DeAnn Walker resigns
The Chair of the Public Utility Commission has resigned in the wake of the power outages. DeAnn Walker says she believes her decision to be in the best interests of the state. Some state lawmakers, including the lieutenant governor, had already called for Walker to step down.
Financial impact of outages
In the meantime, a University of Texas panel has discussed the power outages last month. Rebecca Klein, with Klein Energy says people are going to feel the financial impact of the blackouts all over the state.
“All consumers under ERCOT are going to end up paying higher bills and the reason is some of these load serving entities may not be able to pay their bill,” says Klein.
And the lack of paid bills is already estimated to be in the tens of billions. And, in fact, just this week, the Brazos Electric Power Cooperative was hit with a bill of more than $2 billion forcing it to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
COVID-19 update
On to COVID now where the declines continue for Travis County’s metrics as hospitalizations fell by a dozen more over the past day. 248 people are now hospitalized, including 76 in the ICU, and that number is also lower than a day ago. Of the 75,901 confirmed cases, 1,578 are active and 73,579 are recoveries.
This week’s arrival of the Johnson & Johnson single shot covid vaccine is really seen as a breakthrough for a lot of states with large rural areas, including Texas. Dr. Diana Fite with the Texas Medical Association says there have been issues getting shots outside of cities and then getting people back for their second dose.
“They try to contact the place where they got the first one, and that place doesn’t have any more for them or they’re referring to another facility,” Fite says.
The single dose vaccine will also help treat the homeless population, who are much more difficult to track down for that second shot.
Following a successful test run over the weekend at the mass vaccination clinic at Circuit of the Americas, a plan is in the works to do it again. Travis County Judge Andy Brown tells CBS Austin about 500 vaccines an hour were administered at COTA and he thinks they can do more.
“Because again, the faster we can get these into arms, I think the more vaccines we will get as a community,” Brown says.
He is very hopeful they will have more vaccines on hand the next time, and it could become a two day event. Ultimately, 10,000 doses given out every single day is the goal.
All 4,000 vaccine appointments that opened up late yesterday afternoon by Austin Public Health have already been filled. More slots are expected to open up today, but many people have taken to social media to complain about continued issues with the Austin Public Health registration process, including very long wait times on the website to secure a slot. And some people say they’ve even been bumped off.
Governor Greg Abbott says he will be making a statewide announcement this afternoon during a stop in Lubbock. And while it’s really not clear what he may say, there’s a lot of speculation it could be related to his statewide COVID orders, including the mask order and business capacity limitations.
Terrys goes to $15 an hour
An Austin burger chain is bumping its full time employees up to $15 an hour. P. Terry’s CEO Todd Cooper explains they’ve put some of the economic burden on customers with a very slight cost increase.
“You know, a nickel on fries and a dime on some of the burgers on the menu,” says Cooper.
Cooper adds that it was not enough to fund the new wages. The rest, he says, is coming from the company’s bottom line profits.
“And it elevated about just over 300 folks on the payroll up to that $15 minimum wage,” he says.
The original median wage was around $12 an hour. So for more than a third of his workforce, this is at 25% raise.
Austin Police Academy
This week the Austin City Council will talk about the possibility of resuming the Austin Police Academy. Mayor Steve Adler still has some reservations about it, saying systemic changes have to be implemented in the way cadets are trained.
“We’ve had past reports that have indicated significant problems and challenges with our cadet classes. We don’t want to do cadet classes until we believe we can be doing them right,” says Adler.
If a cadet class were approved, it would likely begin in the spring. Last year, the council suspended all cadet classes and reallocated tens of millions of dollars away from the APD budget.
Austin rents are rising
Austin area rents are rising twice as fast as the national rate. Rob Warnock with Apartment List says Austin rent has jumped by 1.4% from January to February, holding at $1,470 on average, for a two bedroom. Prior to that, he says, rent had been on the downswing.
“February, we saw rents go up for the first time in a long while. They started to kind of bottom out last month. But this month in February across the country, we saw an increase in 0.7% in the median rent,” Warnock says.
Austin is leading Texas major cities in terms of the median rental costs.
This news and more on News Radio KLBJ:
https://omny.fm/shows/klbjam-flash-briefing-1/am-newscast-3-2-21
