BG Reads 6.14.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - June 14, 2024

June 14, 2024

Bingham Group Reads

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June 14, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 5 takeaways from a conversation with Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax (KUT)

🟣 Project Connect lawsuit likely headed to appeal before trial (Austin Monitor)

🟣 Planning Department announces update of Imagine Austin, due by late 2026 (Austin Monitor)

🟣 Austin comes up short in bid for EV HQ project, loses to North Carolina city (Austin Business Journal)

Read On!

[BINGHAM GROUP]

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

5 takeaways from a conversation with Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax (KUT)

T.C. Broadnax is about a month into his role as Austin’s new city manager. He started with a lot on his plate: building a budget for next year, finding solutions to house the homeless and hiring a new police chief.

He also has a lot of work to do around emergency preparedness. The City Council fired his predecessor, Spencer Cronk, over the city’s poor response to an ice storm that led to widespread power outages.

KUT recently sat down with Broadnax to talk about his priorities as city manager. Here are five takeaways… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Project Connect lawsuit likely headed to appeal before trial (Austin Monitor)

The Project Connect lawsuit expected to go to trial Monday appears destined for appeal instead.

Assistant Attorney General Alyssa Bixby-Lawson, whose office opposes efforts by the city of Austin and the Austin Transit Partnership to validate voter-approved bonds for constructing Project Connect, has indicated that the attorney general’s office will not move forward with the case on Monday.

In response to a question from lawyers for ATP and the city about whether they would be going to trial on Monday as previously scheduled, Bixby-Lawson wrote, “If the Judge calls this case and commences the trial without ruling on the AG’s plea to the jurisdiction, we will be immediately filing the notice of appeal.”

Plaintiff taxpayers, represented by attorney Bill Aleshire, and the attorney general have argued throughout the case that the court did not have jurisdiction to decide the issue. While the AG and the taxpayers have repeatedly asked Judge Eric Shepperd to rule on jurisdiction, ATP and the city has asked him not to… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Planning Department announces update of Imagine Austin, due by late 2026 (Austin Monitor)

Austin’s Planning Department has announced its plans to update Imagine Austin, the city’s 30-year strategic plan, over the next two-and-a-half years. The department plans to begin six months of community engagement that will end in December and provide the initial topic areas of most importance for assessing how the city will look 30 years into the future.

Passed in 2012, Imagine Austin considered how transportation options, housing affordability and environmental protection should fit into the city’s future, with the goal of making Austin more livable, connected and inclusive.

City Council allocated $3 million in the current city budget to cover the costs of updating the plan by the end of 2026.

April Geruso, division manager in the Planning Department, said the city’s population growth and major initiatives such as Project Connect are some of the factors that need to be wrapped into the new Imagine Austin. Other major comprehensive plans such as the Austin Strategic Housing Blueprint, the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan and the Water Forward Plan need to be acknowledged in the document, she said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

What is Imagine Austin? -> The Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan was adopted in 2012, provides a framework for how the city can grow in a compact and connected way, and identified eight priority programs to implement the plan.

Austin comes up short in bid for EV HQ project, loses to North Carolina city (Austin Business Journal)

A California-based electric vehicle charging company backed by several of the world's biggest car manufacturers almost picked the city of Austin for a $10.1 million corporate headquarters and research project before opting for a North Carolina city instead, according to interviews and documents obtained by the Austin Business Journal.

Ionna LLC — a joint venture created by BMW, General Motors Co., Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis — on June 11 announced it selected Durham for the investment that will take place over the next five years and create roughly 200 jobs with a minimum average wage of $128,457. The North Carolina Department of Commerce's Economic Investment Committee approved a performance-based job creation grant of $4.1 million to incentivize Ionna's project.

But the company was also evaluating Austin as the "competing site," according to incentive documents obtained by the Triangle Business Journal and shared with the Austin Business Journal. Committee members noted that the decision came down to labor availability, quality of life, business environment and available incentives, among other factors. Ionna is set to invest $10 million in the new facility by the end of 2028… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Austin Water aims to transform landscape requirements for new homes (Austin Monitor)

Austin Water is planning a landscape transformation initiative for new single-family homes as part of the city’s long-range water conservation strategies, according to a progress report Wednesday to the Water and Wastewater Commission.

Kevin Critendon, Austin Water’s assistant director over environmental, planning and development services, noted that while rainfall in May brought the combined Highland Lakes storage level to about 56 percent, Austin remains in a stubborn drought with once-weekly outdoor watering restrictions. The rainfall, Critendon said, “is certainly good news and it’s certainly taking a bit of anxiety off of us for the very near future, but that does give us an opportunity to reframe and rethink water conservation … around long-term behavior modification.”

The concept of “landscape transformation” grew out of the 2018 Water Forward plan, a road map for the city’s water future for the next 100 years. The plan, which is currently in its implementation stage, heavily focuses on innovative conservation strategies to ensure the sustainability of Austin’s water supply.

Landscape transformation, Critendon said in his presentation, “is a collection of activities that the utility is working on pursuing, aimed at changing behaviors and attitudes around outdoor water use, specifically lawn irrigation.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

What the Supreme Court's ruling on a popular abortion medication means for Texans (Houston Chronicle)

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected on Thursday a move to ban a widely used abortion pill, halting for now a case that could have drastically reduced access to reproductive care for millions of Americans. Siding with plaintiffs would have added further obstacles for Texans, who have almost no legal access to abortion in the state.

But all nine justices said the plaintiffs in the case did not having standing to sue over the federal Food and Drug Administration's approval of the medication, mifepristone, and its later actions to expand access to it. The high court did not weigh in on the merits of the case, only that the anti-abortion doctors and groups who sued hadn't sufficiently shown they were harmed by the regulations. The case is not over, however. The justices sent it back to the district court level, where three Republican-led states have since joined on. They could try to revive the lawsuit and return it to the high court. Here's what to know about the impacts of the high court's ruling for Texans.

Texas law bans all abortions except to save a pregnant person's life or prevent "substantial impairment of major bodily function." It does not include exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or incest. Mifepristone comprises half of a two-pill combination used to end pregnancies in more than half of U.S. abortions, and more than half of those in Texas.

Mifepristone blocks a hormone needed for the pregnancy to continue, and misoprostol empties the uterus. If the plaintiffs had won, what would it have meant for Texas? Without the pill, clinics and doctors in states where the procedure is legal said they would switch to using only misoprostol, the other drug used in the two-drug combination. That single-drug approach has a slightly lower rate of effectiveness in ending pregnancies but is widely used in countries where mifepristone is illegal or unavailable.

The case could have also impacted access for Texans who now have to travel out of state to access the procedure. Since abortions were severely restricted in Texas in 2021, at least 1,300 Texans a month have traveled to states including New Mexico and Colorado for abortion care, according to the group formerly known as Texas Policy Evaluation Project. Who brought the case? The plaintiffs included the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists, two prominent anti-abortion groups. They asked U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo to order the FDA to immediately suspend or withdraw its approval of the drug, arguing it is unsafe despite researchers saying decades of scientific evidence proves otherwise… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign in Phillipines to incite fear of China vaccines (Reuters)

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus. The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found.

Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation. Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.” After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day.

A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law. The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation… (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

District 4

District 6

District 7 (Open seat)

District 10 (Open seat)

_________________________

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