BG Reads 8.5.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - August 5, 2024

August 05, 2024

Bingham Group Reads

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August 5, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 What can Austin learn from Dallas about covering I-35 with a park? (KUT)

🟣 City will promote relocation of homes as alternative to demolition (Austin Monitor)

🟣 1,500 U.S. flights canceled as Tropical Storm Debby nears landfall, including 200 in Texas (Austin American-Statesman)

🟣 Trump says he’ll skip an ABC debate with Harris in September and wants them to face off on Fox News (Associated Press)

Read On!

[BINGHAM GROUP]

🟣 Bingham Group has renewed its MBE and DBE certifications with the city of Austin. We are currently seeking sub-consultant services to support projects in the Austin Metro. Learn more here.

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

What can Austin learn from Dallas about covering I-35 with a park? (KUT)

As a high-stakes project to sink I-35 through downtown Austin kicks into gear this summer, city officials and the University of Texas are looking to Dallas for a possible glimpse of the future.

The vision: a vast, green expanse covering sections of I-35, similar to Klyde Warren Park in Dallas. The 5.4-acre sanctuary spans the sunken Woodall Rodgers Freeway, connecting the densely populated Uptown neighborhood with a thriving Arts District and downtown business center.

Since it opened in 2012, this "deck park" has been widely hailed as a success, boosting land values and stimulating the development of luxury high-rise buildings with homes and offices that are among the most coveted in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

But the project also raises important questions about how Austin and UT should navigate the governance of their potential new parks, balancing public accessibility with privatization and commercialization... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

For future water conservation, reuse may be key (Austin Monitor)

Though July’s rain may have eased some fears over the continuing drought, Austin Water is still playing the long game, with plans to prepare for a drier future.

Water Resources Supervisor Marisa Flores Gonzalez joined the city’s Water and Wastewater Commission last month to discuss a new indirect potable reuse project, designed to stretch Austin’s water supply during severe shortages. With rough schematics in place, the utility hopes to have the infrastructure fully operational by 2028.

The project would recapture effluent wastewater for treatment and return it to Lady Bird Lake, where it would undergo natural mixing and eventual reintegration to the potable water supply. Use of the system would be triggered only when the combined storage of lakes Travis and Buchanan hit dire levels of 400 acre-feet, 200 below Stage 4 Drought levels. (For context, the latest reports from the Lower Colorado River Authority show a combined storage of 1,106,412 acre-feet.)... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

City will promote relocation of homes as alternative to demolition (Austin Monitor)

The city has identified a number of ways to increase the relocation and deconstruction of homes as an alternative to demolition that could take place amid the push for more housing on smaller parcels of land.

A memo issued last month from JosĂ© Roig, director of the Development Services Department, and Richard McHale, director of Austin Resource Recovery, detailed the findings and recommendations those departments have agreed upon in response to a November resolution from City Council that called for more streamlining and promoting alternatives to demolition.

Some of the first steps include developing training programs for the general public and contractors on relocation permitting, prioritizing the processing of relocation applications for expedited review, and establishing a fee waiver or voucher system to offset the costs of relocation permit reviews… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

1,500 U.S. flights canceled as Tropical Storm Debby nears landfall, including 200 in Texas (Austin American-Statesman)

As Tropical Storm Debby prepared to make landfall Monday as a Category 1 hurricane with a life-threatening storm surge and rain totals that could reach 30 inches, thousands of flights across the United States were affected.

Approximately 125 miles south of Tampa, Fla., as of Sunday afternoon, Debby seemed unlikely to have any direct impact on Texas — even remnants of the storm.

But it was affecting Texans in other ways. According to the flight tracking website Flight Aware, the storm caused more than 1,500 flight cancellations and 3,000 delays nationwide, including about 200 flights in Texas and dozens more delays at airports in Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Voting Rights Act doesn’t protect coalitions of racial or ethnic groups challenging political maps, appeals court rules (Texas Tribune)

Coalitions of minority groups cannot band together to claim that political maps constitute discriminatory gerrymandering, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a Galveston County lawsuit.

The 12-6 decision found that the Voting Rights Act’s protections for individual racial or ethnic groups do not extend to multiple groups joining together to claim that political boundaries dilute their votes. The ruling came in a case in which Black and Latino voters jointly sued Galveston County for voter discrimination after the county dismantled a district where people of color made up the majority.

The ruling Thursday reversed a 1988 5th Circuit opinion that found there was nothing that expressly prohibited such coalition claims in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. That decades-old ruling stemmed from a lawsuit alleging that an at-large election system — where all voters elect representatives who serve the entire area, rather than specific geographic districts within it — diluted the votes of a coalition of Black and Hispanic voters… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

What Chevron's move to Houston means for the energy capital (Houston Chronicle)

The nation’s second-largest oil company said Friday it planned to move its headquarters to Houston from San Ramon, Calif., later this year, consolidating even more big oil industry power in the nation’s energy capital. Chevron follows Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest oil company, which last year moved its headquarters to its Houston campus from Irving.

“Texas offers a business-friendly environment, a more affordable cost of living, and better proximity to key counterparts in the service sector, our industry and academia,” the company said in a statement. “We are currently in the process of evaluating which positions will relocate, and which positions will remain in San Ramon to support our California operations. We expect to complete this evaluation before the end of the year.”

Chevron’s decision follows a surge of punitive policy changes for the oil industry in California following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2022 climate commitments that promised to quicken the state’s shift to renewable energy. At the time, Newsom said the state was in the business of “holding Big Oil accountable.” The following year, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against Chevron, four other oil and gas majors and the American Petroleum Institute alleging a years-long climate change deception campaign in the state.

“We have previously stated that we believe state policy makers have pursued policies that raise costs and consumer prices, creating a hardship for all Californians, especially those who can least afford it,” the Chevron statement said. “These policies have also made California investment unappealing compared with opportunities elsewhere in the U.S. and globally.”

Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston, said Chevron, which has a major refining presence in California, “continues to be at odds with the California regulators and the new state legislation that is impacting all companies operating in California. The state of Texas is much friendlier to the energy business and their moving to the state reflects that.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

Trump says he’ll skip an ABC debate with Harris in September and wants them to face off on Fox News (Associated Press)

Donald Trump says he is pulling out of a scheduled September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on ABC and wants them to face off on Fox News, making it increasingly unlikely that the candidates will confront each other on stage before the November election. In a series of Truth Social posts late Friday, the Republican nominee and former president said his agreement to a Sept. 10 debate on ABC “has been terminated” because he will no longer face Democratic President Joe Biden, who ended his campaign last month after a disastrous performance in their first debate.

Trump now says he will appear on Fox News on Sept. 4 in Pennsylvania with rules that he called “similar” to his debate with Biden, but with a full audience instead of a mostly empty studio. Trump said that if Harris, the likely Democratic nominee, does not agree to the new network and date, he will do a “major Town Hall” with Fox News.

Michael Tyler, a Harris spokesperson, said Trump “is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out.” It was not immediately clear whether ABC would turn its Sept. 10 event into a Harris town hall in Trump’s absence. Tyler said Harris is committed to the time slot and would appear “one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime time national audience.” In a subsequent Truth Social post on Saturday afternoon, Trump said of Harris, “I’ll see her on September 4th or, I won’t see her at all.” Trump has gone back and forth on debating with Harris since she entered the presidential race. He had told reporters he felt an obligation to debate but also said in a recent Fox News interview that he thought Americans “already know everything” about both candidates Harris has pressed Trump to keep the commitment he made when Biden was in the race. Noting Trump’s criticisms of her, Harris dared him recently to “say it to my face.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Lousy jobs report forces Fed to reckon with hard landing (Wall Street Journal)

The script is being flipped for the U.S. economy.

For 2½ years, high inflation has drawn a nearly single-minded focus from the Federal Reserve and the White House as the nation’s foremost economic challenge.

But in the span of a week, punctuated by a surprisingly lackluster July hiring report on Friday that sent markets reeling, the labor market has become the locus of concern for economic policymakers in Washington.

Fed officials have spent the year trained on ensuring inflation moves down without causing unnecessary weakness, achieving a so-called soft landing.

Given recent declines in inflation, “Now the question is whether we are settling at full employment, or whether we are blowing through full employment. That’s a critical question,” said Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee in an interview Friday. 

A broader economic slowdown, if it materializes in coming months, could also upend an already volatile presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris… (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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