The first and second memos are reviews of Mr. Broadnax's time as city manager of Dallas and Tacoma, respectively. The information was pulled from news articles from the time. We've provided links where appropriate.
The last is a review of the seven city of Dallas budget's Mr. Broadnax spearheaded. This was compiled through review of publicly available budget documents.
BG Memo Link - Contact me for general questions or comments. If there are specific business/policy concerns, we’re happy to schedule time to consult -> [email protected].

✅ 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.

CLICK HERE TO REVIEW CITY OF AUSTIN PUBLIC MEETINGS / AGENDAS FOR THE WEEK OF MAY 6, 2024

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Travis County judge to hear arguments over Central Health’s payments to Dell Medical School (KUT)

A hearing is scheduled Thursday in a lawsuit that alleges Travis County’s taxing hospital district Central Health has improperly funded money to Dell Medical School since 2014.

Judge Amy Clark Meachum of Travis County’s 201st district court will hear arguments in Birch v. Travis County Healthcare District, which was filed by a group of local taxpayers in 2017.

At issue is a $35 million annual payment from Central Health to Dell Medical School at UT Austin, which was enabled by a ballot proposition approved by voters in 2012. The proposition raised taxes collected by Central Health, in part to help support the development of a new medical school “consistent with the mission of Central Health.”

The suit’s plaintiffs — Rebecca Birch, Richard Franklin III and Esther Govea — say that money has been used by Dell Medical School for things like education, research and administrative costs. Fred Lewis, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that funds raised by a narrowly-designated, special-purpose district like Central Health should only be used to pay medical costs for poor residents… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

How T.C. Broadnax's salary as Austin's city manager compares across the state (KUT)

T.C. Broadnax began his job as Austin's new city manager on Monday. He is starting as the city's highest-paid employee at nearly half a million dollars. By comparison, his compensation is among the highest in the state, even over larger cities like Dallas and San Antonio.

KUT collected data from those cities and others to see what might explain the large difference in salaries. Here's what we found out… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Changes to the city’s Corridor Program raise ‘serious transparency concerns’ for transportation commissioners (Austin Monitor)

A massive shortfall in the city’s Corridor Program has caused work to be paused or cut back in some areas of the city. At their most recent meeting, Urban Transportation commissioners questioned the lack of public engagement on the changes.

The current cost of all of the improvements envisioned in the program is about $1 billion, which is more than double the $482 million approved by voters through the 2016 mobility bond. The shortfall is expected to increase as inflation continues.

According to a presentation by Capital Delivery Services Deputy Director Eric Bailey, a number of projects along Airport Boulevard, Burnet Road, Lamar Boulevard, Slaughter Lane and William Cannon Drive have been put on hold or scaled back until funding is identified.

“About a year ago, as we were moving from the design phase into construction, is when it really hit home that we weren’t going to be having the funding available in the foreseeable future to actually take these projects through to construction,” Bailey said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Taylor-based foundation gifts 68-acre property to UT to support semiconductor ecosystem (UT News)

A foundation formed 28 years ago to attract a higher education center to the city of Taylor, just northeast of Austin, has given The University of Texas at Austin a 68-acre tract that will be developed into The University of Texas at Austin – Taylor Center.

The property is situated near Samsung Austin Semiconductor’s new 6 million-square-foot chip fabrication plant and will catalyze the region’s growth as a national leader in the semiconductor supply chain.

“Advancing innovation, growing education and cultivating leadership in the semiconductor space is a major area of focus for The University of Texas, and we are excited to have a presence in the burgeoning Taylor community and the opportunity to further shape the expanding footprint of the semiconductor ecosystem in Central Texas,” said President Jay Hartzell.

“We are grateful to the Temple College at Taylor Foundation for welcoming UT into its vision for educational and economic opportunity in the region and to the City of Taylor for its commitment to supporting one of the nation’s most critical needs.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Texas Republicans vowed to rid politics from prosecution. A push to remove one DA shows the opposite (Houston Chronicle)

Last year, Republican lawmakers boasted about removing politics from local criminal prosecutions when they passed a law that makes it easier to remove elected district attorneys who refuse to try certain crimes. But the law’s first real test — a push to remove Austin’s Democratic district attorney — shows their attempts have only injected more politics into the process.

The petition against Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza, which a local resident submitted last month, was written by Garza's former Republican opponent. The judge overseeing the case was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, an outspoken critic of Garza. And the Republican prosecutor assigned to the case has challenged one Texas city’s move to decriminalize low-level marijuana possession, a policy championed by Garza and many other reform-oriented prosecutors.

Garza, who easily won his recent Democratic primary for reelection, has blasted the petition as flawed and politically motivated. “In March, a few billionaires and MAGA Republicans and their dark PAC money failed to stop our progress at the ballot box,” he said in a statement. “Now, their allies are wasting taxpayer money trying to undermine the voters' decision of Travis County.

They failed once, and they'll fail again." House Bill 17 was part of a larger conservative effort to clamp down on progressive criminal justice policies in Texas’ big cities. It came after several district attorneys announced publicly that they would not prosecute low-level drug possession, abortion-related crimes and child abuse allegations against parents of transgender children receiving transition care. Texas law had already spelled out a process for removing elected officials on the basis of “incompetency,” “official misconduct” or “intoxication.” A local judge could preside over the case, and a local prosecutor could present it, though county officials had the option to appoint someone else... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

Here’s why UT and A&M are unlikely to divest from Israel (Texas Tribune)

Across University of Texas System campuses and Texas A&M, groups of students, faculty and staff have staged protests in solidarity with Palestinians and demanded that their schools divest from companies tied to Israel or weapons manufacturing.

As some have pointed out, this would require action from the investment management company that oversees the endowment funds for the UT and Texas A&M Systems.

“It's clear that UT and other universities really have the opportunity to make a massive global impact with the decisions they make about their investments,” said Annette Rodriguez, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin who is part of a coalition of UT-Austin groups calling for divestment from companies supplying the Israeli Defense Forces.

The governance structure of the university systems under Gov. Greg Abbott, a staunch Israel supporter, makes that a long shot. And some university system leaders have already expressed opposition to divestment. Here’s why university groups say they continue to protest and call for divestment… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Who will be the next Houston Police Department Chief? Here are names that have been raised (Houston Chronicle)

Mayor John Whitmire hasn't yet outlined his plans to hire a new, permanent police chief to take the place of former Chief Troy Finner. But that hasn't stopped some names from being floated as potential replacements to lead the state's largest police force. Whitmire on Wednesday said he wasn't ruling out an "internal or external chief," and that he plans to use his personal network to find candidates and lead the search himself. Here are some of the names that have been floated to be the next Houston chief.

Eddie Garcia, the chief of the Dallas Police Department, emerged as a rumored candidate for the Houston job less than a day after Finner's departure. Dallas TV station WFAA reported that Houston and Austin were "showing interest in potentially hiring" Garcia, who's been in his position since 2021.

Garcia is an at-will employee and can leave at any time, the station reported. Art Acevedo was Houston's police chief from 2016 until 2021. Previously the leader of the Austin Police Department from 2007 until 2016, he left Houston to become the chief in Miami. His time in Florida lasted just 7 months. Larry Satterwhite was made the acting chief of police the night of Finner's retirement.

A 34-year veteran of the department, Satterwhite came up as a patrol officer, SWAT team member and special operations commander, before being appointed as executive assistant chief of field operations in 2021 by Finner. In that position, Satterwhite supervised some 3,000 HPD employees who work in the department's patrol divisions… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Two political consultants plead guilty in Henry Cuellar bribery case (Texas Tribune)

Two political consultants agreed to plead guilty to charges that they conspired with U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar to launder more than $200,000 in bribes from a Mexican bank, according to recently unsealed court documents that show the consultants are cooperating with the Justice Department in its case against the Laredo Democrat.

Cuellar, a powerful South Texas Democrat, was indicted with his wife Imelda on charges of accepting almost $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican commercial bank, Banco Azteca. The indictment, unsealed last week, accuses Cuellar of taking money from the bank in exchange for influencing the Treasury Department to work around an anti-money laundering policy that threatened the bank’s interests. Cuellar allegedly recruited his former campaign manager, Colin Strother, and another consultant, Florencio "Lencho" Rendon, to facilitate the payments, according to court records… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

What Azerbaijan wants from Texas politicians (Texas Monthly)

It’s harder to be a moderate in Washington, D.C., than ever before. Nobody knows that better than the veteran centrist Democrat Henry Cuellar, who faces prosecution from the federal government for his work on one of the few remaining bipartisan causes in Texas politics: the glorious nation of Azerbaijan.

On Friday, the Department of Justice indicted Congressman Cuellar, who represents Laredo, on fourteen counts, including bribery, conspiracy, failure to register as a foreign agent, and money laundering. Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, are alleged to have used a network of shell companies to hide $600,000 in payoffs from a Mexican bank and an Azerbaijani oil company. For those payments, the feds allege, Cuellar offered concrete deliverables, the “quid” for the “quo.” Cuellar is supposed to have promised to pressure Biden administration officials to back off from enforcing regulations on Mexican banks and to have promised the Azerbaijanis he would back them in Congress.

Cuellar denies the charges. His office did not respond to an interview request from Texas Monthly, but in a full-throated press release about the indictment, he wrote that “everything [he has] done in Congress has been to serve the people of South Texas.”

For a powerful borderland representative who is the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee (Cuellar stepped down after the indictment), allegations of entanglements with a Mexican bank would seem to make a certain amount of sense. But Azerbaijan’s alleged involvement with Cuellar struck many as a curious detail. To many Americans, “Azerbaijan” sounds a bit like one of those fake Eastern European countries that produce the villains in Liam Neeson movies. Azerbaijan is, instead, an oil-rich country that won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The nation is a family-run despotism: only two men have run the country since 1993—first Heydar Aliyev, and then his son, Ilham Aliyev.

The country’s wealth is tied up in the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, known as SOCAR, which is also run by the Aliyev family. The irony, though, is that Uncle Joe’s Department of Justice is cracking down on Cuellar for his work on one of the last remaining issues that basically the entire political spectrum in Texas agrees on: advocacy for the immortal nationhood of the Azerbaijani people.

If that sounds like a joke, the joke’s on us. Azerbaijan’s lobbying efforts were a quiet drumbeat in our state for much of the last fifteen years or so. The drumbeat was too soft for almost anyone to hear, and on the face of it, it seems to have accomplished little except getting Cuellar in trouble. But it’s a revealing campaign to explore, because it shows how easy it is for a foreign (and dubious) government to purchase influence in Texas, a state where the political system is already purpose-built to allow rich folks to buy influence... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[2024 Austin City Council Race Watch]

This fall will see elections for the following Council Districts 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, and Mayor.

Declared candidates so far are:

Mayor

District 2

Council Member Vanessa Fuentes

District 4

District 6

District 7 (Open seat)

District 10 (Open seat)

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