🟪 Austin mayor, other officials seek affordable housing money from Dog's Head development (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 Tesla begins testing Cybercab without steering wheel in Austin (Austin American-Statesman)

🟪 Gov. Greg Abbott calls for ban on data center development in rural Texas neighborhoods (Texas Tribune)

🟪 The divided Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision exposes sharp rifts among justices (Associated Press)

🟪 Justices expand presidential power over regulators, but not the Fed (New York Times)

READ ON!

✅ Austin mayor, other officials seek affordable housing money from Dog's Head development (Austin Business Journal)

everal elected officials in Austin are calling for the development of the Dog’s Head area to include environmental protections and funds for affordable housing. 

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson and three other council members — Michael Siegel, Jose “Chito” Vela and Jose Velasquez — put out a statement on the City Council message board on June 30 outlining some of their priorities for the future of the massive development.

The city of Austin is considering creating a tax increment re-investment zone, or TIRZ, for the Dog’s Head area. That would help fund construction and future infrastructure investment needed for the uniquely shaped tract… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Tesla begins testing Cybercab without steering wheel in Austin (Austin American-Statesman)

Tesla Inc. is advancing tests of its purpose-built robotaxi on the streets of Austin. 

CEO Elon Musk says it has started engineering tests of the Cybercab in Austin. A newly released video shows an engineering vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals taking a safety monitor to a destination in the East Riverside neighborhood, past Willow Creek Drive. 

The tests arrive after the Cybercab has been spotted driving around Austin for months, often with a steering wheel and a person in the driver’s seat. Now, the engineering tests are the latest indication that Tesla is preparing to add the vehicle to its robotaxi fleet, following recent regulatory activity. 

The Texas Department of Public Safety uploaded the Cybercab's first responder interaction plan to its website, a step required under Texas' autonomous vehicle framework before operators can obtain approval to operate commercially.

A filing with the Environmental Protection Agency revealed specs for the vehicle, including its 219-horsepower and 418-mile range. And last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed revisions to the current requirements that all light vehicles contain hand- or foot-operated, removing those requirements for vehicles designed never to be operated by a human… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Gov. Greg Abbott calls for ban on data center development in rural Texas neighborhoods (Texas Tribune)

Gov. Greg Abbott called for blocking new data center development in rural parts of the state during a campaign stop in East Texas on Tuesday.

“We must prohibit them from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” Abbott said at the Bullard event, which primarily discussed his plan to cut property taxes, adding that this issue “dovetails right into fighting for East Texas values.”

Abbott’s push for a prohibition in rural neighborhoods appears to go further than a sweeping regulatory framework he unveiled earlier this month, which called for data centers to add new power generation to the grid, pay for their own infrastructure costs, reuse their own water and implement measures such as setbacks, among other proposals aimed at limiting their impact on residential communities… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Dallas will furlough 4,200 city employees amid budget gap (Texas Tribune)

Dallas will furlough more than 4,200 city employees for three days to counteract a $30 million budget shortfall expected this year, city officials said Tuesday.

The state’s third largest city has seen higher-than-expected costs this year as its revenue fell short, driven by a drop-off in expected sales tax revenue. Overtime for police officers and firefighters and increased health care costs for employees, including higher medication costs for treatments such as GLP-1s, helped drive costs beyond what the city had planned, Dallas officials said in May.

To help bridge the gap, about half of the city’s civilian employees must take off work without pay on July 10, Sept. 4 and Sept. 28, city officials announced. A group of city executives must also take another two unpaid days off sometime before Sept. 16… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ The divided Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision exposes sharp rifts among justices (Associated Press)

The U.S. Supreme Court’s divided ruling that children born in the U.S. are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment — even if their parents are in the country unlawfully or only temporarily — exposed deep fissures in the justices’ views on the issue and toward each other.

The court’s two Black justices notably had very different views on U.S. citizenship in the context of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Tuesday’s decision rejects an order President Donald Trump issued at the start of his second term, declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

The majority, composed of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, determined that birth on U.S. soil plus being subject to U.S. law is enough for citizenship… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Justices expand presidential power over regulators, but not the Fed (New York Times)

The Supreme Court expanded presidential power on Monday by affirming President Trump’s ability to fire most independent regulators, though the justices explicitly affirmed the Federal Reserve’s independence and said its leaders could not be dismissed at will. The court’s 6-to-3 ruling to broadly allow the firing of federal regulators, with the three liberal justices dissenting, is a significant shift in power from Congress to the president that could usher in a drastic change to the government’s structure by giving the president more direct control over independent agencies.

The justices ruled in two separate but related cases. One involved Mr. Trump’s efforts to fire Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission who did not align with his agenda, and another involved his efforts to fire the Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, whom the president had targeted as he pressured the central bank to lower interest rates.

In the first case, the justices found that Ms. Slaughter could be dismissed, but underscored the “unique role” of the Federal Reserve and cautioned that it should not be read as extending to the central bank. At the Federal Reserve — which has vast influence over the economy and a long history of independence from political forces — the justices affirmed that officials could not be fired at will, only for cause. In the second case, the justices decided in a 5-to-4 ruling that Ms. Cook could not be fired without the chance to refute the unproven allegations of mortgage fraud that the Trump administration cited in seeking her ouster. Agencies affected: The Federal Trade Commission is just one of dozens of agencies affected by the ruling in Trump v. Slaughter.

The president will now be able to fire at will leaders from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Postal Service, ending nearly 90 years of legal protection for those jobs. In the F.T.C. case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent that the majority’s ruling would unleash “chaos” by transforming independent agencies, undoing centuries of political practice and concluding that “all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time.” In the Cook case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the court had decided to “go big” when “a modest approach would have been appropriate.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)