The BG Reads
Posts
BG Reads 3.27.2024

BG Reads 3.27.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - March 27, 2024

March 27, 2024

View this email in your browser

Bingham Group Reads

Presented by:

March 27, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 Austin will offer T.C. Broadnax its City Manager job

🟣 Texas AG Ken Paxton reaches deal to end securities fraud charges after 9 years

🟣 Texas lawmakers and agency leaders experiment, ponder policies for an AI future

Read on!

✅ CLICK HERE for this week’s City of Austin meeting times and agendas.

[BINGHAM GROUP]

✅ [NEW] BG Blog - Takeaways From Austin’s City Manager Candidate Town Hall

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

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Austin will offer T.C. Broadnax its City Manager job (D Magazine)

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson told the Austin City Council Tuesday evening that outgoing Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax is its search committee’s lone finalist for the same job in the capitol city.

The announcement comes one day after Broadnax and the other finalist, Denton City Manager Sara Hensley, traveled to Austin for a town hall to answer questions from residents. It also comes roughly 21 days after Austin named Broadnax a finalist. Early documents from the city’s search firm indicated that Broadnax was ranked as the most qualified of the applicants.

“I give great thanks to both of our excellent candidates,” Watson wrote on the city’s message board Tuesday night. “I know this has been a daunting process, but they’ve demonstrated their professionalism. Austin would do well with either person.”

Broadnax announced his resignation last month after running Dallas for seven years. His last day at 1500 Marilla is slated to be June 3. A majority of the City Council asked him to resign, arguing that the fractured relationship between Broadnax and Mayor Eric Johnson made doing city business more difficult than it should be… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Related Articles:

Project Connect: Here's the latest timeline, cost estimates for Austin's light-rail plans (Austin American-Statesman)

Austin's light-rail planners and their guiding board will meet Wednesday to discuss the latest on the transit project's planning and construction schedule.

Last week, nearly a year since scaling back its initial plans due to ballooning cost estimates, the Austin Transit Partnership gave local media a preview of what's to come during the meeting, including possible construction and completion dates.

Board members will consider taking action to further the ongoing process to earn funds from the Federal Transit Administration, from which the light-rail planning agency is seeking matching grant funds to cover at least 50% of the costs of construction of the system.

Here's a primer before the meeting, including an explainer on recently released cost estimates, where the line will and will not go, when to expect construction, and the looming court trial where the city's funding mechanism for the system is at issue… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Sixth and Guadalupe, Austin's tallest tower, welcomes residential tenants (Austin Business Journal)

Sixth and Guadalupe gets plenty of attention for its 589,000 square feet of office space that tenant Meta Inc. is seeking to sublease, but it’s easy to forget that the new tallest tower in the city also houses 349 luxury apartments it must fill.

Now complete, Sixth and Guadalupe started welcoming its first residential tenants in mid-February, said Melissa Steed, who handles leasing at the property as director of operations at Kairoi Residential. Kairoi handled development of the tower’s residential portion, while Lincoln Property Co. handled development of the commercial portion.

Today, the building is about 18% leased and 11% occupied, Steed said, though Kairoi is expecting a slower-than-average initial leasing period due to the price of the luxury units. Most apartments in the building are priced at $5.07 per square foot, while the penthouse units can be leased at $10.47 per square foot, which she estimated was about $2 to $3 higher than the rest of the Central Business District.

According to the tower’s website, units still available range from 617 to 1,608 square feet.

Steed added that stabilization of the property is expected to take around 18 to 20 months, whereas she estimated a normal lease up in Austin would take about 14 months...(LINK TO FULL STORY)

Austin has failed to invest in its Black communities, says new report (KUT)

On March 11, the community organization Austin Justice Coalition and data activism nonprofit Measure jointly released a report titled, “The State of Black Lives in Austin.”

Drawing on Austin Justice Coalition’s deep community ties and Measure’s statistical expertise, the dossier’s 64 pages condemn the City of Austin for its failure to invest in and address Black communities in Austin — whose numbers have been declining since at least 2000 — and present a series of urgent needs elucidated by Measure’s comprehensive study.

For the first time since a similar report came out 16 years ago, the paper enables activists to wield the high card of hard numbers as they approach policymakers — and the coalition hopes the report will indeed furnish policymakers with invaluable guidance if they’ll come to the table… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

Texas Medical Board provides rules for how doctors can navigate Texas abortion laws. Some say it still leaves many questions. (Houston Public Media)

The Texas Medical Board published what it sees as guidance for doctors on how to define what constitutes a medical exception under the state's strict abortion ban on Friday. Dr. Sherif Zaafran, president of the Texas Medical Board, spoke to Houston Matters about why they chose to give guidance, rather than a specific list of exemptions.

"A list of exemptions is, number one, never going to be exhaustive," Zaafran said. "And, number two, it’s always going to have to take consideration of the circumstance of the case itself, and that’s why we use very specific language of medical judgment.” Zaafran added that medical judgment would be dependent on the circumstances of the case, the location of the case, and what other considerations had to be taken while that case was going on.

"One of the things that we listed in the proposal is the ability, for example, to transfer to a higher level of care," he said. "So, there may ... one circumstance where you’re in an urban area versus in a rural area, where there may not be the ability to render care in a way that you may be able to in an urban area." Zaafran said during the height of the pandemic the board tried to provide guidelines around elective surgeries, and many surgeons came back with questions about specific cases.

"A lot of surgeons would ask us, ‘Well, what about this type of case? What if it was cancer here or what if it was cancer that could not wait more than a month,'" he said. "And what we really said, at the end of the day, is you just have to document to us if you and your judgment believe that a case is emergent and describe the scenario in this situation and why." This is similar to that kind of circumstance, Zaafran said. Doctors will have to describe why they believe that a woman's life is in danger and an abortion must be done to preserve the woman's life or organ function… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Texas lawmakers and agency leaders experiment, ponder policies for an AI future (Texas Tribune)

The next time the Texas Department of Transportation is on the scene of a crash before you even realize there’s a standstill ahead, or if you see that state agencies are sending their invoices a little sooner, you might thank a computer.

In the brave new world of artificial intelligence, the new Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council is already finding surprising ways Texas state agencies are already using advanced computing to increase efficiency. Created by the Legislature during last year’s session to explore the role of AI in government, the council has been meeting for less than a month, but their findings so far are already creating buzz.

Last month, Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan appointed members to the council, which has wasted no time getting the ball rolling on investigating potential places for legislation. On Thursday, the council co-chairs, state Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, and state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, sat on a panel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Policy Summit addressing the future of AI as it relates to state government mere hours after the advisory council held its first substantive meeting... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Texas AG Ken Paxton reaches deal to end securities fraud charges after 9 years (Politico)

Prosecutors on Tuesday announced an agreement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that would ultimately dismiss securities fraud charges he has been facing for nearly a decade.

Under the 18-month pre-trial agreement, the special prosecutors in the case would drop three felony counts against Paxton. As part of the deal, Paxton must pay full restitution to victims — roughly $300,000 — and must also complete 100 hours of community service and 15 hours of legal ethics education.

The resolution lets Paxton avoid a trial, which had been set to begin in less than three weeks on April 15. Paxton was first indicted in 2015 after being accused of duping investors in a tech startup near Dallas before he was elected attorney general. If he had been convicted at trial, Paxton could have been sentenced to life in prison… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US/WORLD NEWS]

Baltimore bridge collapses after powerless cargo ship rams into support column; 6 presumed dead (Associated Press)

A cargo ship lost power and rammed into a major bridge in Baltimore early Tuesday, destroying the span in a matter of seconds and plunging it into the river in a terrifying collapse that could disrupt a vital shipping port for months. Six people were missing and presumed dead, and the search for them was suspended until Wednesday morning.

The ship’s crew issued a mayday call moments before the crash took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge, enabling authorities to limit vehicle traffic on the span, Maryland’s governor said.

As the vessel neared the bridge, puffs of black smoke could be seen as the lights flickered on and off. It struck one of the bridge’s supports, causing the structure to collapse like a toy, and a section of the span came to rest on the bow.

With the ship barreling toward the bridge at “a very, very rapid speed,” authorities had just enough time to stop cars from coming over the bridge, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

People say they're leaving religion due to anti-LGBTQ teachings and sexual abuse (NPR)

People in the U.S. are leaving and switching faith traditions in large numbers. The idea of "religious churning" is very common in America, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

It finds that around one-quarter (26%) of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, a number that has risen over the last decade and is now the largest single religious group in the U.S. That's similar to what other surveys and polls have also found, including Pew Research.

PRRI found that the number of those who describe themselves as "nothing in particular" has held steady since 2013, but those who identify as atheists have doubled (from 2% to 4%) and those who say they're agnostic has more than doubled (from 2% to 5%).

This study looks at which faith traditions those unaffiliated people are coming from.

"Thirty-five percent were former Catholics, 35% were former mainline Protestants, only about 16% were former evangelicals," says Melissa Deckman, PRRI's chief executive officer. "And really not many of those Americans are, in fact, looking for an organized religion that would be right for them. We just found it was 9%."… (LINK TO FULL STORY)