BG Reads | News You Need to Know (March 17, 2021)

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[BINGHAM GROUP]

[MEETING/HEARINGS]

  • Austin Council Work Session (3.23.2021 @9AM)

  • Austin Council Voting Session (3.25.2021 @10AM)

  • 2021 Council Calendar

[THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE]

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Adler at SXSW: Expect 'a close vote' on Austin homeless camping measure (Austin American-Statesman)

The Austin City Council's decision two years ago to de-criminalize camping in many public spaces stoked a political firestorm unlike any he's ever seen in the city, Mayor Steve Adler said during a Tuesday South by Southwest panel discussion.

"We had the eruption of the largest political issue that I can remember in this city in the last 50 years and we're in a race to see what we can do," Adler said in a virtual prerecorded setting with San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria.

Austinites will get to vote soon on whether to reinstate the camping ban, as the issue will be on the city's May 1 ballot. Adler made no predictions on whether voters will reinstate the ban or let the current ordinance stand.

"It will be a close vote," he said.

Adler's comments came as part of his participation in the panel titled "Taking it to the Streets: Homelessness in Cities." The nearly hourlong session was moderated by San Francisco-based reporter Sarah Holder and included homelessness consultant Matthew Doherty as well as the two mayors.

The inclusion of Adler was a no-brainer given the furor over Austin's homelessness crisis and the blame that tends to be assigned to him for the increase in tent encampments and the pace of the city's attempts to house its unsheltered residents.

Save Austin Now, the nonprofit that collected more than 20,000 voter signatures to put the camping ban on the May ballot, is co-led by local Republican party leader Matt Mackowiak, a critic of Adler who has framed the mayor as the poster child for the city's homelessness problem… (LINK TO STORY)

'A champion for social justice': Austin civil rights icon Bertha Sadler Means dies at age 100 (Austin American-Statesman)

Austin civil rights pioneer, school namesake, church co-founder, business leader and lifelong educator Bertha Sadler Means died at noon Tuesday at age 100.

"She was approaching her 101st birthday and had lived life to the fullest," said her granddaughter Inonge Khabele, speaking for the family. "We will dearly miss her sense of humor, tenacity, generosity, compliments and celebratory way of living every moment. In the coming days, we will share more about her life and her upcoming service." 

She did not give a cause of death.

The Austin school district named Bertha Sadler Means Academy for Young Women Leaders after Means, who picketed and protested alongside her friends and family to end Jim Crow segregation in Austin. She was among the first Black educators to teach in Austin's white-majority schools.

"As civil rights advocate, community leader, educator, businesswoman, and mother, she lived an extraordinary life with major contributions to Austin, which continue through her children," said U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin. "Even at the joyful community celebration that was her 90th birthday, I was pleased to be identified as 'one of her boys,' from my student days working out of her kitchen on NAACP voter registration drives. At Barton Springs, at skating rinks, at school, at voter registration drives, she was a champion for social justice and an inspiration."… (LINK TO STORY)

Why Breyer Capital’s CEO — and many others from Silicon Valley — are moving to Austin (KXAN)

Jim Breyer, CEO of venture capital and private equity investor Breyer Capital, announced in August 2020 that Breyer Capital would be opening a second office in Austin. While Breyer Capital’s original office and interest in Silicon Valley remain, Breyer himself has also moved to Austin and is investing in what he sees as the city’s potential as an emerging tech hub.

On Tuesday for an online session at SXSW, Breyer shared his thoughts about Austin with Nancy Fechnay, the co-lead at Towview Ventures & Partner at Flight Ventures Capital Factory. Fechnay is also a recent transplant to Austin.

Breyer explained he had been visiting Austin and making investments there since the 1990s. His friend Michael Dell asked him to join Dell’s board in 2008, prompting Breyer to visit Austin quarterly for board meetings where he “fell in love with the city.”

“I love the live music, the Austin vibe, the different neighborhoods, the weirdness as well as entrepreneurial opportunities, everything from food trucks, to food entrepreneurs, to the Texas Hill Country,” Breyer told Fechnay.

He also commended the academic work being done at the University of Texas at Austin and the “welcoming spirit” he has found in Austin.

Over the past few years, many Silicon Valley-based companies have added a presence in Austin with some relocating to Austin entirely.

Apple is building a second campus in the city. Facebook opened Austin offices in 2010 and now has more than 1,000 employees in the city. Google already has one office building in Austin, which has affixed the company’s logo to the Austin skyline. A second Google building is under construction downtown and a third is in progress at Plaza Saltillo just east of downtown. In December 2020, Oracle announced it would be moving its corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin.

Over the last year, Elon Musk set down roots for many of his ventures in Austin. Musk confirmed he moved to Texas in 2020 and is believed to have relocated his personal residence to Austin specifically. Tesla has announced plans to build a Gigafactory for manufacturing electric vehicles in Travis County, SpaceX revealed plans to open an Austin office, Boring Company is hiring for jobs in the Austin area and Musk’s private foundation relocated from California to Austin… (LINK TO STORY)

Voices of Austin censured for breaking campaign finance laws (Austin Monitor)

The nonprofit Voices of Austin violated city law by campaigning against Proposition A last year, the Ethics Review Commission ruled on March 10. The commission voted to censure the organization, the most severe rebuke at its disposal.

Nonprofits are not allowed to advocate for or against ballot measures or political candidates, but Voices of Austin did just that, the commission said. Mailers and social media posts from the group strongly criticized Prop A in the runup to the 2020 election.

While the communications did not explicitly tell voters not to vote for Prop A, Chair Luis Soberon said it would be “very hard” to interpret them as “anything other than an appeal to oppose a ballot measure.”

Voices of Austin violated another city campaign finance law by “almost certainly” spending more than $500 on political messaging – the limit for nonprofits.

Roger Borgelt, counsel for Voices of Austin, insisted in past hearings that the organization simply educates voters on the issues, something that is well within its right as a 501(c)(4). But Borgelt admitted during a preliminary hearing that “there may have been a technical violation of city code,” a statement that compelled commissioners to hold a final hearing.

Political consultant Mark Littlefield, who brought the complaint shortly after last year’s election, accused Voices of Austin of using its nonprofit status to campaign without disclosing its donors. Nonprofits don’t have to disclose their top five donors or their expenditures, unlike political action committees.

Littlefield had hoped the commission would force Voices of Austin to reveal its donors, but the commission does not have such authority. Littlefield warned that if the city keeps letting nonprofits campaign without punishment, “it’ll make our democracy that much weaker in the city of Austin.”

The nonprofit also violated city law when Borgelt failed to show up at last Wednesday’s final hearing. Soberon called Borgelt’s absence “disrespectful” and tied it to a pattern of disrespect toward the commission that he said “is not OK.” Soberon said he “plan(s) on doing something about it.”

The commission has little power to enforce campaign finance laws beyond written reprimands. Though the commission has discussed asking City Council to grant it more teeth, such as the ability to impose significant financial penalties, nothing has come of it so far… (LINK TO STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

Texas' last Public Utility Commission member resigns at Gov. Greg Abbott's request (Texas Tribune)

​Public Utility Commission Chair Arthur D'Andrea, the only remaining member of the three-seat board that regulates Texas utilities, is resigning from his post, Gov. Greg Abbott said Tuesday night.

Abbott said in a statement that he asked for and accepted D'Andrea's resignation and plans to name "a replacement in the coming days who will have the responsibility of charting a new and fresh course for the agency." D'Andrea's resignation will be effective immediately upon the appointment of a successor, according to a copy of D'Andrea's resignation letter that was obtained by The Texas Tribune.

He is the latest in a long line of officials who have left the PUC or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas since last month's deadly winter storm plunged large swaths of Texas into subfreezing temperatures and overwhelmed the state's electricity infrastructure, causing massive power outages. At least 57 people died in Texas as a result of the storm — most of them from hypothermia — according to preliminary data the state health department released Monday.

The reason for D'Andrea's resignation was not immediately clear late Tuesday. It came hours after Texas Monthly reported that he told out-of-state investors on a call he would work to throw "the weight of the commission" behind stopping calls to reverse billions of dollars in charges for wholesale electricity during the storm. The cost of electricity last month has emerged as a hot-button issue in this year's legislative session after an independent market monitor estimated that the electric grid operator overbilled power companies around the time of the storm.

On Monday, the Texas Senate suspended its own rules to quickly pass a bill to force the PUC to reverse billions of dollars in charges for wholesale electricity during the winter storm. D'Andrea has publicly resisted such calls.

The PUC regulates the state's electric, telecommunication and water and sewer utilities. D'Andrea was promoted to chair by Abbott less than two weeks ago to replace the chair at the time, DeAnn Walker, who resigned at the beginning of the month over fallout related to the winter storm. The other commissioner, Shelly Botkin, resigned a week after Walker.

According to a recording of the call obtained by Texas Monthly, D'Andrea at one point said he expected to remain the sole member of the commission for now, adding he did not think Abbott would want to appoint new commissioners during the legislative session since the Senate would have to confirm appointees… (LINK TO STORY)

Electricity repricing bill hits wall in House, marking first major schism with Senate this session (Texas Tribune)

The Texas Senate's hurried push to reverse billions of dollars in charges for wholesale electricity during last month’s winter storm appeared to hit a wall Tuesday in the House, a setback that drew consternation from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and marked the first major schism between the two chambers this legislative session.

At Patrick’s behest, the Senate scrambled Monday to pass Senate Bill 2142, which would force Texas’ energy grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to claw back about $4.2 billion in charges after an independent market monitor found ERCOT artificially inflated prices and overbilled energy companies by $16 billion.

While Patrick has repeatedly characterized those billions of dollars in charges as a mistake, House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, said in a statement earlier Tuesday that there was “no error” in the operator's pricing and instead called it “a proactive decision.” Phelan also expressed skepticism with reversing such charges and said doing so “based on disagreement with PUC and ERCOT’s management decisions is an extraordinary government intervention into the free market.”

“ERCOT and PUC failed Texas repeatedly during this tragic event, but the decisions made on pricing were made based on ensuring the reliability of the grid,” Phelan said. “I believe that these decisions saved lives.”

Patrick responded in the Senate soon after, reiterating that he believed an error had been made and saying that it’s “a bad day for the Texas Legislature” if it can’t fix it.

“The Texas Senate stood for individuals, and I’m proud of you,” Patrick told senators. “The House stood for big business.”

ERCOT is a nonprofit entity that manages the power grid and controls the prices power generators charge to retail electric providers such as power companies and city utilities. During the storm, ERCOT set the price of electricity at $9,000 per megawatt-hour — the maximum amount allowed. The price remained that high for more than a day after ERCOT stopped forcing power outages due to limited supply. Outgoing ERCOT CEO Bill Magness and PUC Chair Arthur D’Andrea say the cap was necessary to incentivize generators to send power to the grid. Patrick and most senators believe the prices should be retroactively brought down.

D'Andrea has said publicly it would be improper — or even illegal — to reverse the charges. On Tuesday, Texas Monthly reported that he was even more forceful in a call with investors, saying he'd put the "weight of the commission" behind keeping the charges in place. D'Andrea resigned later Tuesday, at the request of Gov. Greg Abbott, who appoints PUC board members… (LINK TO STORY)

Biden faces growing political threat from border upheaval (Washington Post)

Rep. Henry Cuellar, a moderate Texas Democrat whose district hugs the border with Mexico, isn’t happy with how President Biden’s team has responded to the surge of migrants trying to enter the United States. “His people need to do a better job of listening to those of us who have done this before,” he said Monday. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, who took a trip to the border Monday to slam Biden’s approach, was even more critical. “There’s no other way to claim it than a Biden border crisis,” McCarthy (Calif.) said during a visit to a migrant processing center in El Paso. And Neha Desai, an immigration attorney who recently visited a detention site, said that while the conditions there have greatly improved from the Trump era, “it is unacceptable for children to be spending days on end in dramatically overcrowded facilities.”

Nearly two months into his first term, Biden faces a growing political threat from the upheaval at the border and is drawing criticism from across the spectrum. Centrist Democrats are nervous about attacks casting them as soft on border security. Liberals and immigration activists are sounding alarms about how migrants are treated. And Republicans are increasingly laying the groundwork for immigration-centric attacks in the midterm elections.

“The Republicans will turn around and use this for a political weapon against Democrats — that we’re weak on the border, we’re not doing enough, we’re letting everybody in,” Cuellar said in an interview. “I’ve been warning the party and the administration: Don’t let this get out of hand, because all you’re going to do is you’re going to give Republicans an issue.” Border arrests and detentions during the final months of the Trump presidency rose to some of the highest levels in a decade, but illegal crossings have skyrocketed since Biden took office. In February, detentions topped 100,000, a 28 percent increase from the previous month, and March is on pace for an even larger surge, with more than 4,000 border apprehensions each day, according to the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures… (LINK TO STORY)

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