BG Reads // December 16, 2025

Author

A.J. Bingham
December 16, 2025

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Presented By

www.binghamgp.com

December 16, 2025

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Austin says it's prepared to keep potential winter storm outages minimal (KUT)

🟪 Austin faces accelerated funding, design deadline for I-35 cap and stitch project (Community Impact)

🟪 Two new City of Austin Government Relations memos

🟪  The state is making a list of transgender Texans. It’s using driver's licenses to help. (KUT)

🟪 An ever-larger share of ICE’s arrested immigrants have no criminal record (Stateline)

READ ON!

[FIRM NEWS]

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

CMO Executives and Advisors_July 2025.pdf519.20 KB • PDF File

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Austin says it's prepared to keep potential winter storm outages minimal (KUT)

The National Weather Service is forecasting warmer and dryer-than-normal conditions for the Austin area this winter. But meteorologist Jason Runyan said high-impact storms are still possible. Historically, these winter storms tend to occur in January and February.

“So pay attention and stay aware as we move into the peak of our winter season,” Runyan said.

In a joint news conference Monday afternoon, Ausin Mayor Kirk Watson, Travis County Judge Andy Brown and other city and county leaders said they are ready for when another round of severe cold weather hits, making preparations to keep roads clear, utilities functioning and people safe. But Watson said despite these efforts, the response will not be flawless.

“How we prepare and how we react will never be perfect,” Watson said. “Some things just aren't anticipated, but we are going to be prepared to react as fast as humanly possible.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Austin faces accelerated funding, design deadline for I-35 cap and stitch project (Community Impact)

City of Austin officials now face a 2025 deadline to define the scope of several cap and stitch projects that could reshape traffic and neighborhoods across the city.

In an update delivered to the Austin Mobility Committee Dec. 4, city officials were confronted with a revised timeline from the Texas Department of Transportation for its I-35 Capital Express Central project.

This new schedule introduces a complex set of financial pressures and risks for the city's cap and stitch initiative, a plan to construct land bridges over the expanded I-35, which is intended to heal the decades-old divide created by the interstate, according to city officials.

The update presents a bit of a paradox: while the construction of key city-funded elements has been delayed by three years, the deadline for committing the remaining millions of dollars to the project has been unexpectedly moved forward, forcing difficult decisions on an accelerated timeline… 🟪 (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

✅ Texas Restaurant Association acquires Texas Bar Nightclub Alliance (Austin Business Journal)

The Texas Restaurant Association is growing into the bar and nightclub space with a recent acquisition of the Texas Bar Nightclub Alliance.

The TBNA is an organization that represents bars, nightclubs and alcohol-serving establishments. The TRA acquired TBNA on Dec. 10 — the acquisition will transition TBNA members into full membership with the TRA.

The TRA declined to share the number of its members, but Tony Abruscato, chief marketing officer for the TRA, said the organization represents the more than 58,000 food and beverage industry locations in Texas, with bars and nightclubs making up an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 of these businesses. The food and beverage sector employs more than 1.4 million workers.

As part of the acquisition, Texas Bar & Nightclub Convention will be integrated into the 2026 Texas Restaurant Show, creating a comprehensive hospitality event for businesses that serve alcohol… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ The state is making a list of transgender Texans. It’s using driver's licenses to help. (KUT)

The state of Texas has continued collecting information on transgender drivers seeking to change the sex listed on their licenses, creating a list of more than 100 people in one year.

According to internal documents The Texas Newsroom obtained through records requests, the Texas Department of Public Safety has amassed a list of 110 people who tried to update their gender between August 2024 and August 2025. Employees with driver’s license offices across the state, from El Paso to Paris to Plano, reported the names and license numbers of these people to a special agency email account. Identifying information was redacted from the records released to The Texas Newsroom.

The data was collected after Texas stopped allowing drivers to update the gender on their licenses unless it was to fix a clerical error. It is unclear what the state is doing with this information.

An agency spokesperson did not respond to questions about why the list was created and whether it was shared with any other agencies or state officials. The Texas Newsroom filed records requests in an attempt to find the answers but did not receive any additional information that sheds light on what the state may be doing with these names… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ An ever-larger share of ICE’s arrested immigrants have no criminal record (Stateline)

Immigration arrests under the Trump administration continued to increase through mid-October, reaching rates of more than 30,000 a month. But, rather than the convicted criminals the administration has said it’s focused on, an ever-larger share of those arrests were for solely immigration violations. In 45 states, immigration arrests more than doubled compared with the same period last year, during the Biden administration.

The largest increases: There were 1,190 arrests in the District of Columbia compared with just seven last year under the Biden administration. Arrests were also more than five times higher in New Mexico, Idaho, Oregon and Virginia. “The result stands in contrast to the administration’s objective of arresting the ‘worst of the worst,’” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Heightened enforcement is likely increasing “collateral” arrests of people found during searches for convicted criminals, he said.

Comparisons between the Trump and Biden administrations were calculated by Stateline in an analysis of data released by the Deportation Data Project, a research initiative by the universities of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. About 93% of arrests could be identified by state. While more people were arrested this year, a lower percentage are convicted criminals.

The share of arrested immigrants who had been convicted of violent crimes has dropped from 9% in January to less than 5% in October. The share under Biden was consistently between 10% and 11% during the same period in 2024. The same trend applies to people arrested solely on immigration violations: Immigration violations alone were behind 20% in April, then rose to 44% of arrests in October, according to Stateline’s analysis. In some states and the District of Columbia, a majority of arrests were for immigration violations alone: the District of Columbia (80%), New York (61%), Virginia (57%), Illinois (53%), West Virginia (51%) and Maryland (50%)… 🟪 (READ MORE)

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