BG Reads // July 28, 2025

Author

A.J. Bingham
July 28, 2025

Presented By

www.binghamgp.com

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Constable George Morales announces run for Travis County commissioner, Precinct 4 (KVUE)

🟪 New pipeline to address Austin's $25B construction project labor shortage begins to flow (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 Hundreds of new units rising under Austin's HOME program (Community Impact)

🟪 Texas lawmakers take aim at contract lobbyists hired by local governments (Dallas Morning News)

🟪 Texas House redistricting committee’s Houston hearing draws criticism over absence of maps (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Democrats’ shotgun approach to opposing redistricting could paint them in a corner (Dallas Morning News)

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ Memos:

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Constable George Morales announces run for Travis County commissioner, Precinct 4 (KVUE)

A new candidate is entering the race for Travis County commissioner, Precinct 4.

Travis County Constable George Morales announced on Saturday he's running for the seat in the precinct, which covers the southeastern part of the county.

The seat is currently held by Margaret Gomez, who plans to retire at the end of her term.

“Precinct 4 is my home,” he said. “I was raised here, I’ve raised my family here, and I’ve spent my life working to uplift this community. My parents taught me the values of service, dignity and never forgetting where you come from. As a lifelong public servant and your Precinct 4 constable, I’ve worked hard to live by those values every day.”

Morales has worked in law enforcement for 26 years. In his campaign announcement, he said he wants to fight for health care for working families and fully fund a diversion center to support mental health and recovery.

“We need leaders who meet people where they are, listen, serve and lead with compassion,” Morales said. “When elected, I am committed to being that kind of leader. My predecessors and ‘Those Who Call Austin Home’ view the Precinct 4 office as sacred. We must uphold the historical legacy built by those who fought for it.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Public Safety Commission clashes with Office of Police Oversight (Austin Monitor)

“It deeply concerns me that we’ve put a retired police officer in charge of taking complaints from the community about police,” Commissioner Rebecca Bernhardt told staff from Austin’s Office of Police Oversight (OPO) during a heated Public Safety Commission meeting this month.

The OPO was scheduled to present an overdue annual report for 2023 (which has been a source of tension for the commission in the past) during the meeting. However, most of this presentation was postponed as appointees voiced other frustrations with the office, which investigates civilian reports about police interactions and makes policy recommendations.

Commissioners were particularly dissatisfied with the OPO’s complaint management process. Bernhardt told Complaint Supervisor Kevin Masters that she had looked him up on LinkedIn. After Masters confirmed that he had spent 27 years with the Kansas City Police Department, Bernhardt expressed her discomfort with placing someone with nearly three decades in law enforcement at the helm of civilian complaints… 🟪 (READ MORE)

🟪 New pipeline to address Austin's $25B construction project labor shortage begins to flow (Austin Business Journal)

The Austin Infrastructure Academy is seeing early returns on its efforts to bolster Austin’s construction and mobility workforce, and talent should start to exit the new pipeline soon.

The academy, which launched in March, has seen notable interest from the private sector and job seekers over its efforts to connect locals to training opportunities in the construction industry. It was spawned by projections that Austin won't have enough workers as it embarks on at least $25 billion in projects, including light rail expansions, I-35 upgrades, a new convention center and a larger airport — not to mention the usual private sector construction.

“We've seen slow momentum, but I think it's going to increase over the next couple of months,” said Yael Lawson, the chief operations officer for Workforce Solutions Capital Area, which oversees the academy. “We're training people now, so we're going to start to see them graduating and hired.”

The academy has held career fairs that have been attended by more than 500 job seekers, and about 58% of Workforce Solutions' training enrollments since have been toward Infrastructure Academy efforts, Lawson said… ✅ (READ MORE)

🟪 Hundreds of new units rising under Austin's HOME program (Community Impact)

Almost 800 new residences have been proposed citywide under the Home Ownership for Middle-income Empowerment, or HOME, initiative after more than a year of the policy being in effect.

Under the two-part program, supported by most of City Council in late 2023 and last spring, multiple housing units can now be built on single-family lots and individual homes can go on smaller lots than previously allowed. The city began accepting single-family building plans with up to three units under HOME's first phase early last year while subdivision and small lot plan reviews under HOME 2 started later that summer.

More than 400 applications for multi-unit HOME 1 projects were filed as of mid-May, with the majority new builds. HOME included a provision to encourage preservation of existing housing alongside new additions but only five projects have taken advantage so far.

Less than two dozen HOME 2 project plans have been submitted, alongside five property subdivisions for smaller lots… ✅ (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

🟪 Texas lawmakers take aim at contract lobbyists hired by local governments (Dallas Morning News)

Over the last two years, lobbyists hired by the city of Dallas have gone to Austin to advocate on issues from flood control to homeless services, and flex their influence to secure millions of dollars for projects such as the new police academy. The outreach has cost taxpayers around $794,000 since 2023, which officials say is necessary to fight for the interests of constituents and monitor policy that directly affects municipalities in Texas. But a bill moving through the Texas Legislature aims to bar local governments from using public funds to pay lobbyists or organizations that lobby for their members — a longtime goal of conservative lawmakers that has failed in previous attempts but is getting renewed focus in the special session that began Monday.

If the bill becomes law, cities, counties and school districts would be unable to hire lobbyists to influence the Legislature, instead having to rely on elected officials or internal staff to navigate thousands of bills filed each session and push for critical funding. Before Senate Bill 12 cleared a committee Tuesday, Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, one of its eight authors, called the practice “unethical” and took issue with local governments paying lobbyists to fight “against things that our voters support” like property tax reform and school choice. The bill, which has multiple House companions, is now awaiting a vote by the full Senate.

“Frankly, Texans are being forced to subsidize speech that they fundamentally disagree with,” Middleton said. But government and school officials who rely on professionals to help them translate the more than 11,000 bills filed by legislators say the ban is a form of censorship that weakens their ability to influence policy while businesses and special interests will continue pushing their priorities through lobbyists. While the bill would prohibit public money for dues to city and county organizations to lobby for members, it excludes law enforcement associations that also hire lobbyists. Middleton did not respond to questions submitted to his staff asking why the bill’s ban would not apply to law enforcement associations… ✅ (READ MORE)

🟪 Texas House redistricting committee’s Houston hearing draws criticism over absence of maps (Texas Tribune)

The Texas House’s redistricting committee visited Houston on Saturday to hear out local residents’ concerns on the state Legislature’s plans to consider redrawing nearly a handful of congressional districts in Texas — all of which are held by Black or Latino Democrats, three in the Houston area.

But the testimony portion of the hearing, limited to five hours, had to wait while Democratic committee members spent the first hour grilling committee Chair Cody Vasut on why they were there in the first place.

When Vasut, R-Angleton, welcomed the standing-room only crowd for the committee’s second “public testimony regarding a revised congressional redistricting plan,” state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, offered a correction.

“I just want to advise the public that they would not be testifying on a revised congressional redistricting plan, because there is no revised congressional redistricting plan,” she said… ✅ (READ MORE)

✅ Democrats’ shotgun approach to opposing redistricting could paint them in a corner (Dallas Morning News)

Fifteen Democratic House members traveled to Illinois and California Friday morning to spread word of Texas’ redistricting effort, while Democratic state senators in Austin mulled the idea of subpoenaing a Department of Justice attorney who wrote the letter prompting the effort. Democrats in the House held an unofficial redistricting committee meeting Thursday night after Republicans voted to cut testimony short. One Democratic candidate for Congress landed in jail after he allegedly disrupted a Thursday redistricting hearing at the Capitol. And the nuclear option of breaking quorum — a tactic used in 2003 to halt a mid-decade redistricting effort temporarily — continues to loom quietly in the background. Through the first week of a special session of the Texas Legislature, Democrats have taken a scattershot approach to opposing a midstream change in congressional district boundaries that was requested by President Donald Trump.

Trump is calling for state lawmakers to flip as many as five Democratic House seats to Republican control ahead of the 2026 midterm, which is expected to favor Democrats. Flipping those seats would help Trump hang on to a slim majority in Congress and continue implementing his agenda. It’s a political rock and a hard place for the minority party that could become stuck between approving a new congressional map that almost certainly will diminish their clout among the Texas congressional delegation and halting efforts at the Capitol to provide relief for flood victims. “It’s a challenge to know how to navigate both trying to win Texas and win the national narrative,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “I think that’s what is indicative of their less-clear approach.”

“The stakes are too high for them to give up on the national level implications of redistricting in exchange for flood control in Central Texas,” Rottinghaus said. “I think they’re willing to make that political trade.” Lawmakers at the Capitol have heard uniform opposition to the redistricting in back-to-back public hearings in the House and Senate on Thursday and Friday. Those hearings will continue over the weekend and into early next week, including a hearing on Monday at the University of Texas at Arlington… 🟪 (READ MORE)

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