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🛑 How to help people affected by Kerrville-area floods (KUT) 🛑

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Death toll in central Texas flash floods rises to 82 as sheriff says 10 campers remain missing (Associated Press)

🟪 With cap of $687M, bond task force to weigh $4.4B in city needs (Austin Monitor)

🟪 The next Austin Convention Center is already booking business (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 Welcome to Dallas, North: The region that just can’t stop expanding (Wall Street Journal)

🟪 Millions more Americans could turn to food banks soon. Food banks are simply not ready. (Politico)

🟪 House GOP clears key hurdle on Trump’s big bill, pushing it closer to vote (Associated Press)

🟪 How healthcare cuts in the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ will affect Americans (Wall Street Journal)

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ Memos:

• Bond Election Advisory Task Force - 2026 Bond Development Update (7.2.25)

• Staff Response to Establish Austin as a Recognized Soccer City (Resolution No. 20240229-059) (6.30.25)

• Staff Response to Resolution No. 20240530-173 Regarding Mail Theft (6.30.25)

🏛️ City of Austin Org Chart (as of June 2025)

💰 2026 City of Austin Bond - Public Input

🏛️ City of Austin Seeks Proposals for Colony Park Displacement Mitigation Strategy RFP

ℹ️ 2025 Essential Resources for Navigating the City of Austin

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Death toll in central Texas flash floods rises to 82 as sheriff says 10 campers remain missing (Associated Press)

Families sifted through waterlogged debris Sunday and stepped inside empty cabins at Camp Mystic, an all-girls summer camp ripped apart by flash floods that washed homes off their foundations and killed at least 82 people in central Texas.

Rescuers maneuvering through challenging terrain, high waters and snakes including water moccasins continued their desperate search for the missing, including 10 girls and a counselor from the camp. For the first time since the storms began pounding Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said there were 41 people confirmed to be unaccounted for across the state and more could be missing.

In Kerr County, home to Camp Mystic and other youth camps in the Texas Hill Country, searchers have found the bodies of 68 people, including 28 children, Sheriff Larry Leitha said in the afternoon.

He pledged to keep searching until “everybody is found” from Friday’s flash floods. Ten other deaths were reported in Travis, Burnet, Kendall, Tom Green and Williamson counties, according to local officials. The death toll is certain to rise over the next few days, said Col. Freeman Martin of the Texas Department of Public Safety… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ With cap of $687M, bond task force to weigh $4.4B in city needs (Austin Monitor)

Over this summer, the Bond Election Advisory Task Force will begin to evaluate a narrowed list of capital needs for the City of Austin’s 2026 bond election, following the delivery of a $4.4 billion needs assessment from city staff later this month. The task force, which has met regularly since October 2024, will begin reviewing project recommendations in August, ahead of its scheduled report to City Council next spring.

In a memo released last week, city budget staff recommended that the 2026 bond package not exceed $687 million, based on the city’s current debt capacity and a goal of limiting the financial impact on taxpayers. Data in the memo show that bond size would increase the annual debt service tax bill for the median homeowner — defined as a home assessed at $525,000 — by approximately $99.82. Each additional $100 million in bond funding would raise the annual bill by roughly $14.26.

The task force’s working groups will meet from August through January to assess proposals from city departments. Those recommendations will then be reviewed and consolidated by the full task force between January and April 2026. The group is expected to deliver its final recommendation to City Council in May, with the Council facing an Aug. 6 deadline to place the bond package on the November 2026 ballot… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ $2B master planned community coming to fast-growing Caldwell County (Austin Business Journal)

Austin developer Wilson Capital hopes to start development of a 932-acre master-planned community in Lockhart as early as the fourth quarter of this year. It's estimated to cost $2.15 billion.

The community, called Blue Sky, will rise on 932 acres along State Highway 130 southwest of Lockhart, according to an announcement. With thousands of homes plus commercial and medical space — and a school — planned, the community will represent major growth for one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, Caldwell County.

Once fully built out, Blue Sky will have more than 3,650 single-family home sites. The first phase of development is expected to begin late this year or early next year with construction of the first 450 lots, which will be 40 and 50 feet wide... 🟪 (READ MORE)

🟪 The next Austin Convention Center is already booking business (Austin Business Journal)

Austin is already securing bigger events due to the city’s effort to expand its convention center. 

The forthcoming $1.6 billion convention center has booked nine groups for 2029 so far. That's when the Austin Convention Center reopens. Those events alone should book up to 75,000 hotel rooms and also create an economic impact of $69.4 million, according to data from Visit Austin, which handles sales for the convention center. 

And the team there has plenty more prospects, dates and spaces to sell.

The Austin Convention Center closed in April because the city is demolishing it and rebuilding so it can host more and larger events. The new convention center will have 70% more rentable space — 620,000 square feet more than the old convention center.

Besides future bookings, Visit Austin has also said it's been able to generate more interest in the new center. There have been conversations with over 67 convention and citywide groups about booking events at the new convention center. 

“These groups equate to a potential estimated 721,000+ hotel room nights and potential total estimated economic impact of $471 million,” said a Visit Austin spokesperson. “Of these groups, 40% of these prospects would not have fit in the old Austin Convention Center building.”… ✅ (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

✅ Welcome to Dallas, North: The region that just can’t stop expanding (Wall Street Journal)

The growth north of Dallas has been so dizzying that people talk about it as if it were a storm, or some other force of nature. That’s how Heather Cowan describes it. She came to the area in 1995 to raise a family after graduating from college in South Dakota. Six months ago, she and her husband moved farther north to the quiet of Gunter, 50 miles from Dallas, “to get ahead of the curve,” as she put it. Even in rural Gunter, though, Cowan said she was starting to “feel” the growth. She was right: The next day, Centurion American Development Group announced it had closed on a thousand-acre parcel in Gunter that would form part of a new development, Platinum Ranch, with 4,200 homes. The corridor north of Dallas is capping a decade as one of America’s fastest-growing regions, pulling in droves of newcomers from California to India and turning them into newly minted Texans. The companies are coming, too. Among them are Toyota, Amazon Web Services, State Farm and others.

Where cattle once outnumbered people, new shopping malls, housing developments and office towers now reign, and a region that was once overwhelmingly white and country is now increasingly South Asian and techie. It is also brimming with a kind of morning-in-America confidence. While the struggle to build housing has become a seemingly insoluble crisis in other parts of the country, locals talk about when—not if—Dallas’s northward march will reach Oklahoma.

If that sounds implausible, it may seem less so since Texas Instruments announced a few weeks ago it would invest up to $40 billion to build a mammoth semiconductor campus in Sherman, just 12 miles from the state line but still within commuting distance of Dallas’s northern satellites. A first laboratory is set to begin production later this year. To drive along Preston Road, which extends 70 miles from Dallas, weaving through the towns that form its expanding frontier, is to encounter a patchwork of new chain stores and restaurants, building sites laden with steel pipes and concrete tubes, and rumbling earth movers. Signs dot the roadside advertising land for sale and communities that exist only on billboards and brochures… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ How long can Beto O'Rourke and Joaquin Castro wait on Senate race? (Houston Chronicle)

Democrats Colin Allred and Terry Virts are already running for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 2026. But what about other potential Democratic candidates? U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, state Rep. James Talarico and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke are among those who have said they are also looking at the race, as well as other statewide contests. After a rally in San Antonio last week, I caught up with all three and pushed them on what their timetables look like for declaring. O’Rourke, 52, couldn’t say for sure when he or any of the others, whom he has been in contact with, would make decisions on the Senate race. “I think it will probably get worked through by the end of this summer if not sooner,” said O’Rourke, who ran for the Senate in 2018 and for governor in 2022.

Candidates have until the first week of December to get into the race. Castro acknowledged that other Democrats might be interested in running for the 20th Congressional District seat he holds now, if he runs for another seat. He said he knows people will be looking to see what he decides because it also affects their political futures. “I’ll make a decision soon,” said Castro, a 50-year-old attorney who has been in Congress since 2013. Talarico, Castro and O’Rourke could technically all end up in the same Senate primary against each other, but Talarico said that doesn’t mean he considers the other two rivals. “We are not rivals,” he said. “We are on the same team. We are all trying to change the state for the better and bring power back to the people. We’re going to coordinate and work together and see what that looks like over the next few months.” While Talarico has talked about running for the Senate, he said he is looking at other races too, like for governor… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Justice Dept. explores using criminal charges against election officials (New York Times)

Senior Justice Department officials are exploring whether they can bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the Trump administration determines they have not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The department’s effort, which is still in its early stages, is not based on new evidence, data or legal authority, according to the people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Instead, it is driven by the unsubstantiated argument made by many in the Trump administration that American elections are easy prey to voter fraud and foreign manipulation, these people said. Such a path could significantly raise the stakes for federal investigations of state or county officials, thrusting the Justice Department and the threat of criminalization into the election system in a way that has never been done before.

Federal voting laws place some mandates on how elections are conducted and ballots counted. But that work has historically been managed by state and local officials, with limited involvement or oversight from Washington. In recent days, senior officials have directed Justice Department lawyers to examine the ways in which a hypothetical failure by state or local officials to follow security standards for electronic voting could be charged as a crime, appearing to assume a kind of criminally negligent mismanagement of election systems.

Already, the department has started to contact election officials across the country, asking for information on voting in the state. A spokesman for the Justice Department, Gates McGavick, said the agency “will leave no option off the table when it comes to promoting free, fair and secure elections.” Voting experts say the push by the Trump administration is alarming, particularly given that it has repeatedly argued, without reliable evidence, that the 2020 election that President Trump lost was affected by mass voter fraud.

“The tactics we’re seeing out of D.O.J. right now are building on what we’ve seen from anti-democracy groups for years,” said Dax Goldstein, the program director of election protection at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit organization. “They’re rooted in the same lies about elections, and they’re all meant to create noise and fear and concerns about issues with our elections that just don’t exist. Our elections are safe and secure, and election officials are working to keep them that way.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Millions more Americans could turn to food banks soon. Food banks are simply not ready. (Politico)

Food banks say they are wholly unprepared to feed millions of Americans when Republicans’ cuts to traditional federal safety net programs take effect.

The GOP’s megabill slashes more than $1 trillion from the nation’s largest food aid program and Medicaid, with some of the cuts taking effect as early as this year. Low-income people grappling with higher costs of living could be forced to turn to emergency food assistance.

In preparation, food bank leaders are trying to convince private foundations and state leaders to give them more money. Some states like Minnesota and Pennsylvania have already been weighing shifting additional resources to emergency food programs or standing up new initiatives to counter the loss of federal dollars.

That still won’t be enough.

According to Feeding America, the cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program alone would eliminate 6 billion to 9 billion meals annually — roughly the same number of meals the food bank network provided last year. Those food banks would need to double their operations to close the gap SNAP leaves behind… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ How healthcare cuts in the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ will affect Americans (Wall Street Journal)

The passage of President Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” has left some hospitals, doctors and patient-advocacy groups reeling. Millions of people will lose health-insurance coverage, and struggling hospitals across the country may have to close, lay off staff or shut down some services, they say. States will also face difficult budget choices as federal funds are reduced. “The magnitude of these reductions—and the number of individuals who will lose health coverage—cannot be simply dismissed as waste, fraud, and abuse,” Rick Pollack, president of the American Hospital Association, said after the House narrowly passed the bill. Trump signed the bill into law on Friday, Independence Day. The act slashes over $1 trillion in healthcare spending over the next decade, mostly from Medicaid, the joint federal and state program that provides health insurance to poor Americans. It is the biggest cut to federal healthcare spending—and to Medicaid—in history.

The legislation’s health provisions, including work requirements for Medicaid recipients, represent a fundamental shift in the federal government’s approach to healthcare for its poorest citizens, both Republicans and Democrats have said. “This is a much more conservative approach to healthcare,” said David Mansdoerfer, a former health official in the first Trump administration. “The big beautiful bill would represent a significant mindset change for federal safety-net programs.” There will be nearly 8.7 million fewer people covered by Medicaid over the next decade because of the bill, according to an analysis by Manatt Health, a consulting firm that advises states and healthcare providers on Medicaid policy.

Other provisions in the bill, including more-stringent requirements for people to enroll and retain health-insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are projected to drive up the number of uninsured, healthcare experts said. Many who study healthcare policy say that people who lose insurance, or people who live in rural areas where doctors and hospitals are closing up shop, often delay preventive care, sometimes costing the system more later. Many of the Medicaid policy changes target the 40 states that expanded eligibility for Medicaid to low-income able-bodied adults. Those enrollees will now have to prove their incomes are below a certain threshold every six months to remain on Medicaid, instead of annually, as well as show that they have spent 80 hours a month working, volunteering or attending school… 🟪 (READ MORE)

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