#NEWS // BG Reads | March 13, 2023
[AUSTIN METRO]
Elon Musk Is Planning a Texas Utopia—His Own Town (Wall Street Journal)
Elon Musk?is planning to build his own town on part of thousands of acres of newly purchased pasture and farmland outside the Texas capital, according to deeds and other land records and people familiar with the project.
In meetings with landowners and real-estate agents, Mr. Musk and employees of his companies have described his vision as a sort of Texas utopia along the Colorado River, where his employees could live and work.
Executives at the Boring Co.,?Mr. Musk’s tunnel operation, have discussed and researched incorporating the town in Bastrop County, about 35 miles from Austin, which would allow Mr. Musk to set some regulations in his own municipality and expedite his plans, according to people familiar with Mr. Musk’s projects.
They say Mr. Musk and his top executives want his Austin-area employees, including workers at Boring, electric-car maker?Tesla?Inc. and space and exploration company SpaceX, to be able to live in new homes with below-market rents…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
State Rep. Ellen Troxclair proposes state takeover of Austin Energy (Austin American-Statesman)
Rep. Ellen Troxclair, a former Austin City Council member who was elected to the Texas House in November, is proposing to have the state take oversight of Austin Energy, the publicly owned utility facing scrutiny after much of the city lost electricity and spent days without power during a recent winter storm.
Troxclair has filed six bills targeting Austin Energy, including the state oversight takeover and a separate proposal that could severely undercut the power provider by allowing customers to choose an alternative service provider. The Lakeway Republican's legislation also challenges Austin Energy to meet certain rate thresholds or else the utility no longer would be allowed to transfer revenue to the city's general fund, which would remove around $100 million annually from the city's coffers.
Troxclair, who served on the Austin City Council for four years through 2018, filed her proposals in the House on Wednesday.
“This legislative package is the result of years of Austin Energy’s refusal to follow best practices in the electric industry, and Central Texans are forced to pay the price,” Troxclair said. “Eighty-five percent of Texans have the right to choose their energy providers. It is time for Central Texans to be freed from Austin Energy’s monopoly, and to enjoy reliable service and sensible operations.”.
The legislation comes as monthly charges for Austin Energy customers are increasing this month due to a?higher base rate?the utility says it needs to offset increased baseline costs. Combined with an earlier fee increase — which was needed to recover pass-through charges — the average user is paying about $24 more a month…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin ISD trustees talk openness of superintendent search (Community Impact)
The Austin ISD board of trustees spent time during a meeting March 9 discussing how open the superintendent search should be.
"We're getting advice from our search firm that the more open your search is, the more narrow your field of applicants may be," District 5 Trustee Lynn Boswell said during a meeting March 9. "So we're trying to find that sweet spot for our community and trying to find that balance between what Texas traditionally does or something that's very open, or something that's in between."
Since March 1, the search firm hired by AISD—GR Recruiting—has been accepting responses to a?community survey?asking what qualities the community wants to see in the next superintendent. Surveys can be?taken online?and are due no later than March 15. Along with the qualities, there has been discussion on how transparent the search will be—with some wanting a completely open search and others wanting a confidential search…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
More than 70 percent of Austin ISD employees are burdened by housing costs, survey finds (KUT)
More than 70 percent Austin Independent School District employees are burdened by the cost of housing in the city, according to an online survey the district conducted this year.
Many of the respondents said the high costs are pushing them to move outside of Austin and to consider leaving their jobs altogether.
AISD’s Director of Real Estate Jeremy Striffler said the results of the survey were stark.
“I think that strong response made clear that this is a real issue for so many,” he said. “That really points to the need, and I guess the encouragement, to try to address this in some way.”…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
Planning underway to bring hubs for music and arts to three cultural centers (Austin Monitor)
The city’s three ethnic cultural centers are being considered to house hubs for music and other artistic endeavors that would provide members of the local Black, Latino and Asian American communities with more opportunities to explore and advance their creative careers.
The process is in its formative stages, with a $50,000 request for proposals open through the end of this week to contractors interested in conducting the public feedback and input sessions necessary to determine the types of services and resources that would be required in the facilities. The feedback would help create a budget and plan for the hubs?– to be?located at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, and the Asian American Resource Center.
Once the plan and proposed budgets are identified, City Council would decide whether to fund the hubs through a bond issue or by shifting money to the Parks and Recreation Department from elsewhere.
The creative and music hubs have been under discussion for nearly a decade and were included as part of the 2016 Music and Creative Ecosystem Omnibus?resolution?that has gone largely unfulfilled…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
Nonprofit aims to reverse Austin's 1928 master plan and get SXSW money to the BIPOC community (KUT)
SXSW brings in millions each year, but Black and brown Austinites don’t always benefit from the influx of money. DAWA, a local nonprofit, has put together a series of music shows and panels during the festival to elevate and direct resources to Austin’s BIPOC community.
The event, Vision:8291, is a response to the city’s 1928 master plan, which broke up freedom colonies and forced the Black population to move across I-35 to East Austin, denying services to those who refused to relocate.
“It’s 1928 in reverse and also having a vision,” DAWA founder Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone said. “A lot of times if you are African-American, you're Black – whatever you call yourself – we start our history with slavery and that’s starting with trauma. So we're starting our vision with reversing that.”…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS]
Legislature has little appetite to fund Ken Paxton’s settlement with whistleblowers (Texas Tribune)
Texas lawmakers are facing a choice: approve $3.3 million in state funds to end a lawsuit accusing Attorney General?Ken Paxton?of improperly firing four whistleblowers or reject an out-of-court settlement — potentially adding millions of dollars in costs while leaving the outcome of the lawsuit to fate in a long-shot attempt to make Paxton pay.
The?multimillion-dollar settlement?announced in February would resolve a 2-year-old lawsuit that alleges Paxton fired former high-ranking deputies in retaliation for accusing him of using his office to benefit a friend and political donor. The settlement would give the former employees back pay and several other concessions while ridding Paxton of one of several ongoing legal problems.
But in a blow to the former agency executives, lawmakers have shown little appetite to use state funds to help Paxton settle the case…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
Proposal adding billions in funding for Texas public schools gains bipartisan support (Houston Chronicle)
Lawmakers from both parties are pushing to reshape how Texas funds its local school districts, with momentum growing behind a proposal to divvy up state dollars based on student enrollment instead of average daily attendance. Texas is one of just six states that currently funds schools based on attendance, which usually runs between 90 and 95 percent of full enrollment. The result of the current system is that school districts around the state lose out on funding for between 200,000 and 300,000 kids, the progressive think tank Every Texan estimates.
As a rough estimate, Texas public schools get about $10,000 in per-student funding from the state, the nonprofit education group Raise Your Hand has estimated, so those students translate to several billion dollars. The bills filed so far this year have not yet received cost estimates from the Legislative Budget Board, which will happen later in the session. The historical reasoning for the attendance-based policy has been that it creates a financial incentive for school districts to fight truancy and drive up attendance, but Texas in 2015 decriminalized truancy, giving districts fewer tools to force kids to come to school. “It's great to have an incentive to go out to drag the kids or encourage them to come back to school. But we've lost all the teeth. We have no teeth with the parents,” said state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, during a recent committee hearing. Nichols added that his view was “kind of shifting a little bit” in favor of enrollment-based funding because schools can only do so much to compel students to show up…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
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[NATION]
Mexican president to US: Fentanyl is your problem (Associated press)
Mexico’s president said Thursday that his country does not produce or consume fentanyl, despite enormous evidence to the contrary. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador appeared to depict the synthetic opioid epidemic largely as a U.S. problem, and said the United States should use family values to fight drug addiction. His statement came during a visit to Mexico by Liz Sherwood-Randall, the White House homeland security adviser, to discuss the fentanyl crisis. It also comes amid calls by some U.S. Republicans to use the U.S. military to attack drug labs in Mexico. The Mexican government has acknowledged in the past that fentanyl is produced at labs in Mexico using precursor chemicals imported from China. Fentanyl has been blamed for about 70,000 opioid deaths per year in the United States.
“Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” López Obrador said. “Why don’t they (the United States) take care of their problem of social decay?” He went on to recite a list of reasons why Americans might be turning to fentanyl, including single-parent families, parents who kick grown children out of their houses and people who put elderly relatives in old-age homes “and visit them once a year.” His statement contrasted sharply with a Thursday tweet from U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar saying a meeting between Sherwood-Randall and Mexico’s attorney general was meant “to enhance security cooperation and fight against the scourge of fentanyl to better protect our two nations.” There is little debate among U.S. and even Mexican officials that almost all the fentanyl consumed in the United States is produced and processed in Mexico. In February, the Mexican army announced it seized more than a half million fentanyl pills in what it called the largest synthetic drug lab found to date. The army said the outdoor lab was discovered in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state. In the same city in 2021, the army raided a lab that it said probably made about 70 million of the blue fentanyl pills every month for the Sinaloa cartel…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
Treasury, regulators unveil bank rescue plan to stem crisis (Politico)
Federal authorities took aggressive action Sunday to end days of global uncertainty and panic, agreeing to backstop all depositors for two failed lenders — and to prevent runs on any other financial institutions.
The Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and FDIC vowed that taxpayers would not bear losses from the moves to bolster the depositors at the two shuttered lenders, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. The agencies said Silicon Valley Bank’s depositors would have access to all their money on Monday.
In a stunning move, the Fed also announced that it would offer cash loans of up to a year for any bank putting up safe collateral — an action that in theory would allow banks to handle deposit withdrawals of any amount. The goal: to reassure people that they don’t need to take their money out at all…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
Fights over rural America’s phone poles slow Internet rollout (Wall street Journal)
The U.S. plans to spend at least $60 billion in the next decade to ensure every American household has high-speed internet. An old-fashioned obstacle stands in the way: utility poles. Getting everyone the same service city dwellers enjoy generally means stretching fiber-optic cable to homes, farms and ranches in rural areas. Many of these places already have utility poles carrying electric or telephone wires. The poles are owned by electric or phone companies that often aren’t getting public money to build out broadband, triggering skirmishes that some internet providers blame for slowing needed upgrades. Disputes involving utility poles have gummed up broadband projects in Kentucky, Michigan and South Carolina. One squabble in Socorro, N.M., left two elementary schools without high-speed internet for several years.
“Our students really suffered,” said Ron Hendrix, superintendent of the Socorro school district. It is “years of not having high-speed network out to two schools that really need it.” The disputes are complicating a rural broadband rollout that Washington is pursuing with new vigor, part of the federal government’s expanding role in internet service as it seeks to upgrade U.S. infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic underscored the need for broadband as many Americans left cities for rural areas. In 2020, the Federal Communications Commission launched a $9 billion program to expand rural networks. States are spending billions of dollars more, drawing from federal Covid-relief funds and their own coffers. And in 2021, a bipartisan infrastructure law dedicated $42.5 billion to the cause. Pole owners including Exelon Corp. and AT&T Inc. say they accommodate other lines on their poles as long as they are fairly compensated for “make ready” costs, such as replacing old poles or moving existing wires…?(LINK TO FULL STORY)
[BG PODCAST]
Bingham Group Associate Hannah Garcia and CEO A.J. review the week in Austin politics.
Today's topic include a review of several items of now from the Austin City Council's 3.9 meeting:
? Agenda Link ->?bit.ly/3yrYmht
? Item 16 -> Approve a resolution accepting the Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (ETOD) Policy Plan
? Item 25 -> Establishing a charter review commission
? Item 27 -> EV Fast Charing Stations
? Item 36 -> Executive Session regarding Search for and appointment of a new city manager
? Council next meets on March 9 for Work Session and March 23rd for its Regular Meeting
BG BLOG:
? The Austin Ballot Petition Threshold ->?bit.ly/3yr8Xcq
BG READS WEEKLY REVIEW:
? Council OKs creation of charter review commission (Austin Monitor) ->?bit.ly/3Lb9bvF
? How Austin is planning for neighboring areas to evolve alongside ‘generational’ transit system (Community Impact) ->?bit.ly/420w4Ij
? Austin homeowners ask judge to void city policies that allow developers to build more housing (KUT) ->?bit.ly/3ysS40L
??Austin's Project Connect is over budget. Texas lawmakers have a plan to rein it in. (Austin American-Statesman) ->?bit.ly/3mMocKb
? BG Reads Page:?www.binghamgp.com/bg-reads
EPISODE 190
The BG Podcast is available on?Apple Podcasts,?Soundcloud, and?Spotify.
ABOUT THE BINGHAM GROUP, LLC
Follow Bingham Group on LinkedIn at:?bit.ly/3WIN4yT
Connect with A.J. on LinkedIn at:?bit.ly/3DlFiUK
Connect with Hannah on LinkedIn at:?bit.ly/3RberR3
Contact us at:?[email protected]
Bingham Group works to advance the interests of businesses, nonprofits, and associations at the municipal and state level.