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December 15, 2025

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Austin ISD considers charter school partners for Burnet, Dobie and Webb middle schools (Community Impact)

🟪 Kyle, Pflugerville voters choose new mayors in runoff elections (KXAN)

🟪 Former Teacher Retirement System of Texas site may be redeveloped in downtown Austin (Austin Business Journal)

🟪  Enforcement of Texas’ “bathroom bill” draws challenges as colleges, cities implement new policies (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Red-hot Texas is getting so many data center requests that experts see a bubble (CNBC)

🟪 John Whitmire unveils party support amid 'civil war' for Houston Democrats (Houston Chronicle)

🟪 Everyone wants to change infrastructure permitting. Nobody knows how to pass it. (NOTUS)

 🟪 T.S.A. is providing air passenger data to immigration agents for deportation effort (New York Times)

🟪 Trump leans into isolation as challenges mount at home (Washington Post)

READ ON!

[FIRM NEWS]

[Blog] Austin 2026: The New Rules of Economic Development at City Hall

Learn more about Bingham Group’s new practice — and review all of our services here: binghamgp.com/services

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ City Manager Executives and Advisors Staff Visual Chart

🏛️ City of Austin Org Chart (as of July 2025)

ℹ️ 2025 Essential Resources for Navigating the City of Austin

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Austin ISD considers charter school partners for Burnet, Dobie and Webb middle schools (Community Impact)

Austin ISD may select charter schools to operate Burnet, Dobie and Webb middle schools next school year.

This summer, AISD restarted the campuses by hiring new principals and staff to improve academic outcomes for students amid multiple failed state ratings. This fall, the campuses have seen a decline in test scores while enrollment has dropped, according to district data shared at a Dec. 11 board meeting.

“This is such a difficult situation,” AISD trustee Arati Singh said. “I think that we've got to be really realistic about the decision for the [charter school] partner.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Kyle, Pflugerville voters choose new mayors in runoff elections (KXAN)

Voters in Travis, Hays and Williamson Counties cast their ballots in a few runoff elections on Saturday, choosing their next mayors and council members. The bigger elections on Saturday were the runoffs for Kyle and Pflugerville’s mayors and four other races held in Central Texas, are below.

Kyle voters chose between the top two candidates from November’s mayoral election after none of the four candidates received more than 50% of the vote. Of those four, Saturday’s runoff election came down to Yvonne Flores-Cale and Robert Rizo. Preliminary results from Saturday’s election have Flores-Cale as the winner of the race, with 50.83% of the vote Saturday.

A runoff election for the position of Mayor of Pflugerville was called on Nov. 18, 2025, after none of the candidates in the Nov. 4 election won more than 50% of the vote, according to the city. The two candidates who received the most votes in the November election and advanced to the runoff on Saturday were Pat McCord and Doug Weiss. Some voters in Buda, Kyle, Leander, and San Marcos chose their next city council representative. For Buda City Council District C, Kimberly Goodman and Jeffrey Morales both received about 43% of the vote in the November election and advanced to the runoff.

Voters chose Goodman as the winner in Saturday’s runoff election. She had 50.79% of the vote. For Kyle City Council District 1, incumbent Bear Heiser advanced to a runoff with challenger Courtney Goza. Heiser received about 40% of the vote in November, while Goza received 27%. Voters chose Goza as the winner in Saturday’s runoff election, with 50.80% of the vote.

For Leander City Council Place 3, Natomi Blair and Anna Yelaun moved ahead to a runoff in this race. Blair received about 48% of the vote in November’s election, while Yelaun picked up 40%. Voters chose Blair as the winner in Saturday’s runoff election, with 53.78% of the vote. For San Marcos City Council Place 2, Josh Paselk and incumbent Saul Gonzales advanced to the runoff. In November’s election, Paselk received 35% of the vote, while Gonzales won 27%. Voters chose Paselk as the winner in Saturday’s runoff election. He got 54.50% of the vote… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ NXP is putting its longtime US HQ on market in Austin (Austin Business Journal)

NXP Semiconductors NV is putting its 155-acre Oak Hill campus — which has served as its longtime U.S. headquarters — on the market as it scours the area for a new office space, several sources told the Austin Business Journal.

The Dutch semiconductor company has enlisted the help of CBRE Inc. to list the 1.5 million-square-foot campus at 6501 William Cannon Blvd. for sale, sources said. The campus was originally built in 1984 for Freescale Semiconductor, which was acquired by NXP in 2015, and has been used for office, research and development and manufacturing. It makes chips used in cars, mobile phones, communications infrastructure and other products.

The property was most recently appraised at $43 million, according to Travis Central Appraisal District.

NXP also has a 960,000-square-foot office and manufacturing space at 3949 Ed Bluestein Blvd. that was built in 1974, according to its website.

In a statement, NXP officials said the company is "exploring options for a new office space driven by the need to modernize and create a vibrant environment that enhances how we work and engage." The company is considering locations based on traffic patterns, talent density, geographical growth trends in Austin, and where employees live, officials said, adding that they have communicated that to local employees… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Former Teacher Retirement System of Texas site may be redeveloped in downtown Austin (Austin Business Journal)

The owner of the former Teacher Retirement System of Texas headquarters in downtown Austin is setting up the property for redevelopment. 

The four-acre site at 1000 Red River St. received approval from the Austin City Council on Dec. 11 to get a uniform zoning designation of downtown mixed-use for the site. It previously had a mix of zoning designations that had different rules and limitations for future development. 

“The rezoning supports compact and connected growth, enhances regulatory consistency, and allows for a mix of uses including office, residential, commercial and life sciences that are compatible with surrounding development,” according to city documents.

Austin Real Estate Acquisitions LLC bought the property in 2022 for $108 million from the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which used the property as its headquarters before shifting its operations to the Mueller area. 

Travis Central Appraisal District records show that LLC has the same address as Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a real estate investment firm based in Pasadena, California. The firm didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment… 🟪 (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

✅ Enforcement of Texas’ “bathroom bill” draws challenges as colleges, cities implement new policies (Texas Tribune)

In the week since Texas’ new “bathroom bill” designed to target transgender people went into effect, some opponents of the restrictions have begun challenging both the spirit and letter of the law as questions remain on how it can be enforced.

Senate Bill 8, also known as the Texas Women’s Privacy Act, restricts what public restrooms, locker rooms and other similar facilities transgender people can use in public buildings by determining access based on sex assigned at birth. The law does not mandate a policy, but requires that cities, counties and public agencies take “every reasonable step” to ensure people do not enter restrooms not matching their sex assigned at birth.

Supporters of the law pushed for more than a decade to cement the sex-based restrictions SB 8 creates as a way of protecting women’s private spaces. Opponents of the law, however, have maintained the lack of clear guidelines on how to uphold SB 8 will lead to uneven, ineffective and potentially invasive enforcement — and on Dec. 6, a group of protesters went to the Texas Capitol to test that claim… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Red-hot Texas is getting so many data center requests that experts see a bubble (CNBC)

Everything is bigger in Texas. That's also true for data center demand in the Lone Star State, where project developers are rushing to cash in on the artificial intelligence boom. Cheap land and cheap energy are combining to attract a flood of data center developers to the state. The potential demand is so vast that it will be impossible to meet by the end of the decade, energy experts say.

Speculative projects are clogging up the pipeline to connect to the electric grid, making it difficult to see how much demand will actually materialize, they say. But investors will be left on the hook if inflated demand forecasts lead to more infrastructure being built than is actually needed. "It definitely looks, smells, feels — is acting like a bubble," said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and a founder of energy consulting firm IdeaSmiths.

"The top line numbers are almost laughable," Rhodes said. More than 220 gigawatts of big projects have asked to connect to the Texas electric grid by 2030, according to December data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. More than 70% of those projects are data centers, according to ERCOT, which manages the Texas power grid. That's more than twice the Lone Star State's record peak summer demand this year of around 85 gigawatts, and its total available power generation for the season of around 103 gigawatts. Those figures are "crazy big," said Beth Garza, a former ERCOT watchdog.

"There's not enough stuff to serve that much load on the equipment side or the consumption side," said Garza, director of ERCOT's independent market monitor from 2014 to 2019. Rhodes agreed. "There's just no way we can physically put this much steel in the ground to match those numbers. I don't even know if China could do it that fast," he said… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ John Whitmire unveils party support amid 'civil war' for Houston Democrats (Houston Chronicle)

Several top Houston elected officials and community advocates are attempting to rally support for Mayor John Whitmire as precinct chairs with the Democratic party weigh whether to deny him future endorsements, according to a letter leaked to the Houston Chronicle. Whitmire, a Democrat who spent 50 years in the Texas Senate before stepping into the mayor’s seat in 2024, caught heat from the party when he appeared as a special guest at an April fundraiser for GOP U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw. Whitmire and his team reasoned at the time that the mayor worked with everyone who helped the city accomplish its goals, and experts said it wasn’t unusual for mayors of large cities to build bridges among members of the opposite party. Notably, the office of Houston mayor is also nonpartisan.

A swath of more than 100 Democratic precinct chairs, though, begged to differ. They penned a series of resolutions shortly after the Crenshaw fundraiser that called for ending the Harris County Democratic Party’s future endorsements of Whitmire, and to hold elected officials to the same fundraising standards as precinct chairs. Precinct chairs take an oath when they are sworn in to not raise funds for members of the opposite party. The resolution regarding fundraising failed in September. The resolution to deny Whitmire future endorsements will be voted on this Sunday. A version of the letter obtained by the Chronicle highlights some of Whitmire’s accomplishments as mayor and during his time in the statehouse.

It points out how Whitmire stood with workers at the Hilton Americas as they went on strike for fair wages. Denying the mayor's future party endorsements, it states, would be “deeply harmful” to the Democratic party’s “unity and strength” as they looked toward securing victories in the 2026 election cycle. “Not everything we see in headlines or online tells the full story,” one version of the letter reads. “The mayor is currently engaged in complex, high-stakes negotiations behind the scenes to protect our city, including navigating challenges with the state and federal governments. These efforts may not always be highly visible or political theater, but they are essential to defending Houston’s interests in the difficult political climate we face.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Pentagon in talks to move major agency to San Antonio. What it could mean. (San Antonio Express-News)

The bureaucracy in charge of the military’s healthcare system could be headed to San Antonio. The move could bring as many 3,300 people and their families to the city if the entire headquarters of the Defense Health Agency relocates, but it remains unclear exactly how many workers or which portions of the organization might move. Recent moves at City Hall and a letter from area congressmen to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, though, suggest ongoing talks over uprooting the agency from Falls Church, Va.

City officials and the military have been mum, but sources suggest an announcement may be coming as soon as this week. The renewed talks come two years after unit officials and city leaders denied the idea was under consideration and with San Antonio fighting to hang on to military personnel. Hegseth’s Pentagon has already yanked two military headquarters, and most of their 1,100 workers, from the city.

It’s also stalled the Air Force’s plans to raise the status of its cyber hub at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. For years, the city and county have been wooing the Pentagon to bring more of its health care system to San Antonio, which already is considered the home of military medicine. And they’re ready to spend to make it happen. Both San Antonio and Bexar County have budgeted $10 million to refurbish an old building on Fort Sam Houston for the unit and, in October, each approved a request for $5 million in state Defense Economic Adjustment Assistance Grants… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Texas universities deploy AI tools to review and rewrite how some courses discuss race and gender (Texas Tribune)

A senior Texas A&M University System official testing a new artificial intelligence tool this fall asked it to find how many courses discuss feminism at one of its regional universities. Each time she asked in a slightly different way, she got a different number.

“Either the tool is learning from my previous queries,” Texas A&M system’s chief strategy officer Korry Castillo told colleagues in an email, “or we need to fine tune our requests to get the best results.”

It was Sept. 25, and Castillo was trying to deliver on a promise Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents had already made: to audit courses across all of the system’s 12 universities after conservative outrage over a gender-identity lesson at the flagship campus intensified earlier that month, leading to the professor’s firing and the university president’s resignation… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Everyone wants to change infrastructure permitting. Nobody knows how to pass it. (NOTUS)

Democrats and Republicans alike are calling for an overhaul of the way infrastructure is approved and built in the United States. They’re just moving further and further apart on how to actually do it. Partisan fighting and intraparty tensions over a slate of permitting reform bills are signaling that the once bipartisan policy goal may once again stall in Congress, even as lawmakers emphasize the need for more energy infrastructure and housing to tackle the growing cost-of-living crisis.

“Polarization is part of everything, so I’m sure it has a role here at some level,” Marc Boom, a former senior adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration, told NOTUS. “The best solution is going to be one that leaves everyone happy, and the path that I’m seeing doesn’t seem like that.”

A group of conservative Republican lawmakers is threatening to withhold support from a bipartisan bill that would overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act, a key permitting statute. Why? It has a measure that would provide wins for renewable energy developers who want to insulate their projects from a Trump administration crackdown. Progressive Democrats and environmentalists, meanwhile, are upset that the bill would weaken community input and environmental review on proposed projects. The impending vote on the SPEED Act comes after lawmakers got into a fiery debate on the House floor last Thursday over a bill that would weaken the scope of reviews under the Clean Water Act. Republicans said that bill would speed up infrastructure, but most Democrats criticized it on environmental grounds.

“You will hear no argument from me about the need for permitting reform,” Democratic Rep. Hillary Scholten said on the floor ahead of a vote on the bill. “We do need reform, but this bill is not what we need. It doesn’t just cut red tape, it cuts all the tape that has protected our clean water for 50 years.” The bill passed, with a handful of moderate Democrats joining most Republicans in voting “yes.” So did a different bill that would speed up permitting for natural gas pipelines. But both came with some mudslinging… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ T.S.A. is providing air passenger data to immigration agents for deportation effort (New York Times)

The Trump administration is providing the names of all air travelers to immigration officials, substantially expanding its use of data sharing to expel people under deportation orders. Under the previously undisclosed program, the Transportation Security Administration provides a list multiple times a week to Immigration and Customs Enforcement of travelers who will be coming through airports.

ICE can then match the list against its own database of people subject to deportation and send agents to the airport to detain those people. It’s unclear how many arrests have been made as a result of the collaboration. But documents obtained by The New York Times show that it led to the arrest of Any Lucía López Belloza, the college student picked up at Boston Logan Airport on Nov. 20 and deported to Honduras two days later. A former ICE official said 75 percent of instances in that official’s region where names were flagged by the program yielded arrests.

ICE has historically avoided interfering with domestic travel. But the partnership between airport security and the immigration agency, which began quietly in March, is the latest way the Trump administration is increasing cooperation and information sharing between federal agencies in service of the president’s goal of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history. “The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. Airline passengers have long been subject to some federal scrutiny. Airlines typically provide passenger information to T.S.A. after a flight is reserved.

That information is compared against national security databases, including the Terrorist Screening Dataset, which includes the names of individuals on a watch list of known or suspected terrorists. But the T.S.A. previously did not get involved in domestic criminal or immigration matters, said one former agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue freely. Among the concerns, the former official said, has been that enforcement activities at airports could distract from airport security and contribute to longer passenger wait times… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Nobel laureate María Corina Machado: ‘I absolutely support President Trump’s strategy’ in Venezuela (The Hill)

Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado said she supports President Trump’s aggressive approach in dealing with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and said she thinks the Venezuelan government’s days are “numbered.” In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” the Venezuelan opposition leader was asked if she supports the U.S. increasing sanctions on Venezuelan individuals and the U.S. potentially conducting more seizures of vessels, like the oil tanker last week.

“Look, I absolutely support President Trump’s strategy, and we, the Venezuelan people, are very grateful to him and to his administration, because I believe he is a champion of freedom in this hemisphere,” Machado told host Margaret Brennan.

Speaking from Oslo, where she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year, Machado noted that she previously dedicated, in part, the award to Trump “because I think that he finally has put Venezuela in where it should be, in terms of a priority for the United States national security.” “And we do support these actions, because, Margaret, we are facing, not a conventional dictatorship.

This is a very complex criminal structure that has turned Venezuela into a safe haven of international crime and terrorist activities, starting with Russia, Iran, Cuba, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels operating freely and directed in partnership with Maduro and his regime,” she continued. Machado has been living in hiding in her own country for nearly a year and was seen in public for the first time this past week in Oslo, where her daughter accepted her peace prize on her behalf.

After winning the opposition primary, Machado was barred from running against Maduro last year and endorsed a lesser-known candidate widely seen as her stand-in. Maduro claimed victory and refused to leave power, but experts broadly dismissed the government’s election data purporting to show Maduro as the winner as “mathematically and statistically” impossible… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Trump leans into isolation as challenges mount at home (Washington Post)

The Trump administration, amid a series of foreign and domestic challenges, is redoubling its efforts to blame an array of outside forces for America’s problems and enact policies that block those influences from crossing U.S. borders. Last week, the United States halted immigration applications from 19 countries.

Shortly after, the administration announced an expanded travel ban covering more than 30 countries — “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem. And on Wednesday, Border Protection officials proposed requiring visitors from U.S. allies to provide up to five years of their social media history, a move that could discourage tourists.

The actions come on the heels of a 33-page National Security Strategy stressing the administration’s opposition to multilateralism and immigration, while scolding European allies that they risk “civilizational erasure” for taking a different approach. “Who a country admits into its borders — in what numbers and from where — will inevitably define the future of that nation,” the paper says.

These moves — accompanied by a bolstering of tariffs and President Donald Trump’s often racially tinged anti-outsider rhetoric — suggest a goal of sealing off the United States from many foreign people, products and cultures. They also signal that the U.S. is refocusing its attention on its immediate neighborhood in the Western Hemisphere, rather than the broader global landscape that has long been its horizon. “We are isolating ourselves in a very dangerous way that I don’t think this administration understands,” said former senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), who served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama.

“We will find ourselves isolated — dangerously isolated — in a world where you do not want to be isolated. Once you go down that road, you will not get that back. That is not the way it works.” Several experts said Trump’s language increasingly echoes the isolationism and anti-immigrant sentiment of the 1920s and 1930s, which downplayed the threat of authoritarianism before World War II. But White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the administration is trying to protect what is great about America. “America’s culture and way of life is worth defending and preserving. Full stop,” she said. “Aliens who come to our country en masse and refuse to assimilate to American society only recreate the same conditions that are destroying the nations they fled from. We cannot allow their problems to become America’s problems.”... 🟪 (READ MORE)

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