BG Reads // November 17, 2025

Author

A.J. Bingham
November 17, 2025

✅ 

faustin a

Presented By

www.binghamgp.com

November 17, 2025

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 City announces timeline for 2026 proposed amended budget (City of Austin)

 🟪 Petition rejected to halt redevelopment of Austin Convention Center (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 The shutdown is over, but Austin’s airport will still battle delays, air traffic controller fatigue (KUT)

🟪 Austin ISD releases final school consolidation plan (KUT)

🟪 Meet the candidates vying to be Texas attorney general in the post-Paxton era (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Texas's water wars (The New Yorker)

🟪 FAA to lift all restrictions on commercial flights (NPR)

READ ON!

[FIRM NEWS]

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The practice is anchored by Senior Consultant Anaiah Johnson, who brings two decades of land development and urban planning experience, including senior leadership at the City of Austin’s Development Services Department and private-sector entitlement management for one of the nation’s largest homebuilders.

For nearly nine years, Bingham Group has represented clients ranging from Central Texas–based firms to national and international companies before municipal governments in the region.

With this new practice, we now provide integrated support across both the political and technical aspects of moving land use policy and development projects forward.

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[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ City Manager Executives and Advisors Staff Visual Chart

CMO Executives and Advisors_July 2025.pdf519.20 KB • PDF File

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ City announces timeline for 2026 proposed amended budget (City of Austin)

The Proposed Amended FY26 Budget Timeline:

  • Tuesday, Nov. 18: City Council Work Session and Budget briefing. Online speaker registration will open on Friday, Nov. 14 at 5 p.m. Online speaker registration closes on Monday, Nov. 17 at 12 p.m. In-person speaker registration closes 45 minutes before start of the meeting.

  • Wednesday, Nov. 19: City Council Work Session and public hearing on the Proposed FY26 Amended Budget. Online speaker registration will open on Sunday, Nov. 16 at 10 a.m. Online speaker registration closes on Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 12 p.m. In-person speaker registration closes 45 minutes before start of the meeting.  

  • Thursday, Nov. 20: City Council to consider action on Proposed FY26 Amended Budget.  Online speaker registration will open on Monday, Nov. 17 at 10 a.m. Online speaker registration closes on Wednesday, Nov. 19 at 12 p.m. In-person speaker registration closes 45 minutes before start of the meeting.

  • Friday, Nov. 21: Special called meeting on Proposed FY26 Amended Budget, if needed. Online speaker registration will open on Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 10 a.m. Online speaker registration closes on Thursday, Nov 20 at 12 p.m. In-person speaker registration closes 45 minutes before start of the meeting.

  • Monday, Nov. 24: Special called meeting on Proposed FY26 Amended Budget, if needed. Online speaker registration will open on Friday, Nov 21 at 5 p.m. Online speaker registration closes on Sunday, Nov 23 at 12 p.m. In person speaker registration closes 45 minutes before start of the meeting… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Petition rejected to halt redevelopment of Austin Convention Center (Austin Business Journal)

The effort to halt the redevelopment of the Austin Convention Center has hit a major roadblock.

The Austin City Clerk announced Nov. 14 that the Austin United PAC didn’t submit the required 20,000 valid signatures to force a ballot measure that could delay or kill the redevelopment of the Austin Convention Center, which began in April. 

“The City has determined that the Convention Center petition fails to meet the requirement for the minimum number of signatures of valid voters,” said Erika Brady, the Austin city clerk, in a statement. “Based on an independent, third-party review, the City is highly confident (99.986%) that the number of valid signatures is less than the 20,000 required to place the item on the ballot.” 

The ballot measure sought to stop the redevelopment of the convention center, either until the project was approved by voters or for seven years, and called for city leaders to prioritize tourism-related funding for music, arts, cultural and outdoor tourism, rather than conventions. The Austin United PAC announced last month it had submitted more than 20,000 signatures and was aiming to get the the issue to voters in May.

Bill Bunch, a community activist who’s involved with the Austin United PAC and also serves as the executive director of the Save Our Springs Alliance, said the PAC disagrees with the city clerk’s determination and are reviewing the clerk’s process. Bunch said the Austin United PAC will look to resolve the "disagreement quickly and amicably” but they could file a lawsuit if necessary… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Austin ISD releases final school consolidation plan (KUT)

The Austin Independent School District released its final version of a school consolidation plan Friday. Ten schools are still slated to close before next year, but the district did make changes to programming and student reassignments.

The campuses on the list include eight elementary schools — Barrington, Becker, Dawson, Oak Springs, Ridgetop, Sunset Valley, Widén and Winn Montessori — as well as Bedichek and Martin middle schools.

As previously announced, Maplewood, Bryker Woods and Palm elementary schools, which were slated to close under the original plan, will stay open.

Superintendent Matias Segura said this version of the plan reassigns 3,796 students and eliminates 6,319 empty seats from the district that has faced declining enrollment over the past decade. The plan is expected to generate more than $20 million in immediate gross savings.

✅ The shutdown is over, but Austin’s airport will still battle delays, air traffic controller fatigue (KUT)

At least four times during the government shutdown, the Federal Aviation Administration restricted the number of flights allowed to arrive in Austin to help the airport's chronically understaffed tower handle the incoming volumes. Some flights were delayed more than an hour. Now, the shutdown is over, but the risk of ground delays in Austin is not.

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport was never among the 40 airports ordered to cancel flights during the shutdown. The FAA is pausing those flight reductions at 6% instead of ramping them up to 10% Friday as planned, saying more air traffic controllers are showing up to work.

But anyone traveling from Austin through airports in cities like Dallas, Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver or Boston still risks having their plans spoiled by the FAA's mandatory flight cuts.

Even after those cuts are lifted, Austin could see more ground delays with Thanksgiving around the corner… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ UT-Austin silent on Trump compact as deadline approaches (Texas Tribune)

The University of Texas at Austin hasn’t said whether it will sign an agreement with the Trump administration that would tie preferential access to federal funding to a series of campus policy changes, even as other universities have rejected the administration’s offer.

The proposal, known as the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” would require UT-Austin to define sex as male or female based on reproductive function, cap international enrollment at 15%, freeze tuition for five years and ensure that academic departments include a mix of ideological perspectives among their faculty and programs.

Provost William Inboden said in an interview last month with The Chronicle of Higher Education that “we align with the principles of conduct that they want,” though he added that “some of the procedural enforcement of the compact would clash with state law and some of our other institutional prerogatives.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

✅ In rare move, Texas AG sues state board to end work-study programs (Texas Tribune)

The core mission of the Texas Attorney General’s office includes defending the state and state agencies in court. But on Friday, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office filed a rare lawsuit against a Texas agency.

The lawsuit seeks to force the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s commissioner and board members to end three university work-study programs that Paxton’s office claims unconstitutionally discriminates against religious students.

Filed in a Travis County district court, the lawsuit alleges that the board is violating the First Amendment by prohibiting work-study participants from “engaging in sectarian activities, including sectarian courses of study,” to receive state benefits… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Meet the candidates vying to be Texas attorney general in the post-Paxton era (Texas Tribune)

For the first time in a decade, Texas voters will have the chance to select a new attorney general without an incumbent in the race. 

At The Texas Tribune Festival on Friday, candidates from both sides of the aisle pitched themselves as the best person to take the place of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is stepping down to challenge Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary. 

Since 2014, Paxton, a Republican, has reimagined the office as a conservative battering ram against Democratic presidents and priorities, a tradition Aaron Reitz, Paxton’s former deputy and one of the candidates vying for the office, said he would continue if elected. 

“I’m the only one in this race with actual recent and relevant experience litigating, investigating, suing, defending and appealing on all of the major issues on behalf of the State of Texas and Texans’ constitutional rights,” Reitz said on stage… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Texas's water wars (The New Yorker)

In 2019, Corpus Christi, Texas’s eighth-largest city, moved forward with plans to build a desalination plant. The facility, which was expected to be completed by 2023, at a cost of a hundred and forty million dollars, would convert seawater into freshwater to be used by the area’s many refineries and chemical plants. The former mayor called it “a pretty significant day in the life of our city.” In anticipation of the plant’s opening, the city committed to provide tens of millions of gallons of water per day to new industrial operations, including a plastics plant co-owned by ExxonMobil and the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, a lithium refinery for Tesla batteries, and a “specialty chemicals” plant operated by Chemours. The facilities went into operation, but the desalination plant stalled out in the planning process, and its projected costs ballooned to more than a billion dollars. In the meantime, the city suffered through a multiyear drought, and local reservoirs reached alarmingly low levels. Residents were prohibited from watering their lawns or hosing down their cars; industrial operations, largely exempt from drought restrictions, kept drawing the water they had been promised. Officials predicted that Corpus Christi might enter an official water emergency—triggered when water demand is projected to exceed supply within six months—by the end of 2026.

This September, the city council met to vote on whether to proceed with building the desalination plant. The hearing started around noon; by midnight, it was still under way, and three women in the audience, including a former mayoral candidate and a college professor, had been arrested for disorderly conduct. Some opponents of the plan voiced concerns about its costs. Others were worried about environmental ramifications. Desalination results in large amounts of salty sludge that must be disposed of. Dumping it in the nearby bay risks harming the ecosystem and destroying the fragile local fishing industry; injecting it underground risks causing small earthquakes. Supporters argued that, without the desalination plant, the local economy would collapse. Around 1 A.M., the council elected to pull funding for the project; where, exactly, Corpus Christi’s water will come from is currently an open question. One possibility is groundwater pumped from nearby rural areas; another is relying on a private-equity firm that provides “water-as-a-service” to struggling municipalities, essentially by building its own treatment infrastructure and leasing the water to the local utility. But those plans, too, have met with local resistance. Texas’s economy has boomed for so long that it would be easy to imagine that the growth might go on forever. But, across the state, residents are being confronted with the alarming reality of limited water supplies. According to the state government’s 2022 Texas Water Plan, by 2070, the population is projected to increase by more than seventy per cent as water supplies decline by nearly eighteen per cent… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Nirenberg jumps into Bexar County Judge race (San Antonio Report)

Former Mayor Ron Nirenberg is waging a primary challenge against Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai — a fellow Democrat who Nirenberg says doesn’t have the vision to steward a rapidly growing county. “I don’t think that that office is performing the way it should. It’s been reactionary to major issues. And frankly, we need strong leadership,” Nirenberg told the San Antonio Report of his decision this week. In recent years across the state, traditionally bureaucratic county judgeships have seen long-time incumbents replaced with more ambitious, and in some cases more partisan, successors.

Outspoken progressive Lina Hidalgo shocked political watchers by unseating longtime Republican Harris County Judge Ed Emmett in 2018. Then in 2022, voters chose Republican firebrand Tim O’Hare to succeed longtime Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley. Nirenberg went toe-to-toe with GOP state leaders many times as mayor, but suggested that isn’t necessarily his intention in replacing Sakai.

“The county judge has the bully pulpit and has the ability to set the tone for this entire community,” Nirenberg said. “It doesn’t mean we’re looking for a fight, but it does mean that sometimes we’ve got to end them.” But he agreed that across Texas, other counties are approaching the role differently. “I think that the kind of energy, innovation and teamwork that are represented by some of these new leaders in counties, is an opportunity to look at Bexar County in a similar way,” he said. A campaign launch party on Saturday exuded energy and enthusiasm as roughly 200 supporters ate pizza while a live band played at Backyard on Broadway… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ FAA to lift all restrictions on commercial flights (NPR)

The Federal Aviation Administration said Sunday it is lifting all restrictions on commercial flights that were imposed at 40 major airports during the country's longest government shutdown.

Airlines can resume their regular flight schedules beginning Monday at 6 a.m. EST, the agency said.

The announcement was made in a joint statement by Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford.

Citing safety concerns as staffing shortages grew at air traffic control facilities during the shutdown, the FAA issued an unprecedented order to limit traffic in the skies. It had been in place since Nov. 7, affecting thousands of flights across the country.

Impacted airports included large hubs in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

The flight cuts started at 4% and later grew to 6% before the FAA on Friday rolled the restrictions back to 3%, citing continued improvements in air traffic controller staffing since the record 43-day shutdown ended on Nov. 12… 🟪 (READ MORE)

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