BG Reads // January 7, 2025

Author

A.J. Bingham
January 07, 2026

faustin a

Presented By

www.binghamgp.com

January 7, 2026

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Watson calls for long-term vision, fiscal discipline for Austin in state of the city remarks (Community Impact)

🟪 Austin climbs back up U-Haul’s list of growth metros; Texas reclaims No. 1 state spot (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 Jury selected from hundreds in trial testing accountability after Uvalde shooting (Houston Public Media)

🟪 Dallas mayor predicts ‘flood’ of Wall Street firms to quit NYC under Mamdani (New York Post)

🟪 White House rewrites January 6 history and blames police for deadly attack on 5-year anniversary (CNN)

READ ON!

[FIRM NEWS]

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

  • Work Session: Tuesday, January 20 @9AM

  • Regular Meeting: Thursday, January 22nd @10AM

🏛️ [New Memos]

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Watson calls for long-term vision, fiscal discipline for Austin in state of the city remarks (Community Impact)

Mayor Kirk Watson outlined several of his stated accomplishments since returning to office, as well as his hopes for Austin's future, during a Jan. 6 state of the city speech downtown.

Looking ahead to his final three years in office, Watson framed his approach around balancing short-term needs with longer-range plans to build on civic improvements and avoid potential pitfalls down the road.

"Austin is... a remarkably successful city. Most of our greatest challenges are a result of success," he said. "The truth of the matter is we’re not really managing decay. But I will tell you, we can. We can find ourselves managing decay within a 5-year or a 10-year or a 15-year period if our short-term focus becomes all we focus on, and we don’t carry out a long-term vision."… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Austin climbs back up U-Haul’s list of growth metros; Texas reclaims No. 1 state spot (Austin Business Journal)

Texas once again tops U-Haul’s annual list of in-migration states, and Austin is still among the list of growth metros.

Arizona-based U-Haul Holding Co.’s (NYSE: UHAL) annual Growth Index analyzes migration data for one-way customer transactions from the past calendar year. Texas moved up to the No. 1 spot after sitting at No. 2 a year earlier behind South Carolina, which fell to No. 4 on the list released Jan. 5.

Among all one-way U-Haul customer traffic in and out of Texas in 2025, 50.7% was for people moving into the state, while 49.3% was for those leaving. Compared to 2024, customers coming to Texas rose 3% year over year, while departures rose just 1%.

Texas also was No. 1 on the U-Haul Growth Index from 2016 to 2018 and from 2021 to 2023.

“Sunshine and warm weather remain appealing to the moving public, based on the top 10 growth states,” U-Haul noted. “Eight of the top 10 states enjoy a southern geography.”

Additionally, seven of the top 10 growth states have Republican governors, U-Haul added.

Those trends are reflected on the metro level as well.

The Dallas area retained its No. 1 ranking, and the Houston metro jumped from the No. 9 spot on the previous ranking to No. 2 on the new list. The Austin metro takes the No. 3 spot, up from No. 5, while Brownsville-McAllen surged from No. 21 a year earlier to No. 10 now. The San Antonio and College Station metros also make the top 25, at Nos. 21 and 23, respectively… 🟪 (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

✅ Jury selected from hundreds in trial testing accountability after Uvalde shooting (Houston Public Media)

A jury has been selected in the trial of a former Uvalde school district police officer charged in connection with the law enforcement response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting. On Monday, more than 400 potential jurors were questioned about their knowledge of the failed police response to one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history. From that pool, 12 jurors and four alternates were selected for the trial. Opening statements are set for Tuesday morning. The trial was moved from Uvalde to Nueces County, where it is being held in Corpus Christi, after a judge determined it would be difficult to seat an impartial jury in Uvalde. During jury selection, presiding Judge Sid Harle acknowledged that, given the case’s national attention, there was likely no one in the pool who had not already heard about the shooting.

Former Uvalde CISD officer Adrian Gonzales faces 29 felony counts of abandoning or endangering a child for his alleged inaction during the response. Prosecutors say Gonzales failed to “engage, distract, or delay the shooter” and did not follow his active-shooter training to confront the gunman. Gonzales has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Several victims’ family members are expected to attend the trial in Corpus Christi, including Manuel Rizo, the uncle of 9-year-old fourth grader Jackie Cazares, who was killed in the attack.

“We're going to hope that the prosecution – the district attorney and the people who owe this to their constituents – do their job, and do a damn good job of it,” Rizo told TPR. News Uvalde school shooting trial moved to Corpus Christi David Martin Davies , October 7, 2025 Former Uvalde CISD police officer Adrian Gonzales' trial—connected to the Uvalde Robb Elementary School shooting—is moved to Nueces County and is set to begin on Jan. 5, 2026. The Cazares family is one of 21 families who sued the City of Uvalde over the shooting, which killed 19 students and two teachers. Hundreds of law enforcement officers from multiple agencies responded to the scene, but federal and state reviews later described the response as a failure, citing a delay of more than an hour before officers confronted the gunman… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Dallas mayor predicts ‘flood’ of Wall Street firms to quit NYC under Mamdani (New York Post)

The mayor of Dallas said he’s ready to welcome a “flood” of Wall Street firms if Zohran Mamdani follows through on his socialist agenda — and even claimed that Texas could overtake New York as the nation’s top financial hub.

In an exclusive sitdown interview with The Post, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said Mamdani’s socialist agenda for the Big Apple — including vows to hike taxes on the rich and expand government control over prices for housing, groceries, and childcare — could accelerate defections of big financial firms from the city.

The 50-year-old Republican, who majored in history as an undergraduate at Harvard, likewise floated the possibility that Wall Street is at risk of being toppled from its perch as America’s premier financial center — likening it to Venice, Italy losing its edge as Europe’s premier trading hub centuries ago.

“It’s not inconceivable at all that within a certain number of years, people look back and go, ‘Do you remember back when New York was the financial capital of the United States? Isn’t that weird?'” Johnson told The Post… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Florida’s school choice headache: Millions of unused dollars (Politico)

Florida’s aggressive expansion of school choice has left more than $400 million in taxpayer-funded education vouchers sitting unused, exposing major cracks in the state’s booming program. Some 500,000 students across Florida, which hosts the nation’s largest school choice effort, have accepted education vouchers toward home or private schooling.

But thousands of these students, for one reason or another, aren’t using the money — leaving a staggering $400 million lingering in their accounts. This massive sum, clocking in at $100 million more than Florida spends annually on school safety, is one of several revelations recently unearthed by shocking state audits, issues lawmakers are attempting to rectify in 2026.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars have been sitting unspent in so-called scholarship accounts where they could have been funding our public schools,” state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D-Orlando) said during a December Appropriations Committee hearing. “We should be putting all of these mind-blowing graphics and numbers on a giant posterboard so that these billions of dollars can be DOGE’d, but we are not. Because under this taxpayer-funded school vouchers scheme, the funding did not follow the student, as we were told.”

School choice is exploding in Florida since the state’s GOP-dominated Legislature two years ago passed its “universal” policy allowing all students, regardless of income, to claim education vouchers averaging $8,000. While the program has proven to be extremely popular among parents and students, instantly opening the voucher flood gates spurred rapid growth that the state and scholarship-administering organizations have struggled to manage… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ White House rewrites January 6 history and blames police for deadly attack on 5-year anniversary (CNN)

The White House rolled out a new website Tuesday with a full-blown recast of the historical record of January 6, 2021, hailing the pro-Trump mob who stormed the US Capitol five years ago as “peaceful protesters” who were provoked by law enforcement.

The new site baselessly claims the violence on January 6, 2021, was instigated by law enforcement and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It recasts the rioters as the victims that day, and depicts President Donald Trump as a hero for granting sweeping pardons for the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the deadly attack.

For years, Trump has whitewashed the history of January 6, when thousands of his supporters violently stormed the Capitol in hopes of preventing Congress from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. But the new site notably goes further than Trump’s past rhetoric, and gives an official White House platform to his long-debunked claims.

One overarching theme on the new site is Trump’s long-running — but completely false — claim that the 2020 election was stolen. His repeated lies about mass voter fraud were the reason why he and his supporters wanted to stop Congress from certifying the results on January 6… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ For many Jan. 6 rioters, a pardon from Trump wasn’t enough (New York Times)

In the first hours of his second administration, President Trump sought to wipe away all trace of the attack on the Capitol by granting amnesty to nearly 1,600 people implicated in the riot stoked by his lies about a stolen election. They answered with a collective cry of gratitude. And why not? The pardon proclamation saved them, opening prison doors and ending all of the criminal prosecutions related to the Capitol attack. Even more, it gave a presidential stamp of approval to their inverted vision of Jan. 6, 2021: that those who assaulted the police and vandalized the historic building that day were victims, and those who spent the next four years using the criminal justice system to hold them accountable were villains.

But nearly a year after Mr. Trump’s sweeping proclamation asserted that he had cleared the way for “a process of national reconciliation,” many recipients of his clemency remain consumed by conspiracy theories, angry at the Trump administration for not validating their insistence that the Capitol attack was a deep-state setup and haunted by problems from both before and after the riot.

“Being pardoned doesn’t make these families whole,” Cynthia Hughes, a prominent advocate for the Jan. 6 defendants, wrote on social media recently. “Many are barely holding on mentally, emotionally, and financially. To pretend otherwise is a lie.” In the five years since the Capitol was stormed, no new facts have emerged to undermine the basic findings of congressional and Justice Department investigators that many of the rioters acted in the misguided belief, pushed relentlessly by Mr. Trump, that he had been robbed of victory in 2020 — and that in attacking the Capitol they not only injured about 140 police officers but also struck at a cornerstone of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Even so, Mr. Trump has long maintained that the rioters endured horrible, even illegal, mistreatment during their prosecutions. And yet if that is true, some pardoned rioters are now asking, then why haven’t their persecutors been thrown in jail? And if the rioters are martyrs to a righteous cause, as the president and his allies have often said, then why haven’t they been made whole through financial reparations?… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ US cuts the number of vaccines recommended for every child, a move slammed by physicians (Associated Press)

The U.S. took the unprecedented step Monday of cutting the number of vaccines it recommends for every child — a move that leading medical groups said would undermine protections against a half-dozen diseases. The change is effective immediately, meaning that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will now recommend that all children get vaccinated against 11 diseases.

What’s no longer broadly recommended is protection against flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis or RSV. Instead, protections against those diseases are only recommended for certain groups deemed high risk, or when doctors recommend them in what’s called “shared decision-making.” Trump administration officials said the overhaul, a move long sought by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., won’t result in families who want the vaccines losing access to them, and said insurance will continue to pay.

But medical experts said the decision creates confusion for parents and could increase preventable diseases. States, not the federal government, have the authority to require vaccinations for schoolchildren. While CDC requirements often influence those state regulations, some states have begun creating their own alliances to counter the Trump administration’s guidance on vaccines. The change comes as U.S. vaccination rates have been slipping and the share of children with exemptions has reached an all-time high, according to federal data. At the same time, rates of diseases that can be protected against with vaccines, such as measles and whooping cough, are rising across the country.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the overhaul was in response to a request from President Donald Trump in December. Trump asked the agency to review how peer nations approach vaccine recommendations and consider revising U.S. guidance accordingly. HHS said its comparison to 20 peer nations found that the U.S. was an “outlier” in both the number of vaccinations and the number of doses it recommended to all children. Officials with the agency framed the change as a way to increase public trust by recommending only the most important vaccinations for children to receive… 🟪 (READ MORE)

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