BG Reads 7.3.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - July 3, 2024

July 03, 2024

Bingham Group Reads

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July 3, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 Updated City of Austin Org Chart (7.2.2024)

🟣 Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D) calls on Biden to withdraw from presidential race (Texas Tribune)

🟣 New website analyzes Austin crimes, response times and more (KXAN)

🟣 After SCOTUS ruling, local advocates protest homeless camping bans, call for investments (Austin American-Statesman)

🟣 Homelessness in Dallas area is down after response transformation (Smart Cities Dive)

🟣 Democrats wrestle with whether Harris would be stronger than Biden (The Hill)

Read On!

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[CITY OF AUSTIN]

âś… Council Message Board RE Climate Bond Initiative (6.28.2024) - Comments from Mayor Kirk Watson and Mayor Pro Tem Leslie Pool

âś… Council Message Board RE Environmental Bond 2024 (7.1.2024) - Comments from Council Members Ryan Alter (District 5) and Vanessa Fuentes (District 2)

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett calls on Biden to withdraw from presidential race (Texas Tribune)

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, called on President Joe Biden to step down as his party’s nominee for the White House on Tuesday citing the president’s poor performance at a debate against former President Donald Trump last week.

“President Biden has continued to run substantially behind Democratic senators in key states and in most polls has trailed Donald Trump,” Doggett said in a statement Tuesday. “I had hoped that the debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not. Instead of reassuring voters, the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies.”

Doggett, 77, is the first Democratic member of Congress to call for Biden to withdraw from the ticket since his debate. U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minnesota, ran a challenge against Biden in the Democratic primaries but has stayed muted since the debate.

Shortly after his statement, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro joined Doggett in calling for Biden to withdraw. Castro ran against Biden in the 2020 Democratic primaries and was quick to criticize his debate performance last week… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

New website analyzes Austin crimes, response times and more (KXAN)

New crime statistics are now available in interactive dashboard form on the Austin Police Department’s data portal.

At Monday’s Public Safety Commission Meeting, a member of APD’s data team walked commissioners through the various dashboards.

“We have five dashboards of the 16 currently, always in the process of creating new ones,” they said.

KXAN has previously covered the initial dashboard, which detailed the highest-level crimes against persons and property.

Now, the dashboards outlining the following information are also available:

  • Cadets in training

  • Retirements and separations

  • Calls for service

  • Response times

Austin gun violence rates higher than Texas, US rates, report says (KXAN)

The National Institute for Criminal Reform (NICJR) partnering with the Office of Violence Prevention (OVP) and the Austin Police Department released a summary analysis describing gun violence in Austin in a memo on Tuesday.

Over a 15-year period, Austin’s homicide rate remained mostly below Texas’ and the U.S. rate, averaging four per 100,000. But, in 2021 and 2022, Austin outstripped Texas’ and U.S. rates, averaging 8.3 homicides per 100,000 in 2021 and 7.1 in 2022, according to the NICJR analysis.

The report said 142 homicides were studied in Austin for 2021 and 2022, excluding officer-involved shootings, accidental self-inflictions and cases of justified self-defense. NICJR said its goal was to study the circumstances of the events, understand the characteristics of individuals involved and show the networks associated with the highest risk of violence... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

After SCOTUS ruling, local advocates protest homeless camping bans, call for investments (Austin American-Statesman)

After a historic ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that upholds city and state laws barring people experiencing homelessness from sleeping and camping in public spaces, Austin-based advocates protested camping bans like the one Austin has and renewed calls for the city to invest in housing and other supportive services.

"We cannot arrest our way out of homelessness. It comes from support," Sasha Rose, lead organizer with Austin Mutual Aid, said at a news conference outside Austin City Hall on Tuesday morning. "We call on our city leadership to invest in affordable housing."

In addition to the grassroots organization Austin Mutual Aid, leaders and organizers with VOCAL-TX, the Healing Project and more spoke at Tuesday's news conference.

"How can we move people and say, "You can't sleep here,' and then we give them no other place to go because the shelters are full?" said Andi Brauer, who works with homeless services for Central Presbyterian Church. "Fund a safe outdoor spaces program for Austin and let people be, let people live and give people the assistance they need now."… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

Homelessness in Dallas area is down after response transformation (Smart Cities Dive)

Three years ago, Dallas transformed how it was tackling homelessness with the All Neighbors Coalition, a group of what is now 150 local organizations working to solve homelessness, says Sarah Kahn, president and CEO of Housing Forward, the coalition’s lead agency.

That meant that instead of member groups each trying separately to solve homelessness one person at a time, they could come together around a unified strategy, Kahn said. The new system allowed for public and private funding to be aligned around getting people experiencing homelessness into permanent housing with connections to support services.

The new approach is working in Dallas and Collin counties, according to local officials: Homelessness overall is down by 19% compared with 2021, and unsheltered homelessness is down 24%, according to point-in-time counts. “We are decreasing homelessness at a time where the nation has seen record increases in homelessness,” Kahn said. 

One of the successful strategies in the Dallas area has been the coalition’s “Street-To-Home” encampment response, Kahn said, which entails bringing behavioral health care and rehousing assistance on-site to encampments and eventually shutting the encampment down. The process usually takes eight weeks from start to finish, she said.

“By the end of that eight-week process, people then are literally signing a lease and being supported to move their belongings directly into their own apartment,” Kahn said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Houston considers driverless car plan after Cruise comeback (Houston Business Journal)

Strange-looking cars are on Houston streets, trucks carrying freight for major companies like AP Moller Maersk and FedEx are shuttling up and down the Interstate 45 corridor, and local governments in the metro area are signing agreements for flying taxis. If some companies have their way, those vehicles could be driverless as early as next year.

When Cruise LLC, a General Motors-backed startup offering self-driving taxis in urban areas, began operating in Houston, the city began discussions to set up a working group to centralize communications relating to autonomous vehicle incidents and complaints, Jesse Bounds, director of the Mayor's Office of Innovation, confirmed. After the company paused operations, Bounds said the group’s purpose became “obsolete,” but the city is now reevaluating the need for the group in light of Cruise’s return.

The city could release reports and conduct community engagement if a need is determined, according to Bounds… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

At half a mile a week, Gov. Greg Abbott’s border wall will take around 30 years and $20 billion to build (Texas Tribune)

Three years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would take the extraordinary step of building a state-funded wall along the Mexico border, he has 34 miles of steel bollards to show for it.

That infrastructure — which has so far run up a price tag of some $25 million per mile — isn’t yet a contiguous wall. It has gone up in bits and pieces spread across at least six counties on Texas’ 1,254-mile southern border. Progress has been hampered by the state’s struggles to secure land access, one of myriad challenges signaling a long and enormously expensive slog ahead for Abbott.

Nonetheless, state contractors have already propped up more wall mileage than former President Donald Trump’s administration managed to build in Texas, and Abbott’s wall project is plowing ahead at a quickened pace. State officials hope to erect a total of 100 miles by the end of 2026, at a rate of about half a mile per week.

The governor frequently shares video of wall construction on social media and has credited the project with helping combat immigration flows. To date, though, steel barriers cover just 4% of the more than 800 miles identified by state officials as “in need of some kind of a barrier.” And at its current rate — assuming officials somehow persuade all private landowners along the way to turn their property over to the state — construction would take around 30 years and upwards of $20 billion to finish…(LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

Democrats wrestle with whether Harris would be stronger than Biden (The Hill)

Democrats are wrestling over the question of whether Vice President Harris would be a stronger candidate than President Biden to head the Democratic ticket after last week’s race-altering debate.

Harris has made it clear in recent days that she fully supports Biden’s continued bid for a second term and is not angling to replace him.

But Democratic aides and strategists say privately that Biden’s fate could depend on what polls show over the next few weeks, and they warn that if he falls substantially further behind former President Trump, it could prompt widespread calls among Democrats for the president to drop his reelection bid.

Democrats have generally stuck with Biden, but cracks emerged Tuesday, with Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) becoming the first sitting House member to call on the president to step aside.

Harris is the most likely substitute for Biden, though several sources said there would likely be competition… (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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