BG Reads // July 15, 2025

Author

A.J. Bingham
July 15, 2025

Presented By

📌 The Austin City Council will hold its first Budget Work Session (agenda link) this morning at 9AM to discuss the proposed FY 2025-2026 budget. View Here (ATXN1).

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Businesses, donors funnel $30M to small nonprofit this week to help with floods (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 Officials say at least 100 people still missing after July Fourth floods; recovery efforts could take months (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Central Texas cities join, drop out of top 15 fastest-growing cities in U.S. (Community Impact)

🟪 Austin FC announces additions to club's ownership group (Austin FC)

🟪  Food banks are running out of food exactly when more Americans will need them (Wall Street Journal)

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

  • Late Friday evening, the City of Austin posted the FY2025-26 Proposed Budget Document. City Manager T.C. Broadnax will present the proposed budget to the Mayor and City Council today at 9AM. View Here (ATXN1).

  • Bingham Group will be following the budget process, including the City Manager and department presentations to City Council, through its approval in August.

  • » Click Here for our high-level summary of the FY2025-26 Proposed Budget. «

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Businesses, donors funnel $30M to small nonprofit this week to help with floods (Austin Business Journal)

The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, a nonprofit used to doling out just a few million dollars annually to rural needs, announced July 11 that it received more than $30 million in one week for the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund.

“The heartbreak we’ve experienced as a community is profound, but so is the response,” foundation CEO Austin Dickson said in an announcement. “In a matter of days, thousands of donors from across Texas and beyond have stepped up to say: we are with you. This is a moment of collective grief, but also of extraordinary love.”

Among the leading donors this week are grocery giant H-E-B, which contributed $2 million, and James Avery Artisan Jewelry, which donated $500,000. The $2 million from H-E-B is part of a $5 million donation the company announced earlier this week. H-E-B was started in Kerrville.

The foundation also announced an initial $5 million in emergency grants to nonprofits that will, in turn, direct the funds to those in need… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Central Texas cities join, drop out of top 15 fastest-growing cities in U.S. (Community Impact)

Texas is home to seven of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. with a population of more than 20,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released May 15.

In the Austin metro, Hutto was the fastest-growing city in the area by percent population change, and ranked 13th overall in the nation with a year over year population increase of 9.4%.

Georgetown, which had ranked as the fastest-growing city in the U.S. with a population of more than 50,000 in 2021 and 2022, lost its spot as the fastest-growing U.S. city in 2023, as the Census Bureau began including smaller cities in the data… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Officials say at least 100 people still missing after July Fourth floods; recovery efforts could take months (Texas Tribune)

More than 10 days after catastrophic July Fourth floods along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, the official death toll across six Hill Country counties has risen to 132 people, while an estimated 101 remain missing, state officials said Monday.

Local and state officials said the exact number of people still missing, though, is difficult to determine. The figure presented Monday was the first time state and local officials had publicly disclosed an updated estimate since Tuesday, when that figure was 161 people.

At a press conference Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott said that 97 people were missing from the area around Kerrville, the Kerr County seat. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said the larger estimate of 101 people includes people missing from other counties.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said during a commissioners court meeting Monday that the search for missing people could take up to six months, but setting a time estimate is also difficult…  🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Austin FC announces additions to club's ownership group (Austin FC)

Austin FC announced today the addition of five (5) individuals to the Club’s ownership group: Jenny Just, Matt Hulsizer, Tench Coxe, Tanuj Gulati, and Dave Snyderman. The new members of the ownership group, who all have residence in Austin, acquire non-controlling, minority stakes in the Club, and represent an investment that will help fuel the Club’s continued growth.

Austin FC Founder, CEO, and Majority Owner Anthony Precourt retains majority ownership control of the Club and, notably, each additional member of the original investment group – which also includes Austin FC co-founder Eduardo Margain as well as Marius Haas, Bryan Sheffield, Matthew McConaughey, David Kahn, and Toby Neugebauer – remain as owners of the Club alongside Anthony Precourt in addition to the five (5) newly named individuals… 🟪 (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

✅ Texas leaders have repeatedly claimed the state’s voting maps are race blind. Until the Trump DOJ disagreed. (Texas Tribune)

At first, the question of whether Texas would take the extraordinary step of redrawing its congressional maps in the middle of the decade was just a political calculation — would Gov. Greg Abbott go along with President Donald Trump’s plan to try to squeeze a few more GOP seats out of the midterms, despite concerns from congressional Republicans?

But then, the Department of Justice offered Texas a legal justification to pursue this long-shot strategy, warning the state in a letter Monday that four majority-minority congressional districts in the Houston and Fort Worth areas are unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. Soon after, Abbott set a special session agenda calling for mid-cycle redistricting “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

This comes just weeks after the conclusion of a trial over Texas’ current maps, in which representatives for the state argued repeatedly that a race-blind process was used to draw the boundaries of the existing districts. Critics say the apparent reversal — with Abbott now acknowledging concerns that some districts were drawn “along strict racial lines” — suggests this is a ploy to provide Texas with political and legal cover to try and add more Republican seats… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Texas’ rising wind, solar reliability undermines critics on renewable energy (Reuters)

President Donald Trump has said that rapid adoption of solar and wind power has made U.S. electricity unstable and expensive, justifying his bid to end most subsidies for renewable energy. But reliability has improved dramatically in the U.S. grid with the most renewable energy – in Texas - and electricity prices there are below the national average, according to regulatory filings and price data reviewed by Reuters. At the same time, some grids that rely primarily on fossil fuel generation have experienced reliability issues and surging prices. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s main grid operator, forecasts only a 0.30% chance of rolling blackouts during peak energy demand in August, according to its June 6 reliability assessment. That is a vast improvement from the 12% chance it predicted for August 2024.

Electricity prices for Texas residential customers and businesses are about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, 24% below the national average, according to the latest monthly report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. “ERCOT has done a good job of defining the products needed for energy and reliability,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas in Austin. “It could be an example for other grids in how to create reliability at a low cost.”

The Texas grid’s performance rebuts the assumptions driving Trump’s sweeping tax-and-spending bill that Congress passed last week, which will end subsidies that boosted adoption of solar, wind and other clean energy technologies. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright cheered the cuts in a social media post saying the bill “will help end wasteful subsidies and deliver more reliable energy for the American people!”

On Monday Trump signed his latest executive order directing federal agencies to strengthen provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill that repeal or modify tax credits for solar and wind projects. Trump called renewable energy unreliable and expensive. He said renewables displaced more dependable sources, relied on foreign-controlled supply chains and harmed the environment. Solar and wind power only work when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. This intermittency can risk significant shortfalls during periods of high demand… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Food banks are running out of food exactly when more Americans will need them (Wall Street Journal)

Sarah Aragón glanced at the growing line of people snaking down Central Avenue, waiting for their allotment of everything from melons to pinto beans to frozen catfish. She wondered how she’ll keep feeding them all. This year, the federal government has canceled food deliveries and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid to food banks. For Aragón, the head of programming for Roadrunner Food Bank, New Mexico’s largest charitable food operation, that has meant losing more than seven million pounds of food she had been counting on.

President Trump’s megabill, passed earlier this month, includes cuts to food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Food banks across the country were already straining under rising demand. Now, they worry many more Americans will go hungry. Some food banks and pantries are pushing for more state, local and private funding. Others are considering cutting back services and the amount of food they can distribute.

“It’s getting to the point where we can’t fill every single need in terms of food,” Aragón said. “I don’t know how much more creative we can be to make things stretch.” Food banks have seen requests for assistance from households—including those with children—jump sharply over the past few years, driven by the end of pandemic aid programs and the impact of inflation on grocery prices. According to a recent survey from Feeding America, a national network of food banks, over half of 162 food banks reported demand rising this past April compared with April 2024. Earlier this year, the Agriculture Department canceled millions of pounds of shipments to food banks that were part of its emergency food-assistance program for low-income people.

A spokesperson for the department said it had only terminated an additional fund set up by the Biden administration that resulted in inflated spending on the program. Deliveries for the main emergency food effort continue uninterrupted, the department said. A separate pandemic-era program, slated to disburse roughly $500 million this year to food banks to buy produce, dairy items and meats from local farmers, was also cut by the Agriculture Department. The department said it had released hundreds of millions of dollars to food banks that had been previously promised as part of the program. Yet food banks say they are already feeling the impacts of federal cuts… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Andrew Cuomo relaunches campaign for mayor after losing primary to Zohran Mamdani (NPR)

Andrew Cuomo says he’s “truly sorry” for running a poor campaign for the Democratic primary — but now he’s “in it to win it.”

The former governor announced Monday he plans to actively campaign for New York City mayor on an independent ballot line, setting up a crowded general election featuring Democrat Zohran Mamdani, GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa, attorney Jim Walden running as an independent, and Mayor Eric Adams — also on the ballot as an independent after dropping out of the Democratic primary.

In a video announcement and fundraising email to supporters, Cuomo signaled a significant shift in his tone.

“I am truly sorry that I let you down,” Cuomo said in a video posted on X, making a rare apology as he thanked the 440,000 New Yorkers who voted for him in the primary election… 🟪 (READ MORE)

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