BG Reads 3.18.2025

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Bingham Group Reads

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March 18, 2025

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Central Texas town, counties prepare for future water demand as growth continues (Austin American-Statesman)

🟪 Can Austin clean up 'Dirty Sixth' Street? How the city hopes to reinvent the iconic strip (Austin American-Statesman)

🟪 After COVID, Texas is less prepared for the next pandemic (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Trump tries to void Biden's pardons, blaming autopen. Many presidents have used it (NPR)

Read On!

🗓️  Check out the Week Ahead for City of Austin public meetings and hearings.

✅ Discover how Bingham Group’s expertise drives results and

explore our experience here.

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

City Memos:

• 3.17 // Update on the City’s Business Expansion Program under Chapter 380 

• 3.17 // Update on the Downtown Austin Strategic Initiative

🏛️ Austin City Hall Week in Review (Week of March 10, 2025)

ℹ️ 2025 Essential Resources for Navigating the City of Austin

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Central Texas town, counties prepare for future water demand as growth continues (Austin American-Statesman)

For three years, no one has been able to swim in the clear, cool waters of Jacob's Well, a popular artesian spring in Hays County with the second-largest submerged cave in Texas.

That's because the drought and overpumping of the Trinity Aquifer have reduced its flow to a trickle, said David Baker, founder of the nonprofit Watershed Association that is dedicated to water preservation.

"It's sad to see something so beautiful impacted to the point where it's not as vibrant as it was," he said. Central Texas is among the fastest-growing places in the country. Along with the growing population, water-intensive businesses in Central Texas such as artificial intelligence, data centers and semiconductor manufacturing plants also are booming. Suburban cities in Hays, Williamson, Bastrop and Travis counties are trying to find ways to make sure everyone has the water they need. Many of those suburbs rely on at least one of three aquifers in Central Texas — the Trinity, Carrizo-Wilcox and the Edwards — along with Lake Travis and other area lakes for their water.

At least one city official said their town will run out of water for new development in a few years if no new sources are developed. Other officials say they have their cities' water needs met until 2040 or 2050. But some water experts, such as groundwater conservation managers and geologists, say they have doubts about promising residents water very far into the future.

One water district in Hays County has "no expectation" that the Trinity Aquifer can sustain the growth the county is experiencing in the long term, said Charlie Flatten, its general manager.

"Projections show that by 2036, Hays Trinity Groundwater Conservation District allocations will have reached the limit of the total available groundwater as modeled by the Texas Water Development Board," Flatten said. "Diversification of our supplies will require a long-term effort by local and state leadership to secure and deliver water."

The western Williamson County town of Liberty Hill, which relies on water from Lake Travis and the Trinity Aquifer, could run out of water for new development in a few years if it doesn't make plans to acquire more sources, said Zach Stein, a water resource project manager at HDR Engineering, during a City Council meeting in February.

"The city needs to develop more than five times the current water supply volume by 2050," Stein said. Stein said Liberty Hill's population of about 12,000 is predicted to grow by 12% annually for the next 10 years… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Planned 4,000-capacity music venue in Southeast Austin gets development partner (Austin Business Journal)

The Live Music Capital of the World is closer to getting a major new venue in Southeast Austin. Los Angeles-based AEG Presents, a global operator of music venues and festivals, has announced it will open the planned 65,000-square-foot, 4,000-person-capacity facility as soon as the first quarter of 2027 in Southeast Austin's River Park mixed-use development.

“We have always wanted to build a venue from the ground up in Austin, but we wanted to make sure the timing and location were right, and we had partners aligned with our vision,” Shawn Trell, AEG Presents’ executive vice president and CEO, said in a statement.

Plans for a music and entertainment venue in River Park, a 109-acre project at the northwest corner of East Riverside Drive and Crossing Place, were unveiled late last year. River Park is being developed by Dallas-based Presidium Group LLC and Switzerland-based Partners Group, who have said it will be built over 10 to 20 years and will feature multifamily units, office, retail, parkland and the entertainment venue.

River Park will be 10 million square feet once complete, the equivalent of about seven Barton Creek Square Malls or 20 Frost Bank towers… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Can Austin clean up 'Dirty Sixth' Street? How the city hopes to reinvent the iconic strip (Austin American-Statesman)

On a Friday night in February on East Sixth Street, a steely-eyed bar doorman rushed around a crowd agitating on the sidewalk and whipped a flashlight above his shoulder. He flicked it on and off toward the street where on-duty Austin police officers were on patrol. A fight was brewing. As a tiff among a group of women turned physical, at least half a dozen officers rushed in.

About half of them worked to yank the women off each other while the rest cordoned off the scene with outstretched arms. Police slammed one of the women to the ground and swiftly ushered her away in handcuffs. It was one of four fights that broke out that night on Austin’s most infamous street, nicknamed “Dirty Sixth” years ago by locals. Such melees are the main feature of a YouTube channel dedicated to street fights that has almost 90,000 subscribers. A major new initiative aims to change that.

ate last year, the Austin Police Department quietly rolled out a pilot program to reopen East Sixth Street to car traffic between Red River and Brazos streets on weekend evenings. The thinking was that breaking up the large crowds that congregate in the streets would reduce violence and the need for such intense police presence.

The move was provocative not just because it sought to reverse a decades-old practice — the street has been regularly shuttered on weekends since the 90s — but because past city leaders deemed it unfeasible as recently as a few years ago. Preliminary statistics from the first two months of 2025 suggest that the change has led to a decrease in violence — including at the hands of police officers — as well as injuries to officers and arrests. While initially billed as a temporary pilot program that would end in March, the city decided to continue on given the promising statistics. But fundamentally transforming a street that for decades has largely served a young and working-class night-time crowd — and cultivated a reputation among locals as the stepchild of downtown Austin — is no easy lift.

Leaders have tried and failed to do it for decades. Experts say a successful overhaul will require a full embrace of nearly everyone who touches East Sixth Street: business owners, visitors, law enforcement, investors, local elected leaders and other city officials. It's a massive task that will play out in the coming months and years… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Travis County sets aggressive goal to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2050 (Austin Monitor)

One of the policy areas that the county has most influence over is roadway safety. Past city limits, the Travis County Commissioners Court is responsible – along with the Texas Department of Transportation, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and other regional authorities – for managing the increased traffic that comes along with booming growth.

And as traffic increases, so do injuries and fatalities. In order to tackle that issue, the Commissioners Court voted unanimously last week to set a goal of reducing traffic fatalities by 50 percent by 2035 and completely eliminating them by 2050.

After incorporating safety recommendations from the community, the court will adopt its final safety action plan in May. In order to receive grant funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s SS4A program, municipalities must commit to aggressive goals like these.

Travis County’s action plan rolls into the bigger CAMPO six-county action plan, which includes Bastrop, Burnet, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties. Commissioners were originally presented with two options: either establishing a target date for achieving zero fatalities and serious injuries, or establishing a significant percent reduction by a target date, with an eventual, dateless goal of zero.

Instead, the county committed to a goal of zero by 2050, mirroring CAMPO’s ambitious plan… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ New strategic plan for downtown streets keeps momentum with stamp from Planning Commission (Austin Monitor)

The Planning Commission recommended a new plan for the city’s downtown streets with several amendments during a meeting on March 11, joining the Urban Transportation and Design commissions and including some of their respective recommendations for the plan.

The document in question, called the Austin Core Transportation Plan, was prepared by the city’s Department of Transportation and Public Works.

The Austin Monitor has previously reported on the plan, which seeks to further reorient the city’s downtown streets around urbanist principles.

Commissioner Alice Woods proposed an amendment to recommend fully converting Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth streets downtown from one-way to two-way, a prescription favored by several transit and urbanist advocacy groups, that narrowly failed 6-3 (amendments require a supermajority of 7-2 to pass)… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

✅ After COVID, Texas is less prepared for the next pandemic (Texas Tribune)

Texas entered the pandemic at a disadvantage, with an unhealthy and uninsured population, an underfunded public health system and workforce shortages across the health care system.

While some hoped the pandemic might force improvements, five years after the first Texan died from COVID, many of these long-standing issues have worsened. Today, Texas spends less per person on public health than it did before the pandemic.

Fewer Texans are getting themselves or their kids vaccinated. Local officials have less power to protect their constituents during a health crisis.

Dozens of state and local health officials, health care workers, epidemiologists and academics say the hard-earned lessons from COVID have been drowned out by a growing distrust of science, expertise and authority.

All of this leaves Texas less able and, likely, less willing to robustly respond to the next pandemic, at a time when measles and avian flu are spreading.

“A large group of people in the United States think that everyone in authority, not just the government, are stupid liars, and if you’re smart, you’ll do the exact opposite of what they tell you to,” said Dr. John Hellerstedt, who led the Texas Department of State Health Services during COVID. “This sets us up for catastrophic failure in the face of the next inevitable emergency.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Texas Republicans want to curb shareholder lawsuits, like the one that blocked Elon Musk's $50B check (Houston Chronicle)

Elon Musk began moving his companies to Texas after a Delaware judge blocked a more than $50 billion pay package for the Tesla CEO last year. Now Texas Republicans, who have welcomed the billionaire with open arms, are pushing legislation that business law experts say would make that court outcome next to impossible here.

Their proposal, a priority of House Speaker Dustin Burrows, would make it significantly harder for shareholders to file lawsuits in Texas against publicly traded companies, like the one that spurred Musk to ditch Delaware and urge other companies to file suit. age for the Tesla CEO last year. Now Texas Republicans, who have welcomed the billionaire with open arms, are pushing legislation that business law experts say would make that court outcome next to impossible here.

Their proposal, a priority of House Speaker Dustin Burrows, would make it significantly harder for shareholders to file lawsuits in Texas against publicly traded companies, like the one that spurred Musk to ditch Delaware and urge other companies to file suit.

They could test the state’s new business courts Shareholders could only bring so-called derivative claims that allege wrongdoing by executives if they held a 3% stake in the company, which for Tesla, would shrink the eligible pool to only a handful of big financial firms. But the legislation would go far beyond the billionaire Tesla, SpaceX and X CEO.

It would insulate all corporate directors and officers from most shareholder claims brought in the state’s new business courts, unless it could be proven that they committed fraud or knowingly broke the law. And the changes would shield executive’s emails, texts and other communications from shareholder inspection in most cases.

The bill would mark a significant expansion of protections for corporations in the state’s new court system that launched just last year and is a key piece of Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to convince more businesses to incorporate in the state.

The Republican governor has yet to comment on the proposal. State Rep. Morgan Meyer, a Dallas Republican who authored the bill, told a House judicial committee this month that the changes will shield businesses from “meritless, distracting lawsuits” and allow companies to “flourish, create new Texas jobs and contribute to Texas' soaring economy.” The changes would only apply to publicly traded corporations or companies that opt into the new rules via the court… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

✅ Trump tries to void Biden's pardons, blaming autopen. Many presidents have used it (NPR)

President Trump is claiming without evidence that some of former President Joe Biden's actions are invalid because he allegedly used a machine to automate signatures on documents, which is a longstanding practice in the White House.

In a late-night Truth Social post, Trump said his predecessor's preemptive pardons of members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection are "hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OF EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen."

The notion that Biden relied on the autopen to sign important documents was heavily perpetuated by the Oversight Project, an arm of the Heritage Foundation that played a key role in promoting false claims about noncitizen voting last year… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Discover how Bingham Group’s expertise drives results and

explore our experience here.

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