BG Reads | News You Need to Know (August 14, 2023)

[Bingham Group]

[BG PODCAST]

EPISODE 211 // Welcome to Episode 211! Bingham Group Associate Hannah Garcia CEO A.J. Bingham review the week (of 8.7..2023) in Austin politics and more.

>>> SHOW LINK <<<

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.


[city of austin]

[AUSTIN METRO]

UT to announce plans for Austin campus hospital in partnership with MD Anderson (Austin American-Statesman)

The University of Texas plans to build a hospital on its flagship campus in Austin in a partnership with cancer treatment giant MD Anderson, three sources told the American-Statesman on Sunday. 

The announcement, which the UT System will make Monday, marks a significant expansion to UT’s seven-year-old Dell Medical School. The effort will include a large fundraising goal. 

The space needed for the hospital will be made possible through the demolition of the Frank Erwin Center, the former longtime home of the Longhorns’ basketball teams. The university announced years ago that it would raze the arena to free up space to expand the medical school.  

The sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly on the announcement, confirmed the hospital is the subject of a press conference that the University of Texas System has called for Monday. Scheduled to speak are Gov. Greg Abbott and two top System officials: Chancellor James Milliken and Board of Regents Chair Kevin Eltife…  (LINK TO FULL STORY)

15 proposed Austin budget amendments worth $1 million or more. Here's what each would do. (Austin American-Statesman)

Austin City Council members presented their proposed 2023-24 budget amendments during a meeting this week.

As currently written, the amendments would add an additional $18 million in ongoing funding and $26 million in one-time funding to the $5.5 billion budget draft, according to the city.

None of the amendments have been finalized or adopted into the budget draft, and the budget has not been voted on. The City Council is set to begin voting on the budget on Wednesday.

As laid out by the city, the amendments fall into eight categories: affordability, equity, health, homelessness, parks, public safety, sustainability and a miscellaneous "other" category… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS]

Will GOP support win the Houston mayoral race for John Whitmire, a longtime Democrat? (Houston Chronicle)

State Sen. John Whitmire is emerging as the de facto choice of Republican voters and donors, who appear to view the veteran Democrat as the most viable Houston mayoral option they can stomach. Whitmire’s campaign strategy is a test of whether he can assemble a coalition of conservatives and right-leaning moderates without ceding too many Democrats — the biggest partisan voting bloc in an increasingly blue city — to his main rival, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.

The GOP support has helped fuel Whitmire’s enormous fundraising advantage, with more than $50,000 coming from donors who helped bankroll last year’s campaign of Alexandra del Moral Mealer, the Republican nominee for Harris County judge. Billionaire casino and Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta, Gallery Furniture owner Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and real estate developer Richard Weekley are among the major Republican donors helping Whitmire raise money.

Both longtime fixtures of Houston Democratic politics, Jackson Lee and Whitmire each were backed by more than 30 percent of likely voters in a citywide poll last month, while no other candidate surpassed 3 percent.

Whitmire, the longtime chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, has vowed to bolster the police presence in Houston, making crime the top issue in his campaign. He attracted early support from some of the city’s most prolific GOP donors and power brokers and outpolled the rest of the field 3-to-1 among Republican voters in a recent citywide survey.

“For most Republicans, the No. 1 issue is crime, public safety and he’s been really campaigning hard on that,” said Rolando Garcia, a member of the State Republican Executive Committee who is active in Houston GOP politics.

“So, I disagree with him a lot on national issues, on state issues. But I think for most Republican voters in the city, if he’s campaigning hard on crime, and he’s going to deliver, you know, that’s something they can vote for.” Most of the Republican donors maxed out the city’s campaign contribution limit of $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 for political action committees. A number of GOP donors have also contributed to a pro-Whitmire group, Protect and Serve Texas PAC, which has attacked Jackson Lee over her past comments about having police funding “reprogrammed” for other uses… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[NATION]

As death toll from Maui fire reaches 93, authorities say effort to count the losses is just starting (Associated Press)

As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui town reached 93, authorities warned Saturday that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. It’s already the deadliest U.S. wildfire for over a century. Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said.

“We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles and it is full of our loved ones,” noting that the death toll is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.” He spoke as federal emergency workers picked through the ashen moonscape left by the fire that razed the centuries-old town of Lahaina. Teams marked the ruins of homes with a bright orange X to record an initial search, and HR when they found human remains.

Pelletier said identifying the dead is extremely challenging because “we pick up the remains and they fall apart ... When we find our family and our friends, the remains that we’re finding is through a fire that melted metal.” Two people have been identified so far, he said. Dogs worked the rubble, and their occasional bark — used to alert their handlers to a possible corpse — echoed over the hot and colorless landscape. “It will certainly be the worst natural disaster that Hawaii ever faced,” Gov. Josh Green remarked Saturday as he toured the devastation on historic Front Street. “We can only wait and support those who are living. Our focus now is to reunite people when we can and get them housing and get them health care, and then turn to rebuilding.” At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, of which 86% were residential. Across the island, he added, damage was estimated at close to $6 billion. He said it would take “an incredible amount of time” to recover.” The confirmed death toll was later raised to 93 from the total of 89 announced in a press conference with Green and other officials… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

As Hunter Biden saga endures, Democrats avert eyes and dismiss worries (New York Times)

For President Biden and his party, the appointment of a special counsel on Friday in the investigation into Hunter Biden was hardly a welcome development. A blossoming criminal inquiry focused on the president’s son is a high-risk proposition that comes with the dangers of an election-year trial and investigations that could balloon beyond the tax and gun charges the younger Mr. Biden already faces.

Yet many Democrats were sanguine about a dark moment in a summer of cautiously bright news for their president. In interviews, more than a dozen Democratic officials, operatives and pollsters said Hunter Biden’s legal problems were less worrisome than their other concerns about the president: his age, his low approval ratings and Americans’ lack of confidence in an improving economy. Part of their sense of calm stems from a version of the what-aboutism often adopted by Republicans since Donald J. Trump’s rise: Mr. Biden’s son is under investigation, Democrats say, but across the aisle, the G.O.P. front-runner has actually been criminally indicted — three times.

“I find it hard to imagine that anyone concerned about political corruption would turn to Donald Trump to address the problem of political corruption,” said Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which has been investigating Hunter Biden since Republicans took control of the chamber.

Democrats cited an array of reasons for whistling past the announcement that David C. Weiss, the Delaware prosecutor first appointed by the Trump administration in 2018 to investigate Hunter Biden, would be elevated to a special counsel. Mr. Weiss has examined both Mr. Biden’s business and personal life, including his foreign dealings, his drug use and his finances; a deal to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and accept a diversion program to dismiss an unlawful gun possession charge has fallen apart. Polling, Democrats noted, has suggested that swing voters aren’t attuned to the various Hunter Biden controversies. Recent elections, including the Ohio referendum this past week, have shown that the abortion rights issue is powering Democratic victories. And Democrats believe ne’er-do-well family members do not cause transitive harm to relatives who are running for president… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Trump swoops into Iowa Fair to scramble DeSantis' effort to reboot campaign (Reuters)

Republican presidential rivals Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis were holding competing events in the early nominating state of Iowa on Saturday, at a time when the former president overwhelmingly dominates opinion polls and the Florida governor is scrambling to reset his troubled campaign.

DeSantis, who has had two staff shake-ups in the past three weeks and is sinking in the polls, had long planned to attend the Iowa State Fair, a political must for aspiring presidential candidates in the state that kicks off the Republican nominating contest in January… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

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