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- BG Reads 3.12.2025
BG Reads 3.12.2025
🟪 BG Reads - March 12, 2025
Bingham Group Reads
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March 12, 2025
✅ Today's BG Reads include:
🟪 Williamson County judge resigns to take position in Trump administration (Austin Business Journal)
🟪 Texas leaders want to crack down on squatters. Their bill would make it easier to evict any renter (Houston Chronicle)
🟪 Two Texans in Congress defend CHIPS Act in the face of Trump’s criticism (Texas Tribune)
🟪 The European Union retaliates after the U.S. metals tariffs take hold (NPR)
Read On!
[CITY OF AUSTIN]
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
✅ Williamson County judge resigns to take position in Trump administration (Austin Business Journal)
Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell, whose leadership in economic development helped attract transformative projects such as the Apple Inc. campus in North Austin and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. factory in Taylor, announced on March 11 that he's resigning and has taken a position in the Trump administration.
Gravell told the Austin Business Journal that he has accepted a position with the U.S. Small Business Administration, a federal agency that provides support to small businesses and entrepreneurs.
His official title is Region 6 advocate, a position in which he represents more than 4.5 million small businesses in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. His official start date was March 10, and he will not be relocating to Washington D.C.
"I now will be able to advocate on behalf of Main Street and remind Washington, D.C., that the red tape that they create can harm local businesses," Gravell said prior to making the announcement at a March 11 Commissioners Court meeting. "Advocating for small businesses is an opportunity of a lifetime and I'm excited."… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ New WilCo subdivision rules affect traffic impacts, water infrastructure (Community Impact)
Williamson County commissioners approved amendments to the county's subdivision regulations at a March 4 meeting.
Changes went into effect immediately and include updates to turn lanes, traffic impact analyses, and water and wastewater infrastructure requirements for developments. In a nutshell Williamson County Engineer Adam Boatright said staff began looking at regulation changes in 2024.
“Williamson County has had good rules for development, but we were looking at additional areas to address public health and safety,” Boatright said... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Plans confirmed for Cedar Park hotel and convention center next to NFM (Austin Business Journal)
The 118-acre CedarView project in Cedar Park has confirmed another anchor in addition to a huge Nebraska Furniture Mart. Indiana-based real estate firm Great Lakes Capital, in partnership with NFM and the city of Cedar Park, announced March 10 that a full-service Marriott hotel and convention center also will be part of the project at 750 E. New Hope Drive.
The hotel will have 300 guest rooms, 30,000-square-feet of event and meeting space, a full-service restaurant, breakfast cafe and expansive pool area, according to an announcement. Construction is slated to begin in May, and it's set to open in early 2027.
"The development of this hotel and convention center in CedarView underscores our commitment to creating vibrant, connected communities that elevate the standard of hospitality," Great Lakes Capital Managing Partner Ryan Rans said in a statement…🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Housing panelists examine what’s worked in Austin, and across Texas (Austin Monitor)
At a South by Southwest panel discussion last week on housing policies in Texas, City Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison shared possible new components of the “agrihood” housing-plus-agriculture approach she championed last year.
While sharing her views on steps the city has taken in recent years to address affordability concerns around housing, Harper-Madison talked about the possibility of allowing a wide-open “rogue zoning” classification to housing around small agricultural parcels.
From prefabricated housing and trailers to multifamily projects, she said the removal of most regulations on housing types would make the projects attractive to builders who want to do business in Austin’s healthy real estate market.
“You can have trailers, you can have manufactured homes, you can have multifamily, you can have single-family, whatever you want. Just rogue zoning in this particular area, this designated area, to see how it works,” she said during the panel discussion organized by Realtor.com.
“For no other reason than because we are so deeply invested in our innovative tendencies and because some of our capital is in our humans. Why don’t we try it and pilot it and see if it works?”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
✅ Texas won't offer a program to help feed kids over the summer. Advocates push for change next year. (KUT)
About three dozen states plan to participate in a federal program that helps families pay for groceries over the summer. For the second year in a row, Texas – which has the second highest rate of food insecurity in the U.S. – won’t be among them. The Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer program, also known as Summer EBT or SUN Bucks, provides families with $120 per eligible child to help pay for food while school's out.
The idea is to help fill the gap for kids who rely on free and reduced-price meals during the school year. Anti-hunger advocates had held out hope Texas could get the program off the ground this summer even after missing the Jan. 1 deadline to tell the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it planned to participate. Celia Cole is one of those advocates. She’s the CEO of Feeding Texas, a network of 20 food banks that pushes for policies to prevent hunger.
She said the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which would be responsible for implementing Summer EBT in the state, needed to know by Monday whether the Texas Legislature was going to allocate funding the agency needed to get the program up and running. The state must provide money up front to launch the program… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Texas leaders want to crack down on squatters. Their bill would make it easier to evict any renter (Houston Chronicle)
Ahead of this year’s legislative session, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick asked state lawmakers to look for ways to “secure Texas” against the plight of people illegally occupying residential spaces. Gov. Greg Abbott also promised to tackle "the increasing problem that we face in the state caused by squatters.”
But the legislation that emerged has little, if anything, to do with what housing experts typically think of as squatting. Instead, it would radically transform the eviction process for millions of Texas renters, making it easier for landlords to evict them, often without notice or a legal proceeding. Tenant advocates, judges and lawyers have raised the alarm about House Bill 32, calling it a Trojan Horse that would strip tenants of their due process rights and erode judicial authority.
“The presumption here is that landlords have the correct case and any defense that a tenant has is false,” said Ben Martin, research director at the nonprofit Texas Housers.
“It makes the eviction process in Texas, once and for all, a rubber stamp for landlords.” Under current law, landlords have to give tenants a three-day notice to vacate before they begin eviction proceedings.
Once an eviction is filed, every case is scheduled for a hearing before a justice of the peace. But the proposed law would eliminate the requirement to provide a notice to vacate when a landlord is evicting a tenant for any reason other than falling behind on rent. If a tenant was accused of smoking in a non-designated area, for instance, a landlord could file immediately to evict them, which becomes part of the tenant’s rental history.
Tenants who fall behind on rent would still receive a notice to vacate. But in both instances, if a landlord asserts there are “no genuinely disputed facts” in the case, they could request a summary judgment, meaning the eviction case would be decided without a trial… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Two Texans in Congress defend CHIPS Act in the face of Trump’s criticism (Texas Tribune)
Two Texas Republicans in Congress are defending the CHIPS Act, saying it benefits national security and creates jobs, and downplaying President Donald Trump’s recent request to get rid of the law.
The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in 2022 by then-President Joe Biden, gives funding to companies to manufacture semiconductors in the United States.
This includes billions to help build and improve Texas factories producing materials for microchips. The CHIPS Act – formally the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors Act – was an effort by the federal government to encourage more semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.
Semiconductors, which make up microchips, are found in nearly every electronic device including cars, cellphones and computers. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced the Chips for America Act, the bill that set up the programs funded by the CHIPS and Sciences Act, in 2020. The lawmakers are prominent Republican supporters of government programs that encourage semiconductor production… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ How voucher vendors could make millions from ‘school choice’ in Texas (Texas Observer)
In August 2024, the business magazine Inc. released its annual list of the top 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the United States. At 815th, a burgeoning upstart called ClassWallet cracked the list’s top 20 percent for the third straight year.
By expanding its operations managing school voucher programs for states across the country, earnings for the Florida company grew by 610 percent over the previous three years. Founded in 2014, ClassWallet now has more than 200 employees and has contracts to administer school vouchers and other educational programs in 18 states through its “digital wallet” platform. Indeed, managing school vouchers has become a big business.
And, as Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature gear up to pass their own program this session, private companies like ClassWallet are descending on the Capitol to lobby for the vouchers legislation and the lucrative contracts it could generate. This comes as other states have drawn scrutiny over myriad problems with the private contractors, including ClassWallet, they’ve hired to administer their voucher programs.
Senate Bill 2, which sailed through the upper chamber early last month, is a universal school voucher proposal that would give students $10,000 a year to attend private school or $2,000 for homeschooling. Lawmakers have initially set aside $1 billion in funding for the Texas school voucher program in 2027, though the Senate bill’s fiscal analysis says the program’s net cost could balloon to $3.8 billion by 2030.
The bill stipulates that up to 5 percent of appropriated funds may go to pay up to five outside vendors like ClassWallet, which the legislation calls “certified educational assistance organizations” (CEAOs), to act as middlemen between the state, parents, and private schools by processing program applications and voucher payments. If the bill were to pass, these private companies could soon be reeling in tens and even hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars per year.
These private vendors could, under the bill, be tasked with managing a complex application process, connecting parents with private schools and education vendors, accepting payments, and “verify[ing] that program funding is used only for approved education-related expenses.”
“They’re a for-profit pass-through, which just means the state appropriates dollars, the vendor holds it, they reserve a small fee for themselves, and then they pass it on to the consumer,” Josh Cowen, education policy professor at Michigan State University and author of the book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, told the Texas Observer… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[US and World News]
✅ The European Union retaliates after the U.S. metals tariffs take hold (NPR)
The European Union on Wednesday announced retaliatory trade action with a series of duties on U.S. industrial and agricultural products that will go into effect from April 1, responding to the Trump administration increase in tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to 25%.
The world's biggest trading bloc was expecting the U.S. tariffs and prepared in advance, but the measures still place great strain on already tense transatlantic relations. Only last month, Washington warned Europe that it would have to take care of its own security in the future.
The EU measures will cover goods from the United States worth some 26 billion euros ($28 billion), and not just steel and aluminum products, but also textiles, home appliances and agricultural goods. Motorcycles, bourbon, peanut butter and jeans will be hit, as they were during President Donald Trump's first term… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ At Southwest Airlines, checked bags will no longer fly for free (Associated Press)
Southwest Airlines will begin charging customers a fee to check bags, abandoning a decades-long practice that executives had described last fall as key to differentiating the budget carrier from its rivals.
Southwest, which built years of advertising campaigns around its policy of letting passengers check up to two bags for free, said Tuesday that people who haven’t either reached the upper tiers of its Rapid Rewards loyalty program, bought a business class ticket or hold the airline’s credit card will have to pay for checked bags.
The airline did not outline the fee schedule but said the new policy would start with flights booked on May 28.
“We have tremendous opportunity to meet current and future customer needs, attract new customer segments we don’t compete for today, and return to the levels of profitability that both we and our shareholders expect,” CEO Bob Jordan said in a statement... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
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