BG Reads 3.7.2025

🟪 BG Reads - March 7, 2025

March 07, 2025

Bingham Group Reads

Presented by:

March 7, 2025

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Prompted by convention center controversy, Council seeks changes to public art program (Austin Monitor)

🟪 Austin Rep. Ellen Troxclair files another bill to kill Project Connect (Austin American-Statesman)

🟪 ‘Greg Abbott: Forget Delaware—‘Y’all Street’ is open for business (Wall Street Journal)

🟪 Trump says Cabinet secretaries, not Elon Musk, are in charge of agency cuts (NPR)

Read On!

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ The Austin City Council meets today at 10AM:

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Prompted by convention center controversy, Council seeks changes to public art program (Austin Monitor)

In response to increasing scrutiny over Austin’s handling of public art, City Council voted Thursday to modernize the Art in Public Places program by updating policies to prevent mishandlings like the controversial deaccessioning of artwork at the Austin Convention Center.

The resolution, which was approved on the consent agenda, follows a heated debate over the fate of Riffs and Rhythms, a large-scale mosaic mural by John Yancey, a former University of Texas professor and respected artist.

Yancey’s work, commissioned in 1996 as part of the city’s public art initiative, is set to be destroyed as part of the soon-to-commence demolition and rebuilding of the convention center, an estimated $1.6 billion project.

The resolution directs the city manager to update the AIPP program to ensure it applies to public-private partnership projects while exempting affordable housing costs from its requirements.

It also seeks to establish a structured process for allowing alternative compliance with the program’s standards. Additionally, the resolution calls for reviewing how public art is incorporated into private development regulations, allowing more flexibility in how AIPP funds can be used for maintaining, relocating and storing public artwork.

It also permits art installations in publicly accessible spaces owned or controlled by the city, including properties managed by entities like the Austin Housing Finance Corporation… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ The District breaks ground, to elevate Round Rock (Community Impact)

By the first quarter of 2027, the first phase of an estimated $525 million project will bring high-rises and density to an area most Round Rock residents think of as cow pasture.

Known as The District, the mixed-use development first announced in 2017 by developer Mark IV Capital broke ground eight years later, on March 6. The first building to go vertical—a seven-story multifamily residential building with 316 units according to project information filings—was designed to be just as attractive from the roof as the curb, with plans indicating that buildings could be as tall as 15 stories.

The walkable development promises over 4 million square feet of residential, hotel, retail, restaurant and office space on a 65-acre plot of land, said Randall Tuller, senior vice president at Mark IV Capital.

While the project is expected to generate tax revenue for the city, developers also hope it will serve as an example of how a community with limited space for growth can expand upward instead of outward… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Election Q&A: Meet the Hutto City Council mayor candidates (Community Impact)

Two candidates will be on the ballot for the Hutto City Council mayor race. Mike Snyder is the sitting mayor, and is running for re-election against Henry Gideon.

City Council members, including the mayor, serve as the city's lawmakers, with their main responsibility being policymaking. In Hutto, council members and the mayor are elected at-large, allowing all registered voters in the city to vote for every position.

The mayor and six council members are elected to serve three-year terms. Voter deadline registration is April 3. Early voting will be held April 22-29, and election day is May 3… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Austin Rep. Ellen Troxclair files another bill to kill Project Connect (Austin American-Statesman)

Austin-area Republican state Rep. Ellen Troxclair has again filed legislation that would derail the city’s multibillion-dollar light-rail plan, known as Project Connect. House Bill 3879, filed Wednesday, is similar to legislation Troxclair filed in 2023 that came close to passing but was successfully targeted by Democrats on a technicality.

Her latest bill would prevent local governments and local government corporations from using money raised through tax rate elections to repay future bond debt and would let taxpayers sue to stop future tax collection if the scope of a project changes significantly after initial voter approval.

“This legislation aims to close two perceived loopholes in the law – that municipalities can use tax-rate elections to fund multibillion-dollar capital projects and that there are no limits on how much a project can change once voters have spoken,” Troxclair said in a news release Thursday announcing the legislation.

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, is expected to file the same version of the bill in the Texas Senate, according to the news release. While the legislation would apply to all local governments and affiliated entities statewide, it would have particularly significant ramifications for Project Connect… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Ikea plans another store south of Austin as it continues shift to smaller layouts (Austin Business Journal)

Ikea is opening a third store in the Austin area — this time on the south side of the metro. The Netherlands-based home furnishing chain plans to open a 35,000-square-foot store at 917 State Highway 80 N. in San Marcos at the San Mar Plaza retail center.

The store is slated to open in the spring, according to the company.

The new location will be a fraction of the size of its traditional store in Round Rock, which is 306,000 square feet. The smaller footprint is on trend with a different model Ikea has been gravitating towards.

“The opening of IKEA San Marcos exemplifies our strategy of developing smaller, more accessible urban store formats in this journey towards a more connected and accessible IKEA experience for the many," Javier Quiñones, CEO and chief sustainability officer of Ikea U.S., said in a statement… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

✅ Amazon’s delivery drones are grounded. The birds and dogs of this Texas town are grateful (Wired)

As the spring planting season arrives in College Station, Texas, certified master gardener Mark Smith is thrilled that peace is in the air. This time last year, a loud buzzing noise began disrupting Smith’s morning routine of checking on the peppers, tomatoes, herbs, and shrubs growing in his backyard. Several times an hour, an Amazon Prime Air delivery drone would noisily emerge about 800 feet away, just past a line of trees behind Smith’s home.

His neighbors began calling the fleet flying chainsaws. Smith, a retired civil engineer, preferred a different comparison: “It was like your neighbor runs their leaf blower all day long,” he says. “It was just incessant.” Amid technical and regulatory challenges, Amazon’s decade-plus quest to fly small items such as toothpaste and batteries to people’s yards in under an hour has yielded just thousands of deliveries.

The experience in College Station has highlighted another challenge: NIMBYs—or people who push for developments to be “not in my backyard”—potentially curtailing where Amazon operates. Over the past few years, drone delivery companies have started operating in several towns and cities across the US without much fuss. The Federal Aviation Administration conducted environmental reviews of 21 planned drone rollouts over the past four years, none of which received more than three critical public comments or any organized opposition—except for one location. In College Station, a university town of about 125,000 people, hundreds of ordinary residents along with the mayor and other officials banded together last year to oppose Amazon’s proposal to more than double the number of daily local drone flights.

The FAA received about 150 comments opposing the plans, including from homeowners’ associations and other groups. A parent said their teenage daughter feared using the swimming pool because of the drone’s camera. (Amazon says it faces forward, not down). A 92-year-old worried about doves that were no longer visible from a kitchen window. Many claimed their homes were losing value. One resident said their peace and quiet was being “invaded by some billionaire's insatiable desire to make even more money.”

In early July last year, councilmember Bob Yancy emailed the mayor and two city officials, explaining that complaints would intensify if Amazon didn’t move the drones. “Amazon’s MO thus far is to conduct aggressive PR efforts writ large while ignoring the immediately affected neighborhood,” Yancy wrote, according to public records obtained by WIRED.

“Without causing a public stink around their project, for their sake and ours, I think we need to quietly secure some assurances that they will act immediately to directly address neighborhood concerns.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Greg Abbott: Forget Delaware—‘Y’all Street’ is open for business (Wall Street Journal)

Two hundred years ago, American families huddling on the East Coast packed up and left. They pushed across Appalachia, traversed the Mississippi River, and braved marauding bands terrorizing the Plains, all in search of the promised land—Texas, where there was fertile soil and room to grow. Today, a similar migration is afoot—this time for American businesses huddling in Delaware.

For decades, Delaware’s business climate was a model for the country. Its famed Chancery Court boasted jurists steeped in corporate law. Doctrines developed over a century formed the firm foundation for companies to do business and were models for courts and classrooms across the country.

The First State was also a short train ride from Wall Street. Most of the Fortune 500 chose to make Delaware their first home. But Delaware has squandered its inheritance. American business law is built on a simple premise: Shareholders invest capital in a corporate enterprise, and officers and directors have a fiduciary duty to shepherd that capital wisely by maximizing profits. There are countless ways to shepherd wisely; no two C-suites take the same approach. So while courts should play an important role in policing matters like fraud and self-dealing, they must have a limited role in second-guessing the countless workaday decisions made inside a business.

Delaware used to understand this principle, embodied in the “business judgment rule.” Recently, however, the Delaware Chancery Court has subjected routine business decisions—even ones repeatedly approved by shareholders—to second-guessing. In Tornetta v. Musk, the court rescinded a years-old compensation package awarding Tesla CEO Elon Musk a 6% increase in shares for generating $600 billion in growth for shareholders. Sounds like a win-win.

The Chancery Court, however, thought there was a problem. In a 200-page post-trial opinion issued Jan. 30, 2024, Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick vacated the award because Mr. Musk is a “Superstar CEO” whose “ownership stake gave him every incentive to push Tesla to levels of transformative growth.” The lesson? Don’t be too much of a visionary or too motivated to increase shareholder value, or we might have to dock your pay.

Businesses read the writing on the wall. In June 2024, Tesla left Delaware and reincorporated in Texas. Tripadvisor also tried to leave, but the Chancery Court sought to turn Delaware into Hotel California: It claimed the power to “enjoin the Company . . . from departing Delaware” to reincorporate in Nevada, boasted of being merciful by opting to impose money damages instead, and then refused to allow Tripadvisor an appeal.

The Delaware Supreme Court was forced to clean up the mess in Maffei v. Palkon, undoing this “exit tax” on businesses preferring laws of other states. Businesses domiciled in Delaware have a choice to make. They can stay and be subjected to increasingly unpredictable theories of liability. Or, like Americans before them, they can come to Texas. Unlike Delaware, the Lone Star State is open for business… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Texas’ DOGE committee takes inspiration from Elon Musk’s federal operation (Texas Tribune)

A few weeks after Elon Musk waved a chainsaw at a conservative gathering touting the Department of Government Efficiency’s federal cost cutting efforts, the Texas House kicked off the first meeting for its own version of DOGE.

Leaders of the Delivery of Government Efficiency committee in the House are following in Musk’s footsteps, promising sweeping changes and reductions to the size of state government.

Committee Chair Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, told The Texas Tribune that DOGE in Texas share’s goals with its federal namesake in trying to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in government. “We’re going to make long-term changes in how we operate here for the state,” Capriglione said.

“This is about, ‘How do we fundamentally change the way the state operates so you can do it in a much more efficient way?’”

So far, Musk’s operation in the nation’s capital has fired more than 30,000 federal employees with more layoffs to come, drawing sharp pushback from Democrats and some concerns from Republicans. DOGE’s website has claimed to cut about $105 billion as of Monday, though that amount is unverifiable and is expected to be much lower… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

✅ Trump says Cabinet secretaries, not Elon Musk, are in charge of agency cuts (NPR)

President Trump told his Cabinet members on Thursday that they are in charge of staff reductions, not Elon Musk, amid continuing questions over the billionaire adviser's role in a drastic reshaping of the federal government. Trump said he'd told his Cabinet as much in a closed-door meeting with most of his secretaries, which Musk also attended. "I don't want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut. I want the Cabinet members to keep the good people, and the people that aren't doing a good job, that are unreliable, don't show up to work, etc., those people can be cut," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Tariffs by whim keep allies off balance and do the same to markets (New York Times)

On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on Fox Business to reassure nervous allies and even more twitchy investors that the Trump administration was negotiating a deal to avoid tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and that the president is “gonna work something out with them.” “It’s not going to be a pause” for Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs, he insisted.

“None of that pause stuff.” On Thursday, the world got what the president characterized as more of that pause stuff. Mr. Trump’s announcement that he had a good conversation with Mexico’s president, and would delay most tariffs until April 2, was only the latest example of the punish-by-whim nature of the second Trump presidency. A few hours after the Mexico announcement, Canada got a break too, even as Mr. Trump on social media accused its departing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, of using “the Tariff problem” to “run again for Prime Minister.”

Indeed, it appears that Mr. Trump is having enormous fun turning tariffs on and off like tap water. But others are developing a case of Trump-induced whiplash, not least investors, who sent stock prices down again on Thursday amid the uncertainty over what Mr. Trump’s inconstancy means for the global economy. (A later rise in stock futures pointed to rosier expectations for Friday.)

When the White House finally released the text of Mr. Trump’s orders on Thursday evening, it appeared that some of the tariffs — those covered in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated and celebrated in his first term — were indeed permanently suspended. Other tariffs were merely paused. Most everyone involved was confused, which may well have been the point.

As Mr. Trump hands down tariff determinations and then pulls them back for a month or so, world leaders call to plead their case, a bit like vassal states appealing to a larger power.

Chief executives put in calls as well, making it clear that Mr. Trump is the one you need to deal with if you are bringing in car parts from Canada or chips from China. And the president responds, as if he is granting reprieves, though not pardons. If, in a usual presidency, tariffs are debated by layers of experts and aides, their potential impact weighed with care, in the Trump White House the determinations are part whim, part weave, part pique… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

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