• There’s no City Council meeting this week; the merrymakers will be back Nov. 5 with a full agenda, including developer Grayco’s return to chambers to take another stab at the affordable housing questions left hanging from last week’s meeting. Housing advocates want the proposed South Shore PUD, located between Lady Bird Lake and East Riverside Drive, to increase its number of affordable units.
• Robin Shivers, Austin philanthropist and loyal friend to the music community, died unexpectedly Oct. 26. The wife of Bud Shivers and daughter-in-law of ex-Gov. Allan Shivers, she co-founded the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, which has provided affordable health care to more than 1,600 local musicians to date.
• Good news for Travis High School: The Texas Education Agency has changed its accountability rating to academically acceptable. It was initially misclassified as academically unacceptable because one student, who met all the graduation requirements, was still taking classes part-time.
• Heavy rainfall last weekend, raising Lake Travis by eight feet, was not enough to position the Lower Colorado River Authority to start taking on new customers. LCRA staffers are recommending suspending any new municipal and industrial water contracts until long-term drought conditions improve.
• What goes around comes around? Former Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz – who, against the wishes of enviros and many city and civic leaders, relocated the company’s Austin operations to an ecologically sensitive area of southwest Austin several years ago – has been linked to an insider trading scandal, according to the Wall Street Journal. Ruiz is believed to have tipped off a hedge fund manager in 2008 about AMD’s plans to reorganize.
• More push back against reproductive rights: Rep. Frank Corte Jr., R-San Antonio, has requested a legal opinion from Attorney General Greg Abbott on whether health clinics that prescribe the emergency contraceptive RU-486 (inflammatorily misnamed “the abortion pill” by anti-choice groups) need to follow the same regulations as abortion clinics.
• Can’t I phone a friend instead? Disgraced ex-Congressman Tom DeLay quit ABC’s celebutainment extravaganza Dancing With the Stars because of stress fractures, so the network has given him a less physical task instead: answering the “Ask an Expert” lifeline on Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
• Teel Bivins, former Texas senator and ambassador to Sweden under President George W. Bush, died this week, five years after he was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy.
• The Houston Chronicle and Hearst Newspapers are suing Gov. Rick Perry to force him to release the clemency report in the now nationally famous Cameron Todd Willingham case. Willingham was executed in 2004, but Perry has faced repeated accusations of trying to delay any investigation into the case and allowing the execution to proceed.
Quote of the Week
“Make no mistake, this is a difficult decision and one I would rather not have to make.”
– Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, on moving to dismiss murder indictments against the two remaining defendants in the 1991 yogurt shop murders
This article appears in swine flu.