As part of the City Manager recruitment process, the City is inviting community members to submit questions that may be included during the moderated discussion.

Questions can be submitted here at SpeakUpAustin page.
Questions will be accepted until 11 p.m. March 20.
The two candidates under consideration, T.C. Broadnax and Sara Hensley, will be introduced on Monday, March 25 at the Permitting and Development Center, 6310 Wilhelmina Delco Drive.
The event begins at 6 p.m. and doors will open to the public at 5:30 p.m. Free parking will be provided at the adjacent parking garage, which can be accessed from Wilhelmina Delco Drive, Middle Fiskville Road or East Highland Mall Boulevard.

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

For the first time in 20 years, more people are leaving Travis County than moving in (KUT)

Between July 2022 and July 2023, roughly 2,500 more people moved out of Travis County than moved in. This figure, which comes out of population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week, marks a reversal in population trends over the last two decades.

“I haven’t seen negative net migration to Travis County in a long time,” said Lila Valencia, demographer for the City of Austin, most of which sits in Travis. The last year fewer people moved to the county than left was 2002.

Travis County has long been known for its ability to attract tens of thousands of transplants each year. Despite dwindling migration numbers recently, the county’s population still climbed by about 7,000 people between the end of 2022 and the first half of 2023. The increase was driven by births instead of by people moving here… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Council hears plan for another South Congress PUD (Austin Monitor)

A proposed 6.0102-acre planned unit development would mean big changes for the southwest corner of South Congress Avenue and Riverside Drive, including the possibility of a tower more than 500 feet tall. City Council heard details about the plans at its work session Tuesday.

Zoning Officer Joi Harden offered a development assessment, describing the PUD proposal as a mixed-use development of approximately 800 residential units, a 225-unit hotel, 200,000 square feet of office space, 90,000 square feet of retail use, 30,000 square feet of restaurant use and a 25,000-square-foot grocery store. She said the majority of the parking for the development would be achieved through a below-grade parking structure. The addresses slated for redevelopment are 500 and 510 S. Congress Ave. (the location of the four-decades-old karaoke bar Ego’s), 105 W. Riverside Drive and 407 1/2 Haywood Ave.

PUD applicants are required to participate in a development assessment before filing the actual request for zoning changes… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Bond election could decide funding for I-35 'cap and stitch' project in Austin (KVUE)

On Tuesday, it was revealed a bond election could be part of the equation to make major changes to Interstate 35 in Central Austin.

On Tuesday morning, the Austin City Council got a briefing on plans for the I-35 "cap and stitch" project, which will lower I-35 in Central Austin and put "caps" on top of the highway. Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) renderings show what the finished product would look like.

City staff told council members a number of funding sources will be needed to make the project happen, including a possible bond election in 2026. That would allow voters to weigh in on whether the city should be able to borrow money for the project, but nothing is set in stone yet.

On Thursday, the city council will consider a resolution that would start the process to get a $193 million state infrastructure bank loan for part of the project… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Shaking off Paxton’s resistance, ATP secures request for bond validation in county court (Austin Business Journal)

The Austin Transit Partnership, the agency behind the city’s $4.8 billion plan to develop a light rail system, has taken a step forward in an ongoing legal saga that risks disrupting the generational investment in city infrastructure.

The Travis County Court has accepted the Austin Transit Partnership’s request to seek court validation of its bond procurement process and combine the review with a lawsuit that questions the financing methods needed to build new train lines.

The case is now set to begin on May 28, and the trial is expected to take three days, according to court records. The judgment would enable ATP to fast-track the lawsuit for completion within a year, compared with about 18 months otherwise…

(LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

Texas’ new immigration law is blocked again (Texas Tribune)

A federal appeals court late Tuesday night stopped a state law allowing Texas police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the Texas-Mexico border — hours after the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed it to go into effect.

Earlier in the day, the high court had allowed the law to go into effect after it sent the case back to the appeals court, urging it to issue a ruling promptly. The appeals court soon scheduled a hearing for Wednesday morning. And on the night before hearing oral arguments the appeals court issued an order to let a lower court's earlier injunction stopping Senate Bill 4 stand, according to a filing.

The Supreme Court earlier Tuesday let SB 4 go into effect but stopped short of ruling on the law's constitutionality, which has been challenged by the Biden administration.

Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas at Austin law professor, said the back-and-forth is “indefensibly chaotic.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

DFW home to nation's 2 fastest-growing counties (Dallas Business Journal)

More people moved out of Dallas County than moved in from mid-2022 to mid-2023, according to the latest federal estimates. But DFW led the nation in metropolitan area population growth. So where are people landing? We've got the full list. So much of the growth story in Texas, including Dallas-Fort Worth, is about the suburbs.

That was reinforced last week when the U.S. Census Bureau released its latest population estimates for metro areas and counties. The Dallas-Fort Worth metro added an estimated 152,598 people from mid-2022 to mid-2023, the largest raw increase in the nation, Dallas Business Journal's Plamedie Ifasso reported.

But Dallas County actually saw negative net domestic migration, according to the agency's estimates, accelerating a trend seen the year prior. Its overall population increased, thanks to births outpacing deaths. That begged for further exploration of where the DFW metro is actually growing. Kaufman County and Rockwall County — both on the east side of the Metroplex — ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in the country and the state with estimated population increases of 7.6% and 6.5%, respectively, according to a Dallas Business Journal analysis of the Census Bureau data. You can see the full list of Texas' 254 counties below.

This growth has major ramifications for business and government. Homebuilders and retailers need to know where people are headed, while school district leaders and city planners must prepare for how growth will impact the groups they serve. Huge neighborhoods continue to spring up on DFW's urban periphery, which is creating new business opportunities, as well as challenges around infrastructure... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US/WORLD NEWS]

‘Tough-on-crime’ policies are back in some places that had reimagined criminal justice (Stateline)

Fueled by public outrage over the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and other high-profile incidents of police violence, a seismic shift swept across the United States shortly afterward, with a wave of initiatives aimed at reining in police powers and reimagining criminal-legal systems. Yet less than half a decade later, political leaders from coast to coast are embracing a return to “tough-on-crime” policies, often undoing the changes of recent years.

This resurgence is most palpable in the nation’s major urban centers, traditionally bastions of progressive politics. San Francisco voters earlier this month approved ballot initiatives that would require drug screenings for welfare recipients and would loosen restrictions on police operations. The District of Columbia, too, has pivoted toward a harder stance on crime, with its mayor signing into law a sweeping package that toughens penalties for gun crimes, establishes drug-free zones and allows police to collect DNA from suspects before a conviction.

Local and state leaders in blue and red states — including California, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont — also have looked to toughen their approaches to crime and public safety in a variety of ways. Lawmakers have proposed bills that would stiffen retail theft charges, re-criminalize certain hard street drugs, keep more suspects in jail in lieu of bail and expand police powers. Many are passing with bipartisan support.

Policymakers are responding to public concerns over rising crime rates and heightened fear and anger due to a surge in offenses such as carjackings and retail theft. To some criminal justice experts, the legislative actions represent more of a partial rollback of progressive criminal justice changes rather than a complete return to past punitive policies.

“The issue for most people isn’t whether something is up or down by 10%. It’s that they are seeing randomness and brazenness, and getting a sense of lawlessness,” said Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. “Some of what we’re seeing is more like … shaving off the edges of some of the policies that felt too lenient.”

The percentage of Americans who think the United States is “not tough enough” on crime grew for the first time in 30 years, according to a Gallup poll released in November. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they believe the criminal-legal system is too soft, up from 41% in 2020. While national crime data is notoriously difficult to track and understand, violent crime across the United States decreased in 2022 — dropping to about the same level as before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the FBI’s annual crime report… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

The Fed is playing a waiting game on rate cuts. The rules are starting to change. (Wall Street Journal)

For investors, the big question hanging over this week’s meeting of the Federal Reserve is whether it will wait a little longer to cut interest rates because of recent, firm inflation readings. The Fed, though, has a different preoccupation: If it waits too long, will it inadvertently cause a recession? Officials won’t put recession risk front and center this week. Yet that risk is likely to drive its thinking over the remainder of the year, leaving it on track to cut rates at some point. The central bank will keep its benchmark interest-rate target at a range of 5.25% to 5.5%, a 23-year high, when its two-day meeting ends Wednesday.

The focus will be on its latest interest rate and economic projections. In their latest projections in December, most officials thought a key gauge of inflation would fall from just above 3% at the end of 2023 to just below 2.5% at the end of this year. Most anticipated three quarter-point rate cuts this year.

Since then, inflation in both January and February has been higher than expected. Investors are intensely focused on whether officials still project three cuts or just two. They will also hunt for clues from Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s news conference over whether the first cut is still possible in June, as futures markets currently anticipate, or later. Earlier this month, Powell suggested the central bank was on track to cut rates by midyear as long as monthly inflation data assured them a downward trend was still intact.

“When we do get that confidence, and we’re not far from it, it’ll be appropriate to dial back the level of restriction so that we don’t drive the economy into recession,” he told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Since then, monthly inflation came in higher than expected in February. The question is whether that was a fluke and the downward trend from the last six months of 2023 will resume, or alternately, whether that slowdown was itself the aberration.The fixation on interest-rate projections this week obscures a bigger shift inside the Fed in the past year, with bigger implications for the economy. The reason rates are above 5% today is that the world looked different in the summer, when the Fed pushed them to this level. At the time, officials feared inflation might become entrenched at 3% or higher, unacceptably above officials’ 2% goal… (LINK TO FULL STORY)