BG Reads // April 21, 2025

Author

A.J. Bingham
April 21, 2025

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✅ Today's BG Reads include:

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

POLICY SPOTLIGHT: HB 3879 – Texas Taxpayer & Voter Defense Act.

📅 Texas House Ways & Means Hearing: Today @1 PM (Agenda Link)

🏛️ The Committee will hear HB 3879 by Rep. Ellen Troxclair (R-Lakeway), known as the Texas Taxpayer & Voter Defense Act. The bill aims to tighten oversight of capital projects funded through tax-rate elections such as Austin’s Project Connect.

🏛️ HB 3879 seeks to close two major perceived loopholes:

  • Restricting the use of tax-rate elections to fund large-scale capital projects.

  • Limiting how much a project’s scope or costs can change after voters have approved it.

💡 Key provisions include:

  • New guidelines for how tax-rate election funds can be allocated.

  • Voter protections to ensure project plans and budgets remain consistent with initial approval.

  • Enhanced transparency requirements for significant project changes post-election.

POLICY SPOTLIGHT: Austin Council to Vote on AI Ethics Framework
📅 Austin Council Hearing: April 24, 2025 at 10AM (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.

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[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Planning staff spells out steps for preservation and coordination in 78702 and beyond (Austin Monitor)

The city is preparing to move forward with a long-term planning effort that would coordinate public and cultural investments in a portion of East Austin seen as under threat of gentrification and other growth pressures. A new memo from the Planning Department issued last week responds to a 2024 City Council resolution directing staff to catalog public properties, identify historically significant private sites in the 78702 zip code.

The resolution passed unanimously by Council last April sought to address concerns over fragmentation and missed opportunities in how city assets and programs have been managed in the historically Black and Latino neighborhoods of Central East Austin. The resolution also called for possible restructuring of city boards and commissions that serve East Austin, focusing on the area bounded by Interstate 35, Martin Luther King Boulevard, Airport Boulevard, and Lady Bird Lake.

While discussing the measure last year, Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison, who represents District 1 and part of the designated area, described the initiative as a way to bring coordination, transparency, and accountability to public investment. Community advocates and cultural groups voiced support then and hoped to prevent further displacement, preserve neighborhood character, and activate neglected city-owned spaces… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Tesla cut jobs, faced fines — here’s why it still calls 2024 a growth year (San Antonio Express-News)

Employment at Tesla Inc.’s headquarters and factory in Austin fell 7% in 2024 after companywide layoffs last spring dented the electric-vehicle maker’s big workforce. Though the company later added back 6,378 jobs, Tesla said it finished the year with 21,191 employees at the sprawling complex where it assembles the Model Y, Cybertruck and advanced batteries.

That was down from 22,777 jobs at the end of 2023. The numbers from Tesla’s annual compliance report to Travis County show that as job totals fell, investment in the complex about 10 miles east of downtown Austin continued. The company said it spent about $1.35 billion last year, pushing total investment in the 2,514-acre development legally known as Colorado River Project LLC to $5.75 billion. About $3.8 billion of that was for construction, improvements and equipment, while another $1.9 billion was to acquire land.

Tesla said the spending and hiring are evidence it “has made progress in fulfilling its goal of building Gigafactory Texas into one of the most sustainable and productive clean energy manufacturing facilities in the world.” The company is off to another rough start in 2025, with share prices tanking and vandals attacking dealerships amid backlash against CEO Elon Musk’s activities in far-right politics and his role as head of the Trump administration’s job-slashing Department of Government Efficiency.

Tesla vehicle sales slumped 13% in the first three months of the year, its slowest quarter since the first half of 2022. Amid slow sales last April, Musk said the company was cutting 10% from its global workforce of about 140,000 people, a reduction it later reported removed 2,700 people from its Austin operations. The subsequent job growth also was slower than the pace in 2023, when the company added 10,500 jobs as it geared up to produce Cybertruck and increase work on batteries… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

✅ With the border quiet, Texas ponders spending another $6.5 billion on border security (Texas Tribune)

Texas’ massive, multibillion-dollar mission to reinforce its border with Mexico helped Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland hire two full-time deputies and three part-timers. It gave him the money to buy equipment and new vehicles. In the lawman’s words, it “kept us alive” as the number of illegal border crossings skyrocketed under the Biden administration to record highs.

And Cleveland, who became sheriff after 26 years as a Border Patrol agent, still has needs. He said he hopes and prays to be able to hire more deputies.

But he also has worries about the state plowing billions of more taxpayer dollars into border security as the border gets quieter and quieter — and President Donald Trump vows mass deportations of undocumented immigrants living throughout the country.

“With President Trump being in the White House, I would foresee the federal government spending more money. The state Legislature surely shouldn’t have to spend that much more money,” he said in an interview. “Why are we asking (for) that?”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Texas utility regulators could make grid history with 'superhighway' lines (San Antonio Express-News)

Texas is facing a $30 billion question about the future of its electric grid: Is it time to create a new, stronger backbone that can grow along with the booming demand for electricity? Or should it stick with the current system and run the risk of playing catch-up a short time later? Utility regulators this week could decide between expanding the grid with more of the 345,000-volt power lines that have crisscrossed Texas for 65 years or starting a new system that can carry more than twice as much voltage. In simpler terms, they’ll be considering whether the grid should start moving more electricity across Texas on a new system of high-speed multi-lane superhighways or keep expanding its system of smaller, two-lane roads.

It’s a key question. Texas already is dealing with overcrowded transmission lines that pose risks to reliability and could even cause cascading blackouts from a single overtaxed circuit near San Antonio. It comes as data centers are flocking to the state in search of massive amounts of power — and as population growth and increasingly severe weather are already testing the grid’s limits. The latest estimates suggest demand will grow an unprecedented 75% by the end of the decade. Grid experts worry that without the new approach, the state risks seeing its grid falling further behind its pace of growth. “We’re at a pivotal point to decide,” Kristi Hobbs, a system planner with state grid operator the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told regulators earlier this year. “Do we want to continue building the system the way we always did, or do we want to consider a higher voltage that will set us up for the future?”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

✅ America’s second-richest elected official is acting like he wants to be president (Wall Street Journal)

If JB Pritzker runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, he will be betting his party’s best prospect is a political punch-throwing heavyset billionaire who inherited massive wealth. While that sounds like President Trump, the two-term Illinois governor would be wagering on himself. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, has become one of the most-outspoken critics of Trump at a time Democrats are struggling to counter him.

Wealth has long opened doors for Pritzker and there are signs he wants the next one to be into the Oval Office. The 60-year-old is visiting New Hampshire, traditional home of the nation’s first presidential primary, to speak April 27 at a party fundraiser about what he sees as Trump’s authoritarianism and to call Democrats to action. The trip is likely to boost speculation that Pritzker, among those vetted by Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign as a possible running mate, is interested in the 2028 nomination.

“There is no doubt that he is going to run,” said Chicagoan Bill Daley, who served as President Bill Clinton’s commerce secretary and President Barack Obama’s chief of staff. “The real question is whether he runs for re-election first or just runs for president.” The governor, who declined an interview, has yet to say whether he will seek a third term. An announcement is expected in the next few months, with the March 2026 primary less than 11 months away. Daley said he would recommend against another gubernatorial bid because a crisis or scandal can pop up at an inconvenient time. Pritzker, he said, has the financial wherewithal to do something most candidates couldn’t: announce a presidential bid in 2026 and lock down the best available campaign staff talent. Pritzker has never shied from confronting Trump. “Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity,” he said in his Democratic National Convention speech in August… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

✅ Hegseth said to have shared attack details in second Signal chat (New York Times)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat. Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders. Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.

The previously unreported existence of a second Signal chat in which Mr. Hegseth shared highly sensitive military information is the latest in a series of developments that have put his management and judgment under scrutiny. Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, before his confirmation as defense secretary, and was named “Defense | Team Huddle,” the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat.

The continued inclusion following Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation of his wife, brother and personal lawyer, none of whom had any apparent reason to be briefed on operational details of a military operation as it was getting underway, is sure to raise further questions about his adherence to security protocols. The chat revealed by The Atlantic in March was created by President Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, so that the most senior national security officials across the executive branch, such as the vice president, the director of national intelligence and Mr. Hegseth, could coordinate among themselves and their deputies ahead of the U.S. attacks… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

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