🟪 Austin leaders put pause on plan to put AI-powered cameras in city parks (KVUE)

🟪 Austin to consider creating a Green Social Housing policy (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 Kyle man arrested after altercation with minors during student protest against ICE in Buda (CBS Austin)

🟪 Texas Education Agency warns districts of potential state takeovers for “encouraging” student protests (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Texas primary between Crockett, Talarico turns ugly (The Hill)

🟪 Trump, in an escalation, calls for Republicans to ‘nationalize’ elections (New York Times)

🟪 U.S. manufacturing is in retreat and Trump’s tariffs aren’t helping (Wall Street Journal)

READ ON!

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🏛️ Council Meetings

✅ Austin leaders put pause on plan to put AI-powered cameras in city parks (KVUE)

City of Austin officials have hit pause on a plan to expand the use of AI-powered security cameras in city parks.

On Tuesday afternoon, a city spokesperson Erik Johnson confirmed to KVUE that a proposal that would have authorized up to $2 million over five years for mobile security cameras in parks across the city had been withdrawn from Thursday’s city council agenda.

The withdrawal by Austin Financial Services staff was revealed in a memo posted on the city’s website from the city’s chief financial officer to the mayor and council.

In response to questions from KVUE about why the item was withdrawn and whether it will appear on a future agenda, Johnson replied, “There isn’t anything further to provide at this time.”

The move comes ahead of a planned protest on Tuesday afternoon and following strong opinions voiced earlier in the day during a city council work session.

Austin police data shows car break-ins dropped by about 50% across 15 city parks after a pilot program using mobile security cameras. On Thursday, council was expected to consider a contract with Live View Technologies to expand that program citywide. The contract would have cost about $400,000 a year to rent mobile security trailers and monitoring services… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Austin to consider creating a Green Social Housing policy (Austin Business Journal)

The city of Austin could soon adopt a new policy that would make the city more involved in housing development and have it take ownership of some projects. 

At the Feb. 5 Austin City Council meeting, leaders may vote on a resolution that would direct the city manager to present a “comprehensive Green Social Housing policy” by the end of August. This policy is meant to provide the city another tool to address the issue of housing affordability and provide a pathway for multifamily projects to start construction, even if market conditions are unfavorable.

Right now, market data has many multifamily developers putting plans on hold.

Social housing is a concept where a government entity is involved in developing residential projects either by taking a part of the ownership or financing the project with public dollars. Social housing projects usually are mixed-income projects where some units are rented at market rates and others are rented at lower rates… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Kyle man arrested after altercation with minors during student protest against ICE in Buda (CBS Austin)

The Buda Police Department has arrested a 45-year-old man in connection with a brawl involving minors during Monday's student protest in Buda.

The incident occurred during a walkout by hundreds of Hays CISD students protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Police said Chad Michael Watts, 45, of Kyle, faces two counts of assault causing bodily injury.

Video obtained by CBS Austin shows part of the altercation, with students shouting and throwing objects as Watts walked toward his pickup truck.

An early investigation identified Watts as the primary aggressor. Both Watts and a girl involved reported minor injuries but declined medical evaluation… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Texas Education Agency warns districts of potential state takeovers for “encouraging” student protests (Texas Tribune)

The Texas Education Agency on Tuesday warned school districts that they could be taken over by the state if they help facilitate students walking out of class to attend protests.

The agency released guidance after Gov. Greg Abbott directed Education Commissioner Mike Morath to investigate a social media post showing Austin Independent School District students participating in nationwide walkouts against the recent killings of several people by federal immigration officers. Austin school district police officers drove near some of the students during the Jan. 30 protest in downtown Austin.

In the guidance released Tuesday evening, the education agency said students, teachers or school districts participating in “inappropriate political activism” could face the following consequences… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Texas primary between Crockett, Talarico turns ugly (The Hill)

The Senate Democratic primary in Texas has taken an ugly turn, with the increased infighting threatening to complicate the party’s chances of flipping the seat in November.

The most notable incident came this week when former Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), the Democratic nominee for Senate last cycle, ripped state Rep. James Talarico (D) for allegedly calling him a “mediocre Black man.” Talarico said the comments were a mischaracterization and that he was referring to Allred’s method of campaigning, not Allred personally. 

Yet the escalating feud between Talarico and primary rival Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) — who quickly threw her support behind Allred in a statement without mentioning Talarico by name — is rattling some Democrats, who view it as an unhelpful distraction ahead of the March 3 primary.

“We’re taking our eye off the ball,” said Texas Democratic consultant Joel Montfort. “But that this is what Democrats are very good at doing. … We become distracted and we start infighting over things that aren’t particularly beneficial to winning races.”

The race for the Democratic nod for Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) seat has started to ramp up in recent weeks amid heated conversations around electability and polling suggesting the primary is getting tighter… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Cy-Fair ISD leader challenges Greg Abbott in pointed letter: 'Nothing to hide' (Houston Chronicle)

Cypress-Fairbanks ISD leaders say they are following the law — not politics — as the state's third-largest district becomes the latest flashpoint in Gov. Greg Abbott's escalating fight over the Islamic Games and a Muslim civil rights group. Superintendent Douglas Killian wrote a personal letter to the GOP governor late last week, expressing frustration over his demands for Cy-Fair ISD to cancel the Islamic Games of North America at its facilities and saying he needed to clear up "significant inaccuracies related to this situation." According to the letter, which the Chronicle obtained Monday, Killian challenged Abbott's demand directly, saying that it would be illegal for the district to discriminate against the Islamic Games and that the group "is not identified as a foreign terrorist organization."

"If there is an existing legal basis for the edict to disallow The Islamic Games of North America from using CFISD facilities that was inadvertently left out of your correspondence, please provide this citation," the superintendent wrote. Killian said that the district would cooperate with all investigations, but that "CFISD has nothing to hide." The public standoff comes as the attorney general launched an investigation into two Texas school districts and Abbott that demanded schools bar the games from using public facilities over alleged ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the country.

The governor has also designated CAIR and its affiliate groups as "foreign terrorist organizations," barring any taxpayer dollars from going to institutions linked to the group. Abbott plans to try and ban the group from operating in Texas. CAIR has since sued the governor over the designation. Cy-Fair ISD leaders previously said that they did not have any plan to lend district facilities to the organization because the registration for any outside group to use district facilities next year opens in August. They also argued the governor's demands could run contrary to a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court decision. The superintendent's letter echoed those sentiments… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Houston realtors drop plan to add flood risk to Texas home listings (Houston Chronicle)

At the last minute, the Houston Association of Realtors pulled the plug on a two-year project that would have published detailed flood risk data on tens of thousands of active home listings across the state. The project would have added flood risk scores to HAR.com, the association’s home search portal and one of the most widely used real estate websites in Texas. But it collapsed late last year after triggering a revolt among members who feared the information could steer buyers away from properties with higher risk scores.

“It came out of nowhere at the very end when we were literally about to go live,” said Sam Brody, an environmental science professor at Texas A&M University and director of the Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas, whose team developed the underlying tool.

Across the country, major home-search portals have faced mounting pressure over whether to display disaster risk data to prospective buyers. Advocates say clearer disclosure can spare buyers from unexpected financial losses later on. Some agents and sellers have resisted, arguing that risk models are imperfect and can negatively affect home sales. This debate carries particular weight in Texas, experts said, as development pushes deeper into flood-prone areas and buyers often have to rely on outdated flood maps. Wesley Highfield, a senior research scientist at Texas A&M University who also worked on the tool, said fears that greater transparency would disrupt the housing market are often overblown.

He added that the tool is still available on his institute’s website under the name Buyers Aware. “In the Houston area, being informed will be less likely to turn away a buyer, but more likely to have a buyer purchase that property with their eyes wide open,” Highfield said. “The effect on the sale price is potentially marginal relative to the expense borne by an uninformed buyer.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Trump, in an escalation, calls for Republicans to ‘nationalize’ elections (New York Times)

President Trump called in a new interview for the Republican Party to “nationalize” voting in the United States, an aggressive rhetorical step that was likely to raise new worries about his administration’s efforts to involve itself in election matters. During an extended monologue about immigration on a podcast released on Monday by Dan Bongino, his former deputy F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states, though he did not name them. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Under the Constitution, American elections are governed primarily by state law, leading to a decentralized process in which voting is administered by county and municipal officials in thousands of precincts across the country. Mr. Trump, however, has long been fixated on the false claims that U.S. elections are rife with fraud and that Democrats are perpetrating a vast conspiracy to have undocumented immigrants vote and lift the party’s turnout. Mr. Trump’s remarkable call for a political party to seize the mechanisms of voting follows a string of moves from his administration to try to exert more control over American elections,as he and his allies continue to make false claims about his 2020 defeat.

Last week, F.B.I. agents seized ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election from an election center in Fulton County, Ga., where his allies have for years pursued false claims of election fraud. The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Trump had spoken on the phone to the F.B.I. agents involved in the Fulton County raid, praising and thanking them. The Justice Department, which has been newly politicized under Mr. Trump, is demanding that numerous states, including Minnesota, turn over their full voter rolls as the Trump administration tries to build a national voter file… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ U.S. manufacturing is in retreat and Trump’s tariffs aren’t helping (Wall Street Journal)

The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended. Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles disappear since 2023.

An index of factory activity tracked by the Institute for Supply Management shrunk in 26 straight months through December, but showed a January uptick in new orders and production that surprised analysts. The Census Bureau estimates that manufacturing construction spending, which surged with Biden-era funding for chips and renewable energy, fell in each of Trump’s first nine months in office.

The gradual slowdown is in some ways a continuation of decadeslong trends that pulled factory jobs overseas and helped empty out Midwestern cities. In an industry where capital plans and construction timelines extend years into the future, turnarounds also don’t happen overnight. In November, the Federal Reserve slashed estimates for overall U.S. output since the pandemic in an annual revision to metrics for industrial production.

“We never got all the way back” from the pandemic, said Josh Lehner, a U.S. economist at SGH Macro Advisors. While auto and chip makers have cut tens of thousands of workers over the past year, stable layoff rates across the sector suggest that the jobs pullback is gradual. Lehner and other economists also say there are signs output has stabilized, if not inched higher, though gains in efficiency could limit the number of new jobs. A White House spokesman noted that manufacturing productivity ticked upward in recent quarters and that workers’ wage hikes outpaced inflation over the past year… 🟪 (READ MORE)