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September 30, 2025

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 City: Over $46.1M approved for affordable housing developments across Austin (KXAN)

🟪 Higher taxes are on the ballot. City leaders explain what they’ll get us. (Austin Chronicle)

🟪 About $675 million earmarked for Texas projects is in limbo as Congress careens toward shutdown (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Texas A&M chancellor Glenn Hegar on culture wars and a new era of state-driven reforms in academia (Houston Chronicle)

🟪 FEMA is paralyzed. Disaster-torn communities are paying the price. (Wall Street Journal)

READ ON!

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ Memo: Austin Government Relations Office – Federal Legislative Update (9.24.2025)

🏛️ City Memo: Short-Term Rental Regulations – Upcoming Action Item (Development Services Department)

🏛️ City Manager Executives and Advisors Staff Visual Chart

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

💰 2026 City of Austin Bond - Public Input

ℹ️ 2025 Essential Resources for Navigating the City of Austin

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ City: Over $46.1M approved for affordable housing developments across Austin (KXAN)

The city of Austin Housing Department announced in a Monday press release more than $46.1 million was approved for eight affordable housing developments in Districts 1,3,4,7 and 9.

Those funds, approved by the Austin Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC) Board meetings this year, were allocated towards the Rental Housing Development (RHDA) program.

According to the release, the funds will aid in the construction of 728 affordable rental units for households earning at or below 30, 50 and 60% of the median family income (MFI).

Housing Department Director Deletta Dean said this is a major step for Austin’s vision of “safe, stable, and affordable housing in every part of our city.” 

“By building new communities and preserving existing ones, we can help residents stay rooted and reduce displacement pressures that threaten neighborhood stability,” Dean said.

The release said funds for the construction of seven of these developments would be offset, in part, by the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, which is administered by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA). Those credits will allow developers to “generate equity through a reduction of federal tax liability in exchange for building low-income rental housing projects,” the release added… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Higher taxes are on the ballot. City leaders explain what they’ll get us. (Austin Chronicle)

Since he began his second stint as mayor in 2023, Kirk Watson has been considered a pragmatist, a problem solver. So the way he talks about homelessness is a bit surprising. Watson doesn’t open with how much money homelessness costs Austin residents or how it affects the city’s image. He begins by saying it hurts people. “I truly believe that we have a humanitarian tragedy here,” Watson told the Chronicle in early September. “And we’re the only ones in a position to fix it. The federal government is cutting assistance programs, including rental assistance. The state is essentially doing nothing – it’s providing us no tools, no money, even in a time of great surplus – and it is going to make homelessness worse. We need to be prepared to try to help.” The city’s homelessness problem is the principal reason Watson is asking Austinites to vote to raise property taxes.

This summer, he and nine of the 10 City Council members passed a budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year that calls for a tax rate election in November. If voters approve the TRE, the city will increase taxes 5 cents more than state law would otherwise allow on each $100 of property value. A person who owns property worth around $500,000 would see an increase of $300 on the city’s portion of their annual property tax bill. Two hundred of those dollars would come from the 5-cent TRE. Advocates for the TRE kicked off a campaign this month – the “Love Austin So Much” Proposition Q campaign – to convince voters to support it. If voters approve the tax, it will bring the city an additional $110 million. The extra revenue would go to public safety, like extra EMS technicians and 911 responders. It would go to parks and pools.

It would go to programs that combat family violence and help people recover from trauma. It would go to a grab bag of small projects designed to save the city money. But about half of the additional money – $51.5 million – would go to getting homeless people off the streets. Homelessness was already a problem during Watson’s first go-round as mayor in the late 1990s, but it had become much more divisive by the time he ran again in 2022. The year before, Austin voters had overturned a 2019 city ordinance which briefly decriminalized camping and panhandling in public places. The ordinance led to homeless people pitching tents in parks and becoming a constant presence Downtown. After his election, Watson pledged to honor the voters’ decision to ban camping, but he also wanted to reorganize the city’s provision of homelessness services, which were spread across different departments and not tightly coordinated… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Public safety agencies team up to help those in crisis (Austin Monitor)

The city of Austin will begin a pilot program next month that will deploy a multi – disciplinary team to deal with mental health related problems within the downtown area. The team will include professionals from Austin, Travis County EMS, the Austin Police Department (APD) and Integral Care.

As Chief Medical Officer Dr. Mark Escott and his colleagues from EMS, APD and Integral Care explained to the City Council Public Safety Committee last week, the goal of the new team is to develop a plan for dealing with persons experiencing mental health crises. Those people might otherwise end up in police custody or in an emergency medical facility.

Between 2022 and the end of 2024, APD processed more than 867,000 calls. Of those, 11 percent were immediately identified as related to a mental health crisis. Of that 11 percent, 86 percent were resolved without police involvement.

“Our responses to low- and moderate-acuity persons in crisis… has worked well,” Escott said. However, he said the team had “identified a gap in treatment for situations that involve a high risk of harm or imminent danger.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

✅ About $675 million earmarked for Texas projects is in limbo as Congress careens toward shutdown (Texas Tribune)

The Texas congressional delegation has secured about $675 million to pay for community projects across the state in federal spending bills for the next fiscal year. But the funds, informally known as earmarks, are all in jeopardy amid the threat of a government shutdown.

Lawmakers returned to their districts last year empty-handed when Congress left earmarks out of stopgap legislation used to fund the government for the current fiscal year, which ends Tuesday. Now, local governments, universities and nonprofits in the state stand to lose out on millions of dollars for infrastructure improvements, research and more if both parties in Congress are unable to resolve an impasse that has stalled the spending package that includes the earmarks.

Dallas Area Rapid Transit could miss out on the $250,000 secured by Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, to modernize the Ledbetter Light Rail Station. Amarillo could end up without the $1.75 million Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Amarillo, acquired to help design a new wastewater treatment facility in the city. And the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Houston may lose out on $350,000 sought by Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Richmond, for facility repairs and upgrades that Nehls said could otherwise be used for youth programs.

These Texas projects are just a few of the ones lawmakers are fighting for as they near a government funding deadline… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Texas A&M chancellor Glenn Hegar on culture wars and a new era of state-driven reforms in academia (Houston Chronicle)

Glenn Hegar leaned forward in his seat on a bumpy plane ride from College Station to Victoria, a picture of confidence after years of flying in small aircrafts on state business. A gold Aggie ring glinted as he gestured with his right hand. The new chancellor of the Texas A&M University System was traveling to a Sept. 4 community event at a recently acquired university, where he agreed to an interview that, at one point, shifted to the changing tides in higher education. The pendulum swings, the 54-year-old said, but the constant is that people want an education and need to be skilled for the workforce. Universities have to “right size” their offerings to ensure they’re providing that service, however, and the “vast majority” of people don’t want their teachers to insert personal opinions in the classroom, he said. Still, Hegar said he didn't see a larger problem at the Texas A&M System's 12 universities, despite the occasional "buzzword" on a syllabus or school website.

“The reality is the Texas A&M University System is right there doing its job, which is providing quality education to their students,” the politician-turned-college administrator said. “And do you have one person here or there, maybe somewhere in 165,000 students, 28,000 employees? … There’s going to be somebody somewhere.” The next two weeks put Hegar to the test when a leaked video went viral, showing an A&M student questioning a professor's discussion of gender identity in a children's literature class. Not even four months into the chancellor's tenure, the culture wars thrust the system's flagship to the center of a national spotlight. The U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division said it would look into the matter, and Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick demanded action at the College Station campus. Aggies split between those who feared an end to academic freedom, and others outraged at the course topic and at the school's initial response to the student's concerns.

Speech-related backlash after the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University escalated accusations of unchecked liberal bias on college campuses. Hegar — a former Republican lawmaker skilled at avoiding tangles in the Capitol — got in front of the issue on social media. He quickly labeled the professor's lesson as "indoctrination," commended a decision to fire her and announced a forthcoming audit of all courses across the system… 🟪 (READ MORE) 

✅ New York City Mayor Eric Adams abandons his reelection campaign (Associated Press)

New York City Mayor Eric Adams ended his struggling reelection campaign Sunday, an acknowledgment that he was no longer a credible contender after a year of scandal and political turmoil.

In a video released on social media, Adams spoke proudly of his tenure as mayor. But he said his now-dismissed federal corruption case left voters wary of him, and “constant media speculation” about his future made it impossible to raise enough money to run a serious campaign.

“Despite all we’ve achieved, I cannot continue my reelection campaign,” he said.

Adams did not endorse any of the remaining candidates in the race, but he warned of “insidious forces” using local government to “advance divisive agendas.”… 🟪 (READ MORE) 

✅ FEMA is paralyzed. Disaster-torn communities are paying the price. (Wall Street Journal)

Minutes after a mile-wide tornado struck this city on an otherwise beautiful day this spring, Ali Rand heard her husband shout as he surveyed the devastation surrounding their tony neighborhood of historical homes. “Everything is gone,” Rand, 38, remembers him saying. The tornado, packing winds of 152 miles an hour, hit the city with blunt force, killing five people. In the weeks following the storm, Rand and other private citizens mobilized teams of residents whose neighborhoods had been destroyed to clean up debris, remove fallen trees and rebuild shattered homes. Largely missing from the recovery efforts, according to Rand, city officials and other residents: the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I’ve never seen someone from FEMA out on the streets,” Rand said. That is by design. St. Louis is a test case for the Trump administration’s new policy of shifting more responsibility for natural disasters to states and cities.

City officials and local residents who are still clearing rubble from destroyed buildings four months after the tornado struck said the experiment isn’t going well. Many of FEMA’s core functions related to preparing for natural disasters and leading recovery efforts after they strike have ground to a halt as the Trump administration redefines the agency, according to more than a dozen FEMA employees and local officials, as well as a review of internal government documents. Crucial contracts and grants haven’t been approved, caught up in layers of new bureaucracy. A wave of senior staff departed the agency when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency offered buyouts, taking decades of experience with them. Around 400 FEMA employees have been detailed to work at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as that agency rapidly expands.

And the administration has started dismantling the agency’s disaster-response infrastructure, which was strengthened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The scaled-back federal response has left places like St. Louis in a bind. The city doesn’t have the finances, institutional knowledge or equipment to rapidly respond to catastrophic disasters like the tornado that struck in May, which the city estimates caused $1.6 billion in damage… 🟪 (READ MORE)

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