The BG Reads
Posts
BG Reads 4.23.2024

BG Reads 4.23.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - April 23, 2024

April 23, 2024

View this email in your browser

Bingham Group Reads

Presented by:

4.17.24 // Bingham Group celebrates 7 years in business!

April 23, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 City budget writers outline some rate increases

🟣 Tesla divorces gigafactory land from city of Austin

🟣 Layoffs and upheaval at Texas universities spur fear as lawmakers continue DEI crackdown

🟣 Supreme Court appears to side with an Oregon city's crackdown on homelessness

Read On!

[BINGHAM GROUP]

✅ (NEW) BG Podcast Ep. 248: Austin Politics Weekly Recap and What's Ahead

✅ BG Podcast Ep. 246: 2024 Elections - Austin Mayoral Round Up

On this episode we welcome back Jack Craver, independent reporter and founder of The Austin Politics Newsletter. Jack and Bingham Group CEO A.J. Bingham discuss the candidate field for the 2024 Austin Mayoral elections, including incumbent Mayor Kirk Watson.

✅ BG Blog: Land Development Code Amendments (4) Overview

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

[AUSTIN CITY HALL]

✅ FY 24/25 Budget Talk

Worth a review -> Briefing on Austin’s five-year financial forecast and economic outlook (Council Work Session, April 16, 2024)
- FY25-FY29 Forecast Presentation
- 2024 Economic & Sales Tax Forecast for the City of Austin
See also -> Mayor Watson’s Watson Wire Newsletter (4.18.2024)
Key Date -> Friday, July 12: City Manager T.C. Broadnax and his team will present the budget to Mayor and Council.

CLICK HERE TO REVIEW CITY OF AUSTIN PUBLIC MEETINGS / AGENDAS FOR THE WEEK OF APRIL 22, 2024

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

City budget writers outline some rate increases (Austin Monitor)

For Austin, like most other Texas cities, property taxes are its single largest source of revenue for the General Fund. The second-biggest revenue source is sales taxes, as explained by Budget Officer Kerri Lang at Tuesday’s City Council work session.

Overall, for homeowners paying fees in the typical range, city taxes and fees are projected to increase by 4.4 percent by Fiscal Year 2029. With overall sales tax collections not meeting expectations so far this fiscal year, the city is expecting a $13.2 million deficit. Somehow city budget writers and Council must close that gap by the time the FY 2025 budget is adopted in August.

Lang mentioned during her presentation that the city could hold a property tax election to allow the city to increase property taxes. Without such an election, the city may not impose a property tax of more than 3.5 percent under state law. Council members did not discuss the issue. If the city continues on its current trajectory without an increase in property taxes, budget writers project that the deficit for FY 2028-29 will have grown to $59.9 million… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Tesla divorces gigafactory land from city of Austin (The Real Deal)

Tesla is the latest company to exercise a controversial “de-annexation” law to bypass various regulations tied to its Austin gigafactory and surrounding land in eastern Travis County.

Tesla is de-annexing nearly 2,100 acres along State Highway 130 and the Colorado River, after its initial request was denied due to partial boundary discrepancies, the Austin Business Journal reported. The eclectic vehicle maker’s revised petition for removal from the City of Austin’s extraterritorial jurisdiction complied with a state law that took effect Sept. 1, and the city has no recourse in the action.

Senate Bill 2038 allows landowners to remove their property from a city’s outer reaches, allowing them to sidestep development approval processes. The legislation is especially relevant in rural areas on the fringes of major cities, where there are unincorporated communities over which municipalities have some control, and where they often provide services such as utilities and garbage… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

New EV station will not charge forward in East Austin (Austin Monitor)

Plans for an electric-vehicle charging lot spanning Pleasant Valley Road were thwarted by Planning Commission members who objected to its auto-centric nature at their last meeting.

The project would have created two electric-vehicle charging parking lots flanking Pleasant Valley at Cesar Chavez Street. The easternmost lot is currently home to a vacant building and a former home to food trucks, and the western lot is undeveloped. Under the neighborhood plan, off-street parking lots are a conditional use that requires approval by the commission.

Commissioners voted 7-3-3 to deny the request. Commissioners Adam Haynes, Patrick Howard and Grayson Cox voted against the denial, and commissioners Nadia Barrera-Ramirez, Jennifer Mushtaler and Ryan Johnson abstained.

“I really do think as a city that it’s important we have adequate EV charging infrastructure, but I would be much more comfortable if these charging stations were some sort of conversion from an existing auto-oriented use, like a gas station, rather than, in this case, a mixed-use site on an Imagine Austin corridor,” Commissioner Alice Woods said. “I just really don’t feel like this decidedly auto-oriented use is appropriate in this area that we’ve identified for walkability and pedestrian-oriented uses in our comprehensive plan.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

Layoffs and upheaval at Texas universities spur fear as lawmakers continue DEI crackdown (Texas Tribune)

In his first public comments since the University of Texas at Austin laid off around 50 employees that used to work in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, President Jay Hartzell tried to explain the fragility of the moment.

Like universities across the state, UT-Austin has scrambled to comply with Senate Bill 17, the new state law banning DEI offices, programs and training at public universities. After closing a multicultural center and ending a scholarship for undocumented students, Hartzell believed the flagship university was in compliance when the ban went into effect in January.

But Hartzell now felt the initial changes would not be enough to placate Republican legislators, who have put higher education under a microscope, he said on a Zoom call with faculty on Monday.

“The legislative climate toward higher education has been moving. And it's moved even since the bill was passed in June,” Hartzell said. “We have to make choices to worry about the long-run future of the university.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

How Texas unleashed a geothermal boom (The Hill)

With its nation-leading renewables fleet and oil and gas industry, Texas is poised to dominate what boosters hope will be America’s next great energy boom: a push to tap the heat of the subterranean earth for electricity and industry. That technology, known as geothermal energy, has demonstrated the rare ability to unite the state’s warring political camps — and is fueling a boom in startups that seek to take it national.

While other forms of renewable energy lost ground during Texas’s 2021 and 2023 legislative sessions before a Legislature that combined a hard-right political bent with a focus on building more “dispatchable” power, the geothermal industry advanced. State lawmakers passed four key bills in 2023 that helped lay the foundation for a new generation of drilling — with just one vote against. In the 2023 session, “we didn’t get put into the renewable bucket, we didn’t really get put into the oil and gas bucket,” said Barry Smitherman, former Republican head of the state Railroad Commission and head of the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance.

Instead, “we became this hybrid that was acceptable to people on both sides of the aisle.”? The regulatory clarity established by those bills has laid the groundwork for a new generation of startups powered by the state’s urgent need for reliable electricity in the face of increasingly extreme weather, as well as a growing trickle of oil and gas veterans leaving an industry they see as plagued by boom-and-bust cycles. As of last year, Texas had 11 of the 27 total geothermal startups in the U.S. On Wednesday, startup Bedrock Energy unveiled a new geothermal-powered heating and cooling system at a commercial real estate complex in Austin. Earlier this month, next-generation drilling company Quaise — which uses high-powered radio waves to drill through hard rock — filed a permit with the state energy regulator to begin field testing its drills, years ahead of what industry insiders had thought was possible. Houston-based Fervo is building a 400-megawatt project in Utah.

Military bases across the state are looking into geothermal as a potential source of secure electricity in an era of price spikes and cyberattacks. And later this year, Sage Geosystems, a company founded by three former Shell executives, will begin using a fracked well as a means of storing renewable energy — which CEO Cindy Taff said will get the company most of the way toward the ultimate goal of commercially viable geothermal electricity… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[NATION/WORLD NEWS]

Supreme Court appears to side with an Oregon city's crackdown on homelessness (NPR)

In a major case on homelessness, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday appeared to side with an Oregon city's crackdown on sleeping in public. The decision could have sweeping implications for the record number of people living in tents and cars, and the cities and states struggling to manage them.

The Supreme Court had declined to hear a similar case out of Boise, Idaho, in 2019. But since then rates of homelessness have spiked. An annual federal count found more than 250,000 people living in parks, on streets, and in their vehicles. Sprawling street encampments have grown larger and expanded to new places, igniting intense backlash from residents and businesses… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Pro-Palestinian protests sweep US college campuses following mass arrests at Columbia (Associated Press)

Columbia canceled in-person classes, dozens of protesters were arrested at New York University and Yale, and the gates to Harvard Yard were closed to the public Monday as some of the most prestigious U.S. universities sought to defuse campus tensions over Israel’s war with Hamas.

More than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had camped out on Columbia’s green were arrested last week, and similar encampments have sprouted up at universities around the country as schools struggle with where to draw the line between allowing free expression while maintaining safe and inclusive campuses.

At New York University, an encampment set up by students swelled to hundreds of protesters throughout the day Monday.

The school said it warned the crowd to leave, then called in the police after the scene became disorderly and the university said it learned of reports of “intimidating chants and several antisemitic incidents.” Shortly after 8:30 p.m., officers began making arrests... (LINK TO FULL STORY)