As you surely know, the Independence Day holiday falls on a Sunday this year, thus many city offices and facilities will be closed the following day, Monday. Among the closures are rec centers and senior centers and most museums (Elisabet Ney, Susanna Dickinson, George Washington Carver, O. Henry, Old Bakery and Emporium, Dougherty Arts, Mexican American Cultural Center and Asian American Resource Center). Austin Public Library branches, Austin Central Library and the Austin History Center will be closed Monday. There will be no changes to Austin Resource Recovery trash, recycling and compost collections, but ARR administrative offices will be closed Monday. City golf courses, tennis centers and Zilker Botanical Garden will be open as usual on Monday. Some swimming pools will be operating on modified schedules – check here for more info. Find details about Parks and Recreation closures here. The Austin Animal Center will be open on Sunday during normal hours, 11am-6pm, but will be closed Monday, July 5.

City Council Member Kathie Tovo is the first of her Council colleagues to file the required July 15 campaign finance report with the city clerk’s office. Tovo, who filed the report last week, reported that her campaign still owes her nearly $162,000 from her successful 2018 reelection bid. She reported expenditures for bank fees and for her website, but in accordance with city ordinance, she did not raise any money this year. If Tovo decided to run for a fourth term, she could do so by gathering signatures from her District 9 constituents starting this November for an anticipated reelection bid in November 2022. She could also decide to run for mayor in 2022, a really expensive proposition for a term that will be over at the end of 2024 since Austin voters decided mayoral elections should coincide with presidential elections.

Trisha Tatro, who has more than 19 years of experience at the Austin Convention Center, has been named director of the department. Assistant City Manager Rodney Gonzales announced Tatro’s selection in a memo Wednesday. According to Gonzales, Tatro “spent her first 14 years” at the convention center, “successfully overseeing the management and execution of world-class meetings and conventions while establishing strong relationships with valuable clients both locally and internationally.” Next, she served as facility manager, moving up to assistant director. Tatro has certainly earned her position, serving as the convention center’s interim director starting just a few weeks before the beginning of the pandemic. Gonzales wrote, “For the past 16 months, Trisha has led the ACCD team through the industry’s most vulnerable time period with poise, resilience, and strength. She has successfully navigated and mitigated the Covid-19 impact on ACCD operations, our community, and our convention and hospitality industry.” Even though the events industry is making a comeback it seems likely that Tatro will need all of her skills and experience to navigate the road ahead, especially in light of the need to reimagine convention center expansion.

The Austin-Area Wildfire Hub, an online project of the Austin Fire Department’s Wildfire Division, describes itself as a “portal for information-sharing, cross-agency initiatives and grassroots coalition-building to prepare our community for wildfire. Because it’s not a matter of ‘if’ the next wildfire occurs, but ‘when.'” The hub contains information and resources on local fire danger and burn bans, fire-adapted and fire-wise communities, wildfire prevention, and the wildland-urban interface code (Austin is the first major city in the state of Texas to adopt the WUI code). But the most fascinating part of the wildfire hub is a live feed that monitors, via satellite, “thermal hotspots and fire activity” around the country in the last 48 hours. It’s shocking to see how many fires are actively burning out there, and seeing them on the map drives home the fact that we are all truly at risk. As the wildfire hub puts it, “Wildfire is everyone’s fight.”

The city and UT Austin have teamed up for a two-year project that will study the disparate impact of extreme heat on the city and look for solutions. According to a press release, the project has “three main goals: creating dynamic heat maps that plot how people experience heat alongside actual temperature measurements; using those maps to develop strategies to cool down temperature hot spots; and finally, presenting the data and potential solutions to community members and city decision-makers.” Of particular focus is East Austin, which has more frequent hot spots than other parts of town. Researchers will use satellite data, sensors and computer models along with resident input, “engaging in discussions about temperature hot spots in their communities and receiving feedback on temperature maps.” Project lead Dev Niyogi, a professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering, said, “This project will help businesses and communities and it is helping students to develop a purpose for their research. They are not simply trying to develop an analysis or a plot; it’s a project that means a better life for someone if we do this right.” In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration selected the project for $296,477 in funding along with three others that focus on community-led urban heat mapping and the inequitably distributed impacts of extreme heat.

The Development Services Department has opened a new center that brings together several different departments all under one roof to provide “a streamlined, efficient experience for residential and commercial customers alike.” DSD’s new Permitting and Development Center, which opens its doors on Tuesday, July 6, will be “offering a new take on the development experience and complementing the growing range of virtual options that are now available for the Austin community.” To save time and be more efficient, DSD will now require customers to make appointments both for virtual and for in-person services. Virtual appointments can be scheduled for as soon as the next business day. Schedule your appointment here.

A new initiative dubbed “Let’s Stick Together” is out to accomplish “the community-focused goal of 70 percent of eligible Travis County residents receiving at least one dose of the vaccine by July 4, and 70 percent of residents fully vaccinated by Labor Day,” according to a news release. Praising the partnership between Central Health, Austin Public Health, Travis County and CommUnityCare Health Centers, Austin Mayor Steve Adler said in a news release, “For more than a year, we’ve joined as a community to keep our friends and family safe from Covid-19. Working together, we’ve saved lives. Continuing to keep each other safe is how we will stop the spread and return to pre-pandemic life. We can get to Stage 1, the lowest risk level of this pandemic, if we all do our part and help each other get vaccinated.” The city of Austin and Travis County plan to launch a calendar and interactive map showing “daily mobile pop-up vaccination sites focused on communities with lower vaccination rates.” Central Health is also paying providers to vaccinate residents of high-risk communities, and patients who get vaccinated will receive gift cards and T-shirts. To learn more about Let’s Stick Together, Central Texas/Vacunémonos y Juntémonos, Central Texas, visit Central Health.

In a June 25 memo to City Council, Chief Animal Services Officer Don Bland described a dire state of affairs at the Austin Animal Center, where “every kennel is full, and staff have had to double-up dogs in each suite.” Bland explained that far more animals are coming into the shelter than are leaving via adoptions, rescue and foster, and said, “Maintaining a No Kill shelter requires support from the entire community, and we are asking the community to help us with this challenge.” From June 1-23 alone, the center took in 1,146 cats and dogs. Austin isn’t the only city shelter coping with a capacity crisis; Bland wrote, “Shelters throughout the Southern United States are facing the same challenges. Our largest rescue partners are also at full capacity and not able to take animals from us to alleviate our space issue.” He warns, “This current challenge may create the need for staff to issue notifications for possible euthanasia. Notifications would apply to animals that have been in our care for a long period due to behavioral concerns.” How can community members help? Step up to foster pets; keep lost pets in your homes and look for their owners instead of turning the animals in to the shelter; use your social media platforms to help spread the word about the crisis and promote shelter animals for rescue, adoption and foster.

Austin Opportunity Youth Collaborative has received a $100,000 grant from the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions to help fund postsecondary and career training programs for low-income youth in the Austin area. The youth collaborative won the grant via its connection with Workforce Solutions Capital Area, which coordinates job training programs throughout Central Texas with an emphasis on careers in health care, information technology and advanced manufacturing. The collaborative targets people aged 16 to 24 who are not participating in school or the job market, with pre-pandemic demographic studies showing there were just over 24,000 such individuals in greater Austin. In 2020, Workforce Solutions helped serve 340 opportunity youth, connecting them to employment, post-secondary education or other opportunities to improve themselves economically. The Aspen Institute’s $1.6 million in total awards were funded in part by JP Morgan Chase, Prudential Financial and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

T.A. Brown Neighborhood Park, Springwoods Neighborhood Park and Deep Eddy Community Garden are the recipients of Austin Parks Foundation’s 2021 Spring Community Grants. The three parks will receive a combined $102,000 for the “installation of connection walks, equipment, a new kiosk, the rebuilding of dilapidated storage sheds and more.” Ladye Anne Wofford, the foundation’s chief mission officer, explained in a news release, “Amenities like tables, benches and kiosks in our parks and green spaces are essential. We are proud to financially support these projects that will allow for much-needed park improvements benefiting communities across Austin. Our parks have been a respite over the past year, and we know these improvements will allow for our community to continue to enjoy them.”

The public will have access to the newly reopened Waterloo Park and Moody Amphitheater on Aug. 14 for an all-day CommUNITY Day event featuring free family-oriented programming and performances in the 11-acre downtown park. The event will feature music and performing arts, math and science education activities, environmental programming and booths and activations from a variety of community organizations. A “Taste Of Austin” concert showcase at the amphitheater in the evening will feature a variety of local live music performers. The park has been closed to the public for a decade to allow for the creation of the Waller Creek Tunnel project, with $88 million in park improvements tied to the flood control effort that eventually cost more than $160 million. Less than a week after the public opening, Grammy-winning Austin blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr. will headline the first ticketed show at the 5,000-capacity amphitheater. That show is being organized by Austin-based concert promoter C3 Presents, which as a partner with the Waterloo Greenway nonprofit will provide 100 free tickets via a community lottery to all of its events at the facility.

Austin Transportation Department staff are hard at work making safety and mobility improvements to the Longhorn Dam bridge. Most recently, the work crew has created a temporary detour to re-route pedestrians and cyclists crossing the bridge to the new shared-use pathway on the bridge’s east side, which opens today. The interim improvements are intended to provide a safer crossing while work begins on the hotly anticipated wishbone bridge that will ultimately serve as the permanent trail crossing for bikes and pedestrians. In the meantime, two pedestrian hybrid beacon signals have been installed to mark the path’s entrance and exit. According to the department, the detour “will remain in place while the west side of the bridge is closed for construction. Construction will continue to build out another shared-use pathway on the west side of the bridge. Future work will include final markings and signal enhancements to complete the project.”

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