BG Reads // April 14, 2025

Author

A.J. Bingham
April 14, 2025

Presented By

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ Austin City Council:

POLICY SPOTLIGHT: Austin Council to Vote on AI Ethics Framework
📅 Scheduled Austin Council Hearing: April 24, 2025 (Agenda Link)

🏛️ Austin City Council will consider a resolution (Item 55) to establish ethical guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in City operations.

🏛️ The proposed framework would guide how AI is deployed across departments—such as permitting, public safety, and translation services—while prioritizing transparency, workforce protection, and digital equity.

💡 Key directives include:

  • Annual audits of AI tools used by the City

  • Public awareness and engagement campaigns

  • Training resources on AI literacy and responsible use

  • Clear restrictions on AI use for surveillance, discrimination, or job displacement

📩 Have questions on how this might impact your operations or policy goals? Email me for a consult. Please include Item 55 AI Framework Question in the subject line.

We’re growing BG Reads and want to better understand who’s reading. Your quick answers help us shape content and build a stronger community.

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Panelists talk pipelines, batteries and other answers to Austin’s energy demands (Austin Monitor)

Austin’s fast-paced growth and the increasing energy demands of large industries like data centers and advanced manufacturing are pushing the region’s energy infrastructure toward a critical juncture, according to experts who spoke at the Austin Chamber of Commerce’s recent Infrastructure Summit.

Energy leaders from major regional suppliers, utilities and infrastructure companies participated in a panel discussion that detailed the urgency and complexity of planning for future reliability in the Austin area. Panelists highlighted that the existing energy systems are straining under a surge in demand that continues to outpace current capacity expansions.

The rising fuel demand to meet the growth of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport was also identified as a pressure point, with the facility currently requiring over 100 tanker truck deliveries of jet fuel daily. Industry representatives described this as an unsustainable “just-in-time” system that will require substantial investment in pipeline projects to meet future needs.

“You can imagine as this airport grows, as demand in this region grows, the infrastructure needs to grow with it,” said Jake Reint, vice president of public affairs for Flint Hills Resources, which supplies airline fuel to the Austin and Dallas markets.

“Additional investment is gonna be needed for this region even as people transition to electrics and and other alternatives. Demand for liquid transportation fuels in a state like Texas isn’t going away anytime soon.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ 6 injured in Northwest Austin explosion that damaged 24 homes (KUT)

Six people were injured in an explosion that rocked Northwest Austin Sunday morning, damaging two dozen homes in a blast that was heard more than 15 miles away in Georgetown, according to the Austin Fire Department.

Firefighters were called to the neighborhood at 11:23 a.m., finding a 2-story home on Double Spur Loop that had been leveled to the ground by the explosion, AFD Division Chief Wayne Parrish says. A neighboring home suffered "severe collapse damage," he says.

Photos shared widely on social media showed a dark cloud of smoke billowing from the explosion, located a few miles northwest of The Domain.

The cause of the blast is currently under investigation by the Travis County fire marshal. Officials at the scene said the neighborhood has no underground gas lines, but the newly constructed home that exploded did have propane tanks… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ UT Austin leaders, students say they’re concerned over west campus safety (KXAN)

XAN spoke with students after University of Texas at Austin leaders published a statement Friday, which says families, students, faculty, staff and visitors are “rightly frustrated” with safety concerns.

“When individuals threaten student safety with violent and criminal behavior, our law enforcement have been steadfast in making necessary arrests to remove these threats. But arrests are not enough,” said UT Austin Board of Regents Chairman Kevin Eltife in the statement… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Here's the staggering amount of money UT student athletes have made on NIL since 2021 (Austin Business Journal)

From Sprouts Farmers Market Inc. to H-E-B LP to Wrangler, big brands are increasingly turning to University of Texas student athletes to hawk and promote their products.

In fact, University of Texas student-athletes have already earned $17.6 million this school year, the highest single-season amount since they became eligible to profit off their name, image and likeness in 2021, according to data obtained by the Austin Business Journal through an open-records request.

UT student-athletes have earned more than $46 million total in the first 3 1/2 years, data show. That number has ballooned since they earned about $3 million in the first year of NIL.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the money was directed to football and men's basketball players, which have earned $33.4 million and $5.5 million during those 3 1/2 years, respectively. Here's a look at some of the NIL data; scroll over the graphics for details…🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

✅ As Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick hold onto power, fresh faces in Texas must wait their turn (Austin American-Statesman)

Once upon a time in Texas politics, one or more of the top statewide elected officials would decide not to run for reelection to seek a higher office. That would set off a mushrooming scramble of other statewide officeholders who were down the food chain to forgo reelection for a chance to win a higher prize. Another scramble would follow as even lower-level leaders would step forward to compete for those newly created vacancies.

The process assured that ambitious up-and-coming politicians would always have their antennas up for new opportunities. That meant consultants and image-makers were always on the prowl to sign up new talent, and would-be campaign donors would have to gauge which candidates would be worth investing in and which ones would have to go begging.

Reporters in the Capitol press corps would always be scrounging for intel so they could be first to break the news that this candidate had just hired that consultant to test the waters to determine which of the statewide offices were the most influential, or at least the most winnable. Such freewheeling jockeying seldom happens in the modern era of Texas politics. Consider that only once since 1990 were the offices for governor and lieutenant governor open at the same time.

And never since the 1990 election were the offices of governor, attorney general and comptroller all open at the same time. Attorney General Jim Mattox decided to make an ill-fated run for the Democratic nomination for governor rather than to seek a third term. Four-term Comptroller Bob Bullock ran for lieutenant governor and won. And an otherwise obscure state representative named Dan Morales was elected attorney general. It wasn't until 2014 that Texas would see an open race for governor. Greg Abbott won the governor's office after deciding not to seek reelection for attorney general. Ken Paxton, then a state senator, won Abbott's old job.

The sitting lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, did seek reelection but lost the Republican primary to Dan Patrick, who had also been a state senator. Not only did Patrick take down Dewhurst, he beat two other statewide officeholders who had also challenged the incumbent. The successful 2018 GOP statewide ticket was pretty much a carbon copy of the one four years earlier. And 2022 was pretty darn close to a three-peat. The exception was the race for land commissioner because incumbent George P. Bush made the mistake of challenging Paxton in the primary… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ To avoid a water crisis, Texas may bet big on desalination. Here’s how it works in El Paso. (Texas Tribune)

The wind swept through El Paso one day in March, lifting a fine layer of dust that settled onto windshields, clothes and skin. The air was thick with haze from a dust storm. This border city, perched on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, receives on average less than 9 inches of rain each year.

Water in the city of 679,000 people is a challenge.

Inside El Paso’s Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant, Hector Sepúlveda, the plant’s superintendent, walks through rows of towering steel tubes as a loud hum vibrates through the air. This machinery is essential to providing thousands in the city with clean water.

“This is a desert community,” Sepúlveda said. “So the water utilities have to always think ahead and be very resourceful and very smart and find resources to take the water that we do have here and provide for a desert community.”

Sepúlveda says the city’s dry climate, compounded by dwindling ground and surface water supplies and climate change has made innovation essential. A key piece of that strategy is desalination — the process of removing salt and other minerals from seawater or salty groundwater so people can drink it… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Texas job market was feeling DOGE's pinch. Then tariffs hit. (Houston Chronicle)

The Texas job market was humming along. Even as first-quarter job cuts surpassed the tally from a year-earlier by more than 40%, the unemployment rate in Texas held steady over the past year at around 4.1%. Still, signs were emerging that policies imposed by the Trump administration were starting to take their toll.

An analysis by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas released last week found American companies slashed more than 275,000 jobs in March, a staggering 60% increase over February’s cuts and more than 200% greater than the 90,309 jobs lost during the same period a year earlier. Challenger data for Texas shows first-quarter job cuts in 2025 were more than 41% greater than the year-earlier period. Yet job growth outpaced losses to start the year.

“The job market has remained robust year to date for Texas,” Pia Orrenius, a vice president and labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said. “Our growth number is like 1.9%, which is right under trend growth, so we've actually seen a little bit of improvement in the first two months of the year relative to last year. But this is backward-looking data.”

Of the nearly 17,500 jobs lost in the state during the first quarter, Challenger found, the services sector took the biggest hit, losing 8,242 jobs, up from 1,053 a year earlier. “In March, Orrenius said, “the Texas service sector outlook survey slowed revenue growth to zero. So there was no growth in March according to our survey.” The impact on the jobs market of the sweeping tariffs announced last week by President Donald Trump has yet to be felt, and their effect will depend in large part on how long they stay in place.

Meantime, the impact of cuts across the federal government are rippling across the Texas economy. “Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency plans to eliminate positions in the federal government. It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs,” Andrew Challenger, the firm’s senior vice president, said in the statement accompanying the report… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ How a secretive gambler called ‘The Joker’ took down the Texas Lottery (The Wall Street Journal)

In the spring of 2023, a London banker-turned-bookmaker reached out to a few contacts with an audacious request: Can you help me take down the Texas lottery? Bernard Marantelli had a plan in mind. He and his partners would buy nearly every possible number in a coming drawing. There were 25.8 million potential number combinations.

The tickets were $1 apiece. The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million. Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants.

They set up shop in a defunct dentist’s office, a warehouse and two other spots in Texas. The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals. Trucks hauled in dozens of them and reams of paper. Over three days, the machines—manned by a disparate bunch of associates and some of their children—screeched away nearly around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second. Texas politicians later likened the operation to a sweatshop. Trying to pull off the gambit required deep pockets and a knack for staying under the radar—both hallmarks of the secretive Tasmanian gambler who bankrolled the operation.

Born Zeljko Ranogajec, he was nicknamed “the Joker” for his ability to pull off capers at far-flung casinos and racetracks. Adding to his mystique, he changed his name to John Wilson several decades ago. Among some associates, though, he still goes by Zeljko, or Z. Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world.

Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually.

The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win. That, in turn, spilled their activities into public view and sparked a Texas-size uproar about whether other lotto players—and indeed the entire state—had been hoodwinked.

Early this month, the state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called the crew’s win “the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas.” In response to written questions addressed to Marantelli and Ranogajec, Glenn Gelband, a New Jersey lawyer who represents the limited partnership that claimed the Texas prize, said “all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

✅ DOGE is far short of its goal, and still overstating its progress (New York Times)

Last week, Elon Musk indicated for the first time that his Department of Government Efficiency was falling short of its goal. He previously said his powerful budget-cutting team could reduce the next fiscal year’s federal budget by $1 trillion, and do it by Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. Instead, in a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk said that he anticipated the group would save about $150 billion, 85 percent less than its objective. Even that figure may be too high, according to a New York Times analysis of DOGE’s claims.

That’s because, when Mr. Musk’s group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all. One of the group’s largest claims, in fact, involves canceling a contract that did not exist. Although the government says it had merely asked for proposals in that case, and had not settled on a vendor or a price, Mr. Musk’s group ignored that uncertainty and assigned itself a large and very specific amount of credit for canceling it.

It said it had saved exactly $318,310,328.30. Mr. Musk’s group has now triggered mass firings across the government, and sharp cutbacks in humanitarian aid around the world. Mr. Musk has justified those disruptions with two promises: that the group would be transparent, and that it would achieve budget cuts that others called impossible. Now, watching the group pare back its aims and puff up its progress, some of its allies have grown doubtful about both.

“They’re just spinning their wheels, citing in many cases overstated or fake savings,” said Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. “What’s most frustrating is that we agree with their goals. But we’re watching them flail at achieving them.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Trump mulls semiconductor levies after lifting reciprocal tariffs on electronics (NPR)

The Trump administration is considering new semiconductor tariffs, after the White House exempted certain electronics from reciprocal tariffs.

"We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigation," Trump posted on social media.

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, echoed Trump and told CNN that the administration is launching an investigation into semiconductors under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. That section of trade law allows the president, after an investigation, to restrict imports of products that are seen as critical to U.S. national security.

"Semiconductors are the key, important part of a lot of defense equipment," Hassett told CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday. "And there's going to be a semiconductor 232 that studies those things carefully and decides what has to be on-shored in order to protect America."… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

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