BG Reads 3.21.2025

🟪 BG Reads - March 21, 2025

March 21, 2025

Bingham Group Reads

Presented by:

March 21, 2025

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 City could raise taxes, cut costs amid funding fears (The Austin Chronicle)

🟪 City pauses $10M in airport art over concerns local creatives were excluded (Austin Monitor)

🟪 95,000 Texas children are waiting for state help to pay for day care (Texas Tribune)

🟪 ‘K Street crashes into ‘nearly un-lobbyable’ Elon Musk (Politico)

Read On!

✅ Discover how Bingham Group’s expertise drives results and

[COMMUNITY]

Austin Sunshine Camps’ Keeper Luncheon (March 26, 11:30AM to 1PM)

Since 1928, Austin Sunshine Camps (ASC) has provided the magic of overnight camp without the barrier of cost to more than 56,000 children in Central Texas.

As a past board president and longtime volunteer and fundraiser, I am proud to support this incredible organization.

This gathering is more than just a lunch—it’s an opportunity to hear inspiring stories, connect with fellow supporters, and meet the dedicated team behind Austin Sunshine Camps.

Wednesday, March 26, 11:30AM to 1PM

2225 Andrew Zilker Rd, Austin, TX 78746

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ City Hall:

🏛️ Memos:

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ City could raise taxes, cut costs amid funding fears (The Austin Chronicle)

The city of Austin has fared well, relatively speaking, through much of the nation’s economic turbulence of the last two decades. But as City Council prepares to work out the city budget for Fiscal Year 2025-2026, it appears the good times are coming to an end.

Over the past decade, as housing prices throughout the city mostly skyrocketed before leveling off in the past two years, job growth stayed relatively constant at around 4%, while sales tax growth mostly stayed apace. Over that time, the city’s population boomed as it had for the prior century (though, that too has begun to change).

But a bevy of factors are coalescing to produce an economic outlook that, at least for the upcoming budget, are motivating talk within City Hall of belt-tightening among city departments, with the specter of job cuts looming in the coming years.

Case in point: A directive from City Manager T.C. Broadnax requiring all city departments (including the big dogs like Austin Energy and the Austin Police Department) to engage in a “service prioritization exercise,” which is bureaucratic-speak for “find money in the budget that we can cut, if needed.”

A Feb. 18 email sent to department directors from one of the city’s financial managers asks that directors “identify 5% of [their department’s] operating budget ... that is farthest from its core mission and/or supports services that are redundant to those provided by another City department or another organization.”

The email included examples of programs to look for (“department was asked many years ago to provide [x service], no one remembers why...” and “department offers [X legacy service]” but “community demand is relatively non-existent”) and spreadsheet templates to document findings… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ City pauses $10M in airport art over concerns local creatives were excluded (Austin Monitor)

The city has paused three significant public art contracts intended for the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport expansion, in a move that may signal a reconsideration of how prominently the city should promote local artists in major public spaces.

Three contract approvals totaling more than $10 million have been pulled from next week’s City Council agenda, following concerns about the selection of non-local artists for these projects. Items 10, 11, and 12 pertained to authorizing negotiations and executions of agreements for artwork installations in the airport’s new tunnel and terminal-tunnel interface as part of the Art in Public Places program. ​

The decision to withdraw the items came after city officials, including Mayor Kirk Watson, expressed concerns about the lack of local artist representation in the proposed contracts.

“Though I believe that the work of these artists is important, I’ve always believed that any artwork that we place in the airport should highlight the importance of our local artists and highlight Austin’s creative, cultural community,” Watson wrote in a post on the City Council Message Board.

“I believe we should have a conversation about these contracts before moving forward at the upcoming work session.” Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes echoed those sentiments, highlighting the need for public investments to reflect and promote local artistic talent… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ LBJ Early College High School to get new sports facilities with modernization project (Community Impact)

LBJ Early College High School marked the start of a new modernization project with a groundbreaking ceremony March 12.

The details The new project is the second phase in a campus modernization initiative funded by Austin ISD’s 2022 bond. The second phase will continue the campus improvements focusing on upgrading athletic facilities.

The school will get a new athletics building with a competition gym, weight room, wrestling gym, locker rooms and a student athlete training center.

The new building is set to open spring 2028. LBJ ECHS will also receive a turf field, the first Austin ISD high school to receive one funded by the 2022 bond, according to a news release… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

✅ 95,000 Texas children are waiting for state help to pay for day care (Texas Tribune)

Today, nearly 95,000 Texas children are waiting for similar aid, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. About 1,300 of them live in Deep East Texas communities.

Those at the top of the list in Deep East Texas have been waiting for a scholarship since May 2024, officials said. State lawmakers are considering pumping the scholarship program with more money.

“My goal would be to infuse some dollars to reduce that wait list,” said state Rep. Armando Lucio Walle, a Houston Democrat. “So many families would like to go to work, but it's just cost prohibitive.”

However, child care professionals say that won’t help much. Like most of the nation, Texas has a shortage of child care centers and workers. Despite the extraordinarily high tuitions families pay to place their children in day care and after-school programs, those fees are rarely enough to cover the costs of operating these facilities… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Texas is poised to make measles a nationwide epidemic, public health experts say (Texas Tribune)

With its measles outbreak spreading to two additional states, Texas is on track to becoming the cause of a national epidemic if it doesn’t start vaccinating more people, according to public health experts.

Measles, a highly contagious disease that was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, has made a resurgence in West Texas communities, jumping hundreds of miles to the northern border of the Panhandle and East Texas, and invading bordering states of New Mexico and Oklahoma. Based on the rapid spread of cases statewide — more than 200 over 50 days — public health officials predict that it could take Texas a year to contain the spread.

With cases continuously rising and the rest of the country’s unvaccinated population at the outbreak’s mercy, Texas must create stricter quarantine requirements, increase the vaccine rate, and improve contact tracing to address this measles epidemic before it becomes a nationwide problem, warn infectious disease experts and officials in other states.

“This demonstrates that this (vaccine exemption) policy puts the community, the county, and surrounding states at risk because of how contagious this disease is,” said Glenn Fennelly, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Texas Tech University. “We are running the risk of threatening global stability.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ 'Don't do the shots,' say parents of West Texas child who died of measles (Houston Chronicle)

The parents of a West Texas child who died from complications of measles spoke out against vaccination, saying they believe measles can improve immunity and prevent cancer. The 6-year-old girl died at a Lubbock hospital Feb. 25, about three weeks after she developed measles, her father previously said in an interview with The Atlantic.

The Texas Department of State Health Services confirmed the following day that the girl, who was unvaccinated, had died from complications of the highly contagious virus. Her father said she died of pneumonia, which the CDC lists as the leading cause of death for children who contract measles.

Her death is the first in an ongoing outbreak in West Texas, which as of a Tuesday has grown to 279 cases with 36 hospitalizations. The girl belonged to a Seminole, Texas, community of Christian Mennonites, who have been hit particularly hard by the outbreak. Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization formerly led by now-U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., spoke with the girl's parents in an on-camera interview released Monday. Measles are "not as bad as they're making it out to be," the mother said through a translator.

She and her husband used Low German, a dialect spoken in Mennonite communities, at points throughout the interview. "Don't do the shot," the girl's parents said during the interview. They said they believe contracting measles strengthens the immune system in the long run and makes a person less likely to develop cancer. But measles can wipe out "immune memory" and make it more difficult for the immune system to fight future infections, a Harvard Medical School professor and immune system researcher told NPR. There is no evidence that contracting measles will prevent cancer in the future… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Irving leaders drop casino, nightclub portions of Las Vegas Sands zoning proposal (Dallas Morning News)

The Irving City Council early Friday morning obliged an abrupt request from Las Vegas Sand Corp. the day before, passing a version of a proposed zoning ordinance that stripped out permissions for gambling for the casino giant’s proposed “destination resort” near the former Texas Stadium site.

The votes bookend a public process that kicked off in mid-January, though the Sands Corp. plans did not garner much of the public’s attention until late February when the zoning proposal went before the City Council.

More than 170 people signed up to speak before the early Friday vote, with every speaker either criticizing Sands Corp.’s proposal or the city’s process. The tenor of their remarks differed from those earlier in the week — many viewed the company’s decision to withdraw the gambling and nightclub elements from the zoning proposal during a Thursday afternoon work session as a victory, though concerns remained that those parts could return later. The future of the resort proposal remained uncertain.

During the work session hours before the vote, Mark Boekenheide, the Sands Corp. executive who oversees the company’s global real estate footprint, did not say the company was abandoning the project but emphasized that casino gaming was essential to move that plan forward.

“I cannot commit to building a four million square foot project and spend four billion dollars — the economics will not work without a casino piece,” Boekenheide told City Council members during the work session, adding the Sands Corp. may consider building hotels without the zoning amendment or the legalization of gambling. Boekenheide said Sand Corp.’s pivot was partly due to the concerns raised by speakers during a heated Monday planning and zoning meeting.

That meeting’s public comment period began in the afternoon and ran into early Tuesday morning, culminating in a narrow 5-4 vote to recommend that the City Council approve the amendment with the gaming portion included. Another factor, he explained, was the uncertainty of when or if gambling would be legalized in Texas. The Texas Legislature would need to vote to send a constitutional amendment to voters state-wide for consideration. The amended zoning proposals with no gambling portion passed in two separate 6-3 votes… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

✅ ‘K Street crashes into ‘nearly un-lobbyable’ Elon Musk (Politico)

Washington’s lobbying class is grasping for an effective approach to an unprecedented challenge: how do you influence a mercurial outsider like Elon Musk who has immense but unofficial power and is the world’s richest person. But solving for Musk could pay huge dividends. If K Street can figure out how to lobby him, they can capitalize off the anxiety pervading Washington that drives companies and industries to sign six-figure retainers.

Lobbyists find they’re being asked not only to save a company from their fear of Elon Musk’s unpredictable social media ire or a sweeping DOGE cut that would hit their industry or wipe out their contract.

Washington’s lobbying class is grasping for an effective approach to an unprecedented challenge: how do you influence a mercurial outsider like Elon Musk who has immense but unofficial power and is the world’s richest person. But solving for Musk could pay huge dividends. If K Street can figure out how to lobby him, they can capitalize off the anxiety pervading Washington that drives companies and industries to sign six-figure retainers.  “

Washington is really used to deliberative processes where stakeholders get input,” said Alex Conant, co-founder of Firehouse Strategies. “Musk doesn’t believe in any of that.”

That frustration is shared across Washington, where private interests trying to protect their own projects—or nudging DOGE to target a competitor instead, sometimes through DOGE’s X account — are running into the same problem. Musk operates with a singular mission: cutting government waste at breakneck speed, with little patience for the conventional playbook.

Lobbyists find they’re being asked not only to save a company from their fear of Musk’s unpredictable social media ire or a sweeping DOGE cut that would hit their industry or wipe out their contract. They’re also being queried about potential real estate investments from the General Services Administration’s plans to sell federal buildings and business opportunities arising from Musk’s effort to modernize government software.

Lobbyists without direct ties to Musk’s inner circle are deploying other strategies such as working more conventional agency contacts or scouring the DOGE leader’s social media feed… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Discover how Bingham Group’s expertise drives results and

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