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BG Reads 3.12.2024

BG Reads 3.12.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - March 12, 2024

March 12, 2024

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Bingham Group Reads

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March 12, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 Austin City Council to move forward with two City Manager candidates

🟣 UT-Austin reverts to requiring standardized test scores for admissions

🟣 America’s election chiefs are worried AI is coming for them

Read on!

[BINGHAM GROUP]

✅ BG Blog - City of Austin org chart red line (as of 2/9/2024)

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Austin and Uber set aside past differences, make nice during South by Southwest. (Austin Business Journal)

If it wasn't evident already, Austin's one-time fight with ride-hailing services is over.

Uber Technologies Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi joined Austin Mayor Kirk Watson for a conversation about the business at South by Southwest on March 11, including sustainability and the ability of the technology to bolster public transit.

The conversation comes nearly a decade after the city and its voters pushed back on ride-hailing companies with increased regulation, a quarrel that reached the Texas Legislature and ultimately led Uber (NYSE: UBER), competitor Lyft Inc. (Nasdaq: LYFT) and some others to cease operating in Austin.

At SXSW, however, Watson and Khosrowshahi agreed ride-hailing can encourage multimodal transportation and the use of Austin's expanding public transit system.

"We are in a different place" than in the past, Watson told hundreds of people in attendance in a Hilton Austin conference room.

Khosrowshahi also said significant changes have taken place in the years since the company sparred with the city over how it could operate in the Texas capital.

"We're a technology company, but we have our feet kind of rooted firmly in the streets of the cities that we operate," Khosrowshahi said.

"So we have been investing a lot of time, effort and kind of cultural change in making sure that whatever we want to do — and whatever our agenda is, whether it's for consumers, or drivers or merchants — it also matches up with the agenda of the governments that we work with and our constituents."

Now, Austin is a darling in the company's eyes as the city prepares to make transformational investments in its transportation infrastructure, including a major expansion of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

Uber hasn't disclosed the size of its operations here, but Austin "is one of our fastest-growing cities," Khosrowshahi said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Austin City Council to move forward with two candidates in city manager search (KXAN)

Brian Platt, one of the finalists for Austin’s city manager hiring process, dropped out, according to a Sunday post from Mayor Kirk Watson’s office.

The mayor’s office confirmed to KXAN that it will not pull in additional applicants and will move forward with the two candidates still in the process.

The last time the City of Austin hired a new city manager, which was in 2017, the process was much different.

“The city had voted to keep the whole process of hiring someone a secret, which they thought would make it more attractive to candidates, perhaps from the private sector who weren’t as used to transparency as those who work in the public sector,” said Elizabeth Findell who covered city politics in Austin during that hiring process. She is now the Texas reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Findell said even though the city didn’t disclose the names of anyone involved in the interview phase, she was able to identify some of the candidates by catching people in a hotel lobby, snapping photos of people coming and going from interviews and using social media.

After realizing it would be difficult to hide the identities of candidates, some of the interviews were moved behind security gates at the airport, Findell recalled. It raised concerns even from some council members about whether the process violated the Texas Open Meetings Act.

“I tried to go after them, eventually tracked them down at the airport, where they were conducting these interviews in a conference room behind the airport security where we couldn’t get to them,” she said.

It was later determined that the firm doing the search had even instructed some of the candidates to consider disguises, Findell said.

Council Member Leslie Pool was one of the city council members involved in that 2017 process and said this time around it was “very important” to her that it be done differently. She said there was no push back from any members of council that the process be transparent and that names of the final candidates be published… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Dallas’ T.C. Broadnax was among several last-minute applicants for Austin City Manager job (Dallas Morning News)

Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax applied for the same job in Austin one day before the Feb. 26 deadline — which was four days after his resignation was announced, according to his cover letter. Of the 39 people who applied for the Austin City Manager job, Broadnax was at least one of nine people whose application materials are dated either the day before or the day of the deadline.

That group includes the other two named finalists alongside Broadnax, Denton City Manager Sara Hensley and Kansas City (Mo.) City Manager Brian Platt. In his résumé and cover letter, which was obtained by The Dallas Morning News through a public records request, Broadnax touts his leadership of Dallas emphasizing his strategies in addressing public safety, equity and inclusion, housing and homelessness, transportation, economic development, historic preservation, community engagement and other areas. He wrote that he is committed to local government and “eager to work in partnership with the mayor and City Council to advance the city of Austin and take the city to the next level.”

“My professional work experience provides a solid local government management foundation, well-suited for the responsibilities and duties of this position,” Broadnax’s cover letter said.

“As the city manager of the city of Dallas, TX, my skills, and abilities qualify me for this position and allow me to bring a unique perspective and proven record in city management, financial, and operational performance to support the Austin City Council’s goals for the next city manager.”

A review by The News of the résumés and cover letters for all 39 applicants shows Broadnax is the only one with experience as a city manager leading a city comparable to the size of Austin, which has the 10th largest population in the country with more than 970,000 residents. The next closest is Platt, who has managed the municipal government operations for a city of more than 500,000 residents since 2020. Platt announced Sunday that he was withdrawing his name for consideration for Austin city manager.

The Kansas City Star reported Monday that the Kansas City Council recently authorized negotiations to extend Platt’s contract on the condition he drop out of Austin’s city manager search. Since March 2022, Hensley has been the permanent city manager in Denton, which has around 150,000 residents. Between May 2019 and March 2022, she has worked as Denton’s interim city manager, deputy city manager, and assistant city manager, according to her résumé. She also worked as an interim Austin assistant city manager for two years starting in March 2017 and was Austin’s parks and recreation director from December 2008 to March 2017… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Tesla's planned factory in Mexico helped spur direct-to-Monterrey flights out of ABIA (Austin Business Journal)

When the latest nonstop international flights begin out of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport on March 22, Austinites apparently will have Tesla Inc. to thank.

That’s because plans by Austin-based Tesla to build an electric vehicle factory near Monterrey, Mexico, played a big role in establishing the direct route linking the Texas capital and the Monterrey airport, according to officials with the Mexican state where the factory would be located and with Viva Aerobus, the airline flying the route.

Tesla has yet to break ground on the Mexican factory, but Samuel Garcia Sepulveda — the governor of Nuevo Leon who was speaking in Austin on March 11 — said he expects the company to begin the work "very soon." Nuevo Leon officials approved an incentives package worth $153 million late last year to build the factory, according to a Reuters report… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

UT-Austin reverts to requiring standardized test scores for admissions (Texas Tribune)

UT-Austin reverts to requiring standardized test scores for admissions (Texas Tribune)

The University of Texas at Austin will once again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, beginning with applications to enroll in the fall of 2025.

The university suspended the testing requirement in 2020 because of limited access to testing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Critics of testing requirements have said they give students from affluent families an unfair advantage because they can access test prep to improve their scores. Still, a growing number of universities are reversing their test-optional admission policies, including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth and Georgetown.

In explaining the decision to reinstate testing requirements, UT-Austin president Jay Hartzell said ACT and SAT test scores help identify how students will fare in their first semester of college and which students would benefit from extra help... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US/WORLD NEWS]

America’s election chiefs are worried AI is coming for them (Politico)

A false call from a secretary of state telling poll workers they aren’t needed on Election Day. A fake video of a state election director shredding ballots before they’re counted. An email sent to a county election official trying to phish logins to its voter database.

Election officials worry that the rise of generative AI makes this kind of attack on the democratic process even easier ahead of the November election — and they’re looking for ways to combat it. Election workers are uniquely vulnerable targets: They’re obscure enough that nobody knows who they really are, so unlike a fake of a more prominent figure — like Joe Biden or Donald Trump — people may not be on the lookout for something that seems off. At the same time, they’re important enough to fake and just public enough that it’d be easy to do.

Combine that with the fact that election officials are still broadly trusted by most Americans — but don’t have a way to effectively reach their voters — a well-executed fake of them could be highly dangerous but hard to counter.

“I 100 percent expect it to happen this cycle,” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said of deepfake videos or other disinformation being spread about elections. “It is going to be prevalent in election communications this year.”

Secretaries of state gathered at the National Association of Secretaries of State winter meeting last month told POLITICO they have already begun working AI scenarios into their trainings with local officials, and that the potential dangers of AI-fueled misinformation will be featured in communication plans with voters. Election officials have already spent the last few years struggling to figure out how to combat an increasingly toxic election environment in which misinformation has fueled public distrust of the electoral system and physical threats. Now they’re worried AI will make that challenge even more unmanageable… (LINK TO FULL STORY)