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- BG Reads 3.3.2025
BG Reads 3.3.2025
🟪 BG Reads - March 3, 2025
Bingham Group Reads
Presented by:
March 3, 2025
✅ Today's BG Reads include:
🟪 Fines for parking violations in Austin will increase starting Saturday (KUT)
🟪 Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander touches down on the moon (CBS Austin)
🟪 Effort to alter local incentives for corporations rattles economic development leaders (Austin Business Journal)
🟪 Texas is the low-cost, high-reward darling of Big Tech (Wall Street Journal)
Read On!
[CITY OF AUSTIN]
🏛️ Tomorrow: Council’s 9AM Work Session has been cancelled
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
✅ Fines for parking violations in Austin will increase starting Saturday (KUT)
Violating parking rules is about to get more expensive in Austin. New fines are taking effect Saturday, with some fines more than doubling.
The standard fine will increase to $75 for not paying for a metered space, parking in an intersection and parking within 30 feet of a stop sign. Previously, the standard fine for an expired or unpaid meter was $30.
The fine for parking in front of a stop sign or parking in an intersection had been $40. Austin City Council also approved new parking violations earlier this month. Blocking an electric vehicle charging station and parking in a bike lane will be illegal starting Saturday.
This is the first time in about 15 years the city has updated its parking rules and fines, city officials said… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Spring festival season to supercharge Austin economy (KXAN)
Year after year, hundreds of thousands of visitors come to Austin for world-renowned festivals and events. And, year after year, those festivals bring hundreds of millions of dollars into Austin.
Though slightly down from 2023, South by Southwest had an estimated $377.3 million impact locally in 2024. “We spend our money locally, and that’s great. But when we can get someone to contribute to our economy that doesn’t normally contribute to it – that’s a value add for us,” said Matt Patton, vice president of AngelouEconomics.
Patton said spring festivals impact the Austin economy predominantly through increased foot traffic, and taxes on hotel stays and car rentals. He also said that visitors’ festival trips may lead to future ones where even more money is spent.
“If they’re coming for a professional conference, they [might say], ‘Well, next time I want to bring the family with me,'” Patton said.
“[Festivals] are a great opportunity for us to showcase all the wonderful things we have here in Austin and Central Texas.” SXSW reported in 2024 there were around 10,500 hotel room reservations in the Austin area during the two-week festival, bringing in roughly $2.3 million for the city’s hotel occupancy tax… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander touches down on the moon (CBS Austin)
CEDAR PARK, Texas — Responsive space service company Firefly Aerospace announced Sunday that its Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon’s surface in an upright, stable configuration on the company’s first attempt. According to a recent press release, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 (named Ghost Riders in the Sky) is the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful soft-landing on the moon.
Blue Ghost completed the precision landing in Mare Crisium at 2:34 a.m. Sunday, carrying 10 NASA instruments. It touched down within its 100-meter landing target next to a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille.
Inertial readings confirmed the lander as being upright in a stable configuration. Following the touchdown, Firefly has been successfully commanding and communicating with the lander from its Mission Operations Center in Cedar Park… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
✅ Effort to alter local incentives for corporations rattles economic development leaders (Austin Business Journal)
In the Austin area, specific types of publicly funded financial incentives have been used by municipalities to lure everything from a big Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. campus and data center projects to speculative industrial parks and multiple Costco Wholesale Corp. locations.
Now, a Texas state senator is proposing sweeping changes to future uses of those incentives, a move economic development and business leaders contend would leave them without a valuable tool to attract business to the state — which has been a key driver of the Texas economy.
Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, filed SB 878 in January with the aim of altering so-called Chapter 380 and 381 incentives programs.
Those programs allow cities and counties to provide loans or grants to companies, often in the form of sales or property tax rebates based on job and capital investment benchmarks, when they're competing with other states or communities for projects or encouraging existing local businesses to grow… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Texas is the low-cost, high-reward darling of Big Tech (Wall Street Journal)
Texas notched another technology win this week when Apple said it is planning a new 250,000-square-foot factory in Houston to make servers for an artificial-intelligence system.
Tech investments are transforming the Texas economy, often via companies from California in search of lower taxes and fewer regulations on land use and labor. Austin already has Apple’s second-largest concentration of employees outside the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.
Samsung has a large and expanding semiconductor presence in the state. Earlier this year, Meta moved its trust and safety teams responsible for writing policy and reviewing content from California to Texas and other U.S. locations. Others have moved their headquarters there, including Realtor.com, Tesla and Hewlett Packard. (News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com.)
“In the end, it’s all about the cost of doing business, and the cost of doing business is just lower in Texas,” said John Diamond, an economist at Rice University in Houston. Recently enacted reproductive policies in Texas, once slammed by business, haven’t markedly dented the state’s allure. Instead, the state is attracting the kind of tech-bro culture that has permeated the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk.
He is developing his own town for employees, Snailbrook, near Austin. Musk-led SpaceX has also bought up houses in the South Texas village of Boca Chica, near a base for the rocket and spacecraft maker, despite some resistance from locals. Apple said the Houston facility—which the company will develop with longtime business partner Foxconn—will open in 2026.
Apple didn’t say how many people would be continuously employed there beyond saying it would create thousands of jobs. Asked for specifics, the company declined to elaborate. In the decade running through early 2024, jobs in the Texas high-tech sector grew at an average annual rate of 4.7%, compared with overall job growth of 2.1%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[US and World News]
✅ From egg prices to housing, US inflation is heating up again (Bloomberg)
No matter what metric you’re looking at, US inflation is moving in the wrong direction again. Whether it’s a house or a carton of eggs, price growth is once again intensifying across a broad range of indicators. Much of that has to do with the same supply and demand factors and labor-market pressures that led to the initial inflation surge in the pandemic, while planned tariffs from President Donald Trump are heightening concerns that prices will rise even more.
The scope of reports indicating a resurgence in price pressures — spanning from input costs to wage growth to inflation expectations — underscores the Federal Reserve’s intent to keep interest rates on hold for the time being. Policymakers’ preferred gauge of underlying inflation probably picked up in January, ahead of data due Friday. “Our outlook is very much for inflation to be coming back.
We’ve been saying second half of this year, but it seems like the pressures are already starting to build,” said Lauren Saidel-Baker, economist at ITR Economics. And between the administration’s policies on tariffs and immigration, there’s more to come, she said. “I want to be absolutely clear: there are upside risks to our inflation outlook.” Costs of materials like lumber and steel have been high for several years coming out of the pandemic and are moving up even more.
A measure of input prices for manufacturers this month reached the highest since October 2022, according to S&P Global. A similar gauge from the Institute for Supply Management rose last month to the highest since May.
Businesses surveyed by the Dallas Fed in February reported that an index of prices for raw materials doubled to the highest since September 2022, around the time when overall US inflation rates peaked. One food manufacturer responded that the items it imports will get more expensive because of tariffs, and higher prices will be borne by consumers... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
✅ Why California’s pro-housing laws aren’t producing more housing (Governing)
One California law was supposed to flip defunct strip malls across California into apartment-lined corridors. Another was designed to turn under-used church parking lots into fonts of new affordable housing.
A third would, according to supporters and opponents alike, “end single-family zoning as we know it.” Fast-forward to 2025 and this spate of recent California laws, and others like it intended to supercharge the construction of desperately needed housing, have had “limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply.”
That damning conclusion comes from a surprising source: A new report by YIMBY Law, a pro-development nonprofit that would very much like to see these laws work. The analysis studied five state laws passed since 2021 that have swept away regulatory barriers to building apartment buildings and other dense residential developments in places where such housing has been historically barred. The laws under review include: Senate Bill 9 from 2021, which allows people to split their single-family homes into duplexes, thus ending single-family-home-only zoning across California. In practice, according to the report, building permits for only 140 units were issued under the law in 2023.
Assembly Bill 2011 from 2022 was designed to make it easier for developers to convert office parks, strip malls and parking lots into apartment buildings. In 2023, developers on just two projects were given local regulatory approval to start work under the law. In 2024, the total was eight. The report found no projects that have made use of SB 6, a similar bill that passed that same year but with stricter labor requirements. SB 4 from 2024, the so-called Yes in God’s Backyard law, which lets churches, other houses of worship and some schools repurpose their land for affordable housing.
The report found no takers on that bill too. “It’s grim,” said Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law. Though she acknowledged that some of the laws are still new, she blamed their early ineffectiveness on the legislative process which saddled these bills with unworkable requirements and glaring loopholes… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)
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