeup of the committees reflected the GOP dominance in the chamber, noting that all were chaired by Republicans and that every standing committee and subcommittee was made up of a GOP majority.
Burrows, however, immediately stirred criticism among hardline conservatives for putting Democrats in charge of half the chamber’s 12 newly created subcommittees. Burrows said his committee appointments tried to ensure that lawmakers could use their expertise to contribute to the chamber’s overall goals… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Texas' plan to expand family leave has one missing piece – participants (Houston Chronicle)
In 2023, shortly after state lawmakers began banning nearly all abortions, they passed what they called an innovative, business-friendly way to expand paid parental leave to millions of working Texans. The law lets businesses buy paid leave insurance to offer employees alongside other benefits like health or dental coverage. Unlike in some Democratic-led states, where paid leave is mandated, the Texas insurance option is completely voluntary.
“This product is a market solution to the growing market demand for paid family leave,” state Rep. Lacey Hull, a Houston Republican who authored the legislation, told lawmakers at the time. Yet two years later, there's little to show for it in a state where most parents say they don’t have the ability to care for their newborns at home while still getting paid.
So far, only two insurers have signed up to offer family leave plans in Texas. Neither would say how many companies have enrolled, and it's unclear if any employees have received benefits. The law did not require the companies or the state insurance department to collect data on enrollment, making it impossible to fully gauge the program's success.
In New Hampshire, one of eight other states that took a similar approach and one of the few with available data, 3% of the workforce enrolled in a paid leave insurance plan in its first year. And that was after a public awareness campaign, autoenrollment for state employees and financial incentives for companies that sign up – none of which was included in Texas' law.
South Carolina’s insurance director noted in December that none of the six insurers that had signed up for its program had sold a single policy. Kristin Smith, director of the Policy Research Shop at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College, is doubtful that the insurance offering in Texas will spur broader change in the availability of paid family leave.
Employers have had decades to provide their own leave policies or offer other types of insurance – like short-term disability – that can sometimes be used for family leave. “Private sector employers have had 30 years to offer this,” Smith said. “And my read is, those who can and want to are already offering this.” Texas has led the country in cracking down on abortion access since 2021, when it became the first state to ban abortions past six weeks. It became the biggest state to ban the procedure in nearly all cases, after the U.S. Supreme Court ended federal protections the next year. At the same time, state lawmakers have done little to ease the financial burden that millions of new parents face… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Greg Abbott offers details on what Texas offers in return for $11 billion for border costs (Dallas Morning News)
Gov. Greg Abbott, back on Capitol Hill to request an $11 billion federal refund for state border security costs, provided more details Thursday about what Texas offers in return. Abbott’s plan involves making 4,000 detention beds available free of charge to President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan as they implement mass deportations of those in the country without authorization.
“About 2,000 of them are areas in several prison units that we have the ability to make sure those beds are available,” Abbott said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security also would have access to land capable of holding another 2,000 beds in “soft-sided facilities,” or tents, that could be erected in days, Abbott told The Dallas Morning News. The state would waive rental fees typically collected when federal authorities use detention beds, Abbott said.
The state also would not charge to house federal troops or agents at two military bases the state built in Eagle Pass and Del Rio, he said. “It’s not as if we’re getting some money for nothing for the United States of America,” Abbott said. “We’re making sure that the United States of America is receiving tangible assets in return for any money they may be providing to us.”
Abbott was in Washington for Trump’s inauguration last month. He returned last week to meet the president in the Oval Office and was scheduled for more meetings with White House staff Thursday afternoon.
The governor started his trip Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol, where he met first with Texas Republicans and then U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. The speaker was asked by reporters about the $11 billion request as he walked into his office for the Abbott meeting… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Texas’ energy demand may exceed supply in 2026, but experts caution against panic (Texas Tribune)
Texas’ main grid operator on Thursday forecast that the state’s growing demand for power could surpass its available energy supply beginning in summer 2026.
In a report outlining potential supply and demand over the next five years, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said it’s possible that the grid would not have enough power to meet peak demand during the summer and winter seasons starting next year. But that was the most dire of the scenarios that ERCOT outlined.
Others show that supply would be tight but stay just ahead of demand. And some experts cautioned that the assumptions ERCOT used were flawed and more pessimistic than what’s likely to happen.
The parameters in the report “better represent the performance of grid resources and the dynamic nature of the ERCOT grid,” ERCOT said in releasing the report. “But it’s important to note that all scenarios in this report have a certain level of uncertainty that can alter the long-term resource adequacy outcomes, and these forecasts will change over time based on a variety of factors.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Houston's 22 departments suffer misuse of city credit cards, widespread inefficiencies, analysis shows (Houston Chronicle)
A sweeping study of Houston’s 22 city departments revealed potential misuse of credit cards, inefficient contracting practices with city vendors and a pressing need to streamline city government to make it more responsive to the public, according to an executive summary obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
The review, conducted by the accounting firm Ernst & Young, pinpointed long-standing problems with the way city government operates, and offered solutions at the request of Mayor John Whitmire. Among the findings: The review found significant concerns with the city’s contracting procedures.
Only a few vendors held around 80% of the city’s contracts. Some departments had multiple contracts with the same vendor, and other departments had multiple vendors for the same service. Authorized city employees can obtain purchasing cards, or “p-cards,” that essentially act the same way as a corporate credit card so they can make purchases for city business.
The study found that p-card payments were split to allow for larger purchases that would have typically been over spending limits, and that some items were purchased from unauthorized vendors. Around 42% of city managers only have one to three people who report to them, the report shows, and the city has challenges with pay equity and competitive compensation.
The report also notes that career pathways gaps created opportunities for “fake promotions” of employees into management roles that didn’t oversee anyone… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[US and World News]
✅ Trump signs a plan for reciprocal tariffs on US trading partners, ushering in economic uncertainty (Associated Press)
President Donald Trump on Thursday rolled out his plan to increase U.S. tariffs to match the tax rates that other countries charge on imports, possibly triggering a broader economic confrontation with allies and rivals alike as he hopes to eliminate any trade imbalances.
“I’ve decided for purposes of fairness that I will charge a reciprocal tariff,” Trump said in the Oval Office at the proclamation signing.
“It’s fair to all. No other country can complain.” Trump’s Republican administration has insisted that its new tariffs would equalize the ability of U.S. and foreign manufacturers to compete, though under current law these new taxes would likely be paid by American consumers and businesses either directly or in the form of higher prices.
The rates to be charged would be studied over the weeks ahead, which could create the potential space to resolve challenges or prolong a degree of suspense and uncertainty… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
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