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- BG Reads 2.17.2025
BG Reads 2.17.2025
🟪 BG Reads - February 17, 2025
Bingham Group Reads
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February 17, 2025
✅ Today's BG Reads include:
🟪 Arctic air expected to bring multiple overnight hard freezes to Austin area this week (Austin American-Statesman)
🟪 Austin ISD announces hiring freeze as budget deficit grows to $110 million (KUT)
🟪 One self-driving car company plans to pick up Austin riders this year. More wait in the wings. (KUT)
🟪 Protests are set to take place on Presidents Day. Here's why (NPR)
🟪 Trump administration tries to bring back fired nuclear weapons workers in
DOGE reversal (Associated Press)
Read On!
[CITY OF AUSTIN]
📺 Yesterday: Austin City Council Regular Meeting
Video Link (Runtime: 1:54:34)
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
✅ Arctic air expected to bring multiple overnight hard freezes to Austin area this week (Austin American-Statesman)
Get ready to bundle up. The National Weather Service anticipates an "intrusion" of arctic air will produce multiple overnight hard freezes in the Austin area this week.
Before the cold northerly air rolls in, daytime temperatures on Monday and Tuesday will be fairly mild compared to the rest of the week, with highs in the 60s and 70s, and partly to mostly cloudy skies. There are some low chances for afternoon showers on Tuesday.
The arctic air is expected to impact Central Texas beginning Tuesday night, when temperatures are anticipated to drop into the upper 20s overnight. Wednesday's high will be in the low 40s.
A second hard freeze is likely to develop overnight from Wednesday into Thursday, and by sunrise temperatures will have dropped into the lower 20s, with a wind chill lingering in the teens.
Daytime highs will warm up into the lower 40s on Thursday, after which another freeze is possible Friday, with lows in the 30s. There's a chance for some wintry precipitation on Friday, according to Monte Oaks, a meteorologist with the weather service's Central Texas office, however, no ice accumulation is expected… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Austin ISD announces hiring freeze as budget deficit grows to $110 million (KUT)
Austin ISD will institute a districtwide hiring freeze on March 1 as the school district tries to claw its way out of a financial hole that has grown deeper since the 2024-25 budget was approved in June. Though district officials initially anticipated a $78 million budget deficit, that figure climbed to $92 million.
Now, it’s reached $110 million, despite Austin ISD already making $26 million in spending cuts. Only special education services will be exempt from the hiring freeze, according to a district spokesperson.
Austin ISD’s Interim Chief Financial Officer Katrina Montgomery shared the sobering news about the budget deficit with trustees during a school board information session Thursday. She said efforts to reduce the deficit must continue, especially to keep the district’s savings account from getting too low... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ One self-driving car company plans to pick up Austin riders this year. More wait in the wings. (KUT)
Eight years after former Austin Mayor Steve Adler declared Austin the “Kitty Hawk of driverless cars,” autonomous vehicles can be spotted all over the city, but most of the public can't ride in them yet.
This is set to change with a collaboration between Uber and Alphabet’s self-driving car company, Waymo, which completed the first fully driverless ride on Austin roads in 2015 and prompted Adler’s remark. Waymo rides have been available to a small number of early testers since October, but more riders will soon be able to hail self-driving cars through the Uber app.
Last week, Waymo announced customers can set their ride preferences to include autonomous vehicles on the app. Joining the "interest" list will increase riders’ chances of hailing a driverless car when the service goes public.
Uber and Waymo announced in September that it would be available early this year. Waymo’s service area covers 37 square miles of the city, stretching from Hyde Park to St. Edward’s University, but it's not the only company with driverless cars on the road.
According to Austin Transportation and Public Works, there are five known autonomous vehicle operators here. Avride, Volkswagen’s ADMT and Amazon’s Zoox are in the testing phase, deploying cars around Austin, typically accompanied by safety drivers, to gather data to improve mobility and safety. An additional company, Motional, is in an early mapping phase… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Austin starts effort to keep downtown vibrant as big projects disrupt it (Austin Business Journal)
With downtown Austin abuzz with activity and major projects, the city is launching a new initiative to better coordinate all of the efforts underway in the area. The City Council approved a resolution Feb. 13 to create the Downtown Strategic Initiative, which will establish a managing entity to identify projects and strategies that make downtown Austin a “vibrant, safe and accessible place,” and also coordinate funding opportunities.
“The Downtown Austin Strategic Initiative will serve as a framework for ensuring downtown remains a vibrant center as Austin’s living room,” Mayor Kirk Watson said in a statement. “As we continue to invest in mobility and infrastructure, I’m thrilled to support an initiative that prioritizes Austin's most important projects while preserving the rich history of our capital city.”
The resolution outlines seven main areas of focus for the Downtown Strategic Initiative:
Mobility and infrastructure
Music and arts
Cultural and historical assets
Economic and workforce development
Public Safety
Homelessness
Parks and Greenspace
✅ Allegations fly in West Austin Business Park saga (Austin Business Journal)
The city of Bee Cave claims its former city manager received improper gifts and was involved in a fraudulent scheme to mislead local officials about the development of the controversial West Austin Business Park.
City officials allege that former city manager Clint Garza worked in concert with the developers of the business park to keep the City Council in the dark about plans to develop an industrial site in the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction, according to an update filed on Feb. 12 to the city's ongoing lawsuit against the developers of the project.
The lawsuit alleges the developers of the West Austin Business Park violated a 2015 Development Agreement for the 23 acres which doesn't allow for an industrial development on the land. The developers have maintained they acted legally and followed the 2015 development agreement. Garza has now been added as a co-defendant in the lawsuit… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ One of Buda's oldest and biggest employers is laying groundwork for a major expansion (Austin Business Journal)
Scott and Leanne Logan can tell you the exact date Night Hawk Frozen Foods Inc. rolled its first frozen meal off a production line in Buda. It was March 20, 1993, their wedding day, and they hosted the reception at the 30,000-square-foot facility owned by Leanne's family at 100 Nighthawk Circle.
"We had fajitas at the reception and they were making Steak 'n Taters at the same time," said Leanne, Night Hawk's owner, referring to perhaps the company's most-famous product.
Now, nearly 32 years later, Scott and Leanne are laying the groundwork for the company's next three decades. They're in the process of obtaining needed approvals from the city of Buda to start building out a new headquarters on a 29-acre property at 2280 Jack C. Hays Trail that they purchased in August… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ The District, a huge and long-anticipated Round Rock project, finally moves forward (Austin Business Journal)
It's been nearly six years to the day since The District in Round Rock was first approved north of Austin. But after years of tweaking and widening the design of the $500 million-plus mixed-use project across from Dell Technologies Inc.'s headquarters, construction is finally about to begin.
Stakeholders in March will hold a groundbreaking for the 66-acre project near I-35 and State Highway 45 Toll Road. It's a notable milestone for a project that was first brought to the Round Rock City Council in 2017 by California-based Mark IV Capital, was first approved for a development agreement in 2019, and has been moving back through the design, planning and incentives process over the last several years.
The District is slated to total nearly 4 million square feet, including 2 million square feet of office space, 150,000 square feet of retail space, several apartment phases totaling about 1.4 million square feet and 300,000 square feet of hotel space, officials said. Investment is expected to exceed a previous $500 million estimate, due to rising construction costs. It's expected to bring 5,000 jobs at full buildout in 2039… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
✅ Texas measles outbreak rises to 48 cases. It’s the state’s worst in nearly 30 years (Associated Press)
The ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas has doubled in size to 48 cases, mostly in children and teens, making it the state’s worst in nearly 30 years. State health officials said Friday in a news release that those who are infected are either unvaccinated or their vaccination status is unknown. Thirteen people have been hospitalized.
The cases have been concentrated in a “close-knit, undervaccinated” Mennonite community, Texas Department of State Health Services spokesperson Lara Anton said. Gaines County is highly rural, so many of the families send their children to small private schools or are homeschooled, Anton said.
“The church isn’t the reason that they’re not vaccinated,” Anton said. “It’s all personal choice and you can do whatever you want. It’s just that the community doesn’t go and get regular health care.” Anton said the state is working with local health officials to increase screening and vaccination efforts.
Health officials are also working to educate school officials on identifying measles symptoms and encouraging families to vaccinate their kids… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Lottery Commission, former director accused of defrauding Texans (KXAN)
Days after the Senate Finance Committee grilled the Texas Lottery Commission about how they handled a $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot from April 2023, new allegations surfaced about former Texas Lottery Commissioner Gary Grief’s role.
In April 2024, a Houston Chronicle investigation revealed a group of investors had essentially gamed a $95 million jackpot, spending nearly $26 million to buy almost every possible number combination. In January, a report from the state’s Sunset Advisory Commission said “Grief seemed quite comfortable operating in the gray areas of the State Lottery Act when the agency’s authority was not crystal clear or the Legislature remained silent on emerging issues.”
On Wednesday, a Houston-based lawyer made stronger allegations. “My client believes that this criminal conspiracy started in 2017 when Gary Grief traveled to California to lobby the founders of Lottery.com to relocate their business to Austin,” attorney Manfred Sternberg told the committee. “From that moment on until Mr. Grief’s sudden retirement in early 2024, the Lottery Commission and Lottery.com became a combined single criminal entity.”
To supplement his claims, Sternberg sent a 22-page document alleging Grief and Lottery.com worked together not only during the jackpot incident but for years. They allege the partnership started in 2017 when Grief allegedly traveled with another Texas Lottery Commission employee to San Francisco to entice Lottery.com co-founders Tony DiMatteo and Matthew Clemenson to move the company to Austin.
The documents accused Grief of bypassing the normal legislative process to change lottery rules to allow cell phones to place lottery bets, opening up the potential for courier services like Lottery.com.
They also allege his changes to allow 24-hour printing of tickets and anonymous claims for winners were designed to help Lottery.com. Also attached to the allegations was a 2019 letter addressed from Grief to DiMatteo telling him Texas Powerball tickets could be purchased by “foreign jurisdictions” as long as the sales were legal where the player was located… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[US and World News]
✅ Trump suggests no laws are broken if he’s ‘saving his country’ (New York Times)
President Trump on Saturday posted on social media a single sentence that appears to encapsulate his attitude as he tests the nation’s legal and constitutional boundaries in the process of upending the federal government and punishing his perceived enemies.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Mr. Trump wrote, first on his social media platform Truth Social, and then on the website X. By late afternoon, Mr. Trump had pinned the statement to the top of his Truth Social feed, making it clear it was not a passing thought but one he wanted people to absorb.
The official White House account on X posted his message in the evening. The quote is a variation of one sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, although its origin is unclear. Nonetheless, the sentiment was familiar: Mr. Trump, through his words and actions, has repeatedly suggested that surviving two assassination attempts is evidence that he has divine backing to enforce his will. He has brought a far more aggressive attitude toward his use of power to the White House in his second term than he did at the start of his first.
The powers of the presidency that he returned to were bolstered by last year’s Supreme Court ruling that he is presumptively immune from prosecution for any crimes he may commit using his official powers. During his first weeks in office, Mr. Trump has signed numerous executive orders that pushed at the generally understood limits of presidential power, fired numerous officials and dismantled an agency in clear violation of statutory limits, and frozen spending authorized by Congress without clear authority. Many of his policy moves have been at least temporarily frozen by judges. Such moves include trying to unilaterally rewrite the definition of birthright citizenship — a right enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment — to exclude babies born to undocumented mothers, and mass firings of public servants, ignoring civil service protection laws… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Trump administration tries to bring back fired nuclear weapons workers in
DOGE reversal (Associated Press)
The Trump administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that DOGE’s blind cost cutting will put communities at risk.
Three U.S. officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration were abruptly laid off late Thursday, with some losing access to email before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning to find they were locked out.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. One of the hardest hit offices was the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, which saw about 30% of the cuts.
Those employees work on reassembling warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons enterprise, with the highest levels of clearance… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ IRS will lay off thousands of probationary workers in the middle of tax season (Associated Press)
The IRS will lay off thousands of probationary workers in the middle of tax season, according to two sources familiar with the agency’s plans, and cuts could happen as soon as next week.
This comes as the Trump administration intensified sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection. It’s unclear how many IRS workers will be affected.
Previously, the administration announced a plan to offer buyouts to almost all federal employees through a “deferred resignation program” to quickly reduce the government workforce. The program deadline was Feb. 6, and administration officials said employees who accept will be able to stop working while still collecting a paycheck until Sept. 30.
However, IRS employees involved in the 2025 tax season were told they will not be allowed to accept a buyout offer from the Trump administration until after the taxpayer filing deadline, according to a letter sent recently to IRS employees… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Protests are set to take place on Presidents Day. Here's why (NPR)
Protests are set to take place in several major cities across the U.S. on Monday, the Presidents Day holiday, according to activists. These demonstrations are being organized by the 50501 Movement, which stands for "50 protests. 50 states. 1 movement."
The protests are a response to what organizers describe as "the anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration." This marks the second nationwide protest by the group, following an event held on Feb. 5.
The protests follow a series of executive orders signed by President Trump, including actions led by billionaire Elon Musk, which have been criticized for their aims to diminish the role of the federal government… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
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