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"It's going to be a while before we see that again," said Tom Noonan, chief executive officer of Visit Austin, which is funded by the city's hotel occupancy tax and promotes Austin as a business and leisure destination. "I don't think we'll completely recover for two or three years."
Last year, Visit Austin booked 1,122 meetings, conventions and sports and social events for some 700,000 attendees.
Just over half were corporate events, another 31% were association meetings, and the remaining 18% were sports, social and government events, said Christine Cramer, director of market analysis and research for Visit Austin.
"Everyone comes to Austin for everything," Cramer said. "There's something that appeals to every interest and every generation."
The picture will look very different this year.
Some 167 conventions, meetings, sports events and social activities, like weddings and reunions, booked by Visit Austin have been canceled since March, Cramer said.
Sports events like the Texas Relays and the Dell Match Play golf tournament were just a few of the sports events that were shut down.
The Spiceworks Tech World conference was set to host 4,000 attendees in September, and the Forrester/Sirius Decisions Summit was to bring 5,000 in May, Cramer said. Both went virtual.
The canceled events would have brought some $217 million to the local economy. Attendees would have rented 213,000 hotel room nights for those events, Cramer said.
Those numbers don't include the cancellation of SXSW and other events that are booked outside the purview of Visit Austin.
Occupancy rates for the city's 43,000 hotel rooms in Austin, which typically don't go below 60% even in the slower summer months, dropped below 17% at their lowest, Cramer said.
Now they're hovering around 25-27% occupancy rates, Cramer said.
Downtown, where nearly 12,000 hotel rooms bring in more than half of the occupancy tax revenues for the city, the low reached 3.9% two weeks ago, she said.
The impact of the coronavirus on travel has been nine times worse than the impact of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a study by the American Hotel and Lodging Association.
And long-term restrictions and lingering fears mean people will likely be inclined to stay home until a treatment or a vaccine is found, Noonan said.
"It'll have to be something like that before we're going to see tremendous change in terms of the size of events taking place," he said.
Noonan predicted that recovery would start with Texans venturing out for "staycations" a short distance from home. Then essential business, followed by more leisure corporate travelers, and smaller events starting with 50 to a few hundred people, he said—all defined by new sanitation practices.
"You're going to start slowly seeing these things build up until you can start saying, yes, we can do that 2,000- or 5,000-person event or convention or sporting event," Noonan said. "So that's the way it's going to come back."
Signs of hope are out there, even if they are moving at a glacial pace.
Local hotel occupancy rates are creeping up by the week, and events are still booking for the less immediate future, Noonan said.
"The meeting site has always been the greatest insurance plan for destinations because you book them 2, 3, 5 years out," he said. "We're still doing that right now."
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(Paxton Smith/Instagram)
Paxton Smith’s 2021 valedictory speech at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas wasn’t the same speech she had previously shared with school administrators. She dropped the approved speech and made a case for women’s reproductive rights after lawmakers passed the Texas "Heartbeat Bill.”
Her advocacy made news on NPR, YouTubeTV and in The Guardian. Just over a year later, the “war on (women’s) rights” she forewarned has come to a head as the U.S. Supreme Court voted Friday morning to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending constitutional protection for abortion access.
“It is up to the people to show up and show the courts and the politicians that we won’t sit back and let this happen,” Smith told Austonia Friday morning. “We will show up, we will fight back. Before, we were scared of them, now they should be scared of us.”
Now a University of Texas sophomore and abortion rights activist, 19-year-old Smith said she wanted to give the same speech in the “the most public way possible” to reach “as many people as possible who don't agree that I deserve this right.”
However, she says the response was “actually overwhelmingly positive” and supportive of her cause. According to a recent UT poll, 78% of Texas voters support abortion access in most cases.
The speech opened up further opportunities for activism: she advocated for reproductive rights at the International Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, interviewed with Variety magazine and spoke to tens of thousands at Austin’s Bans Off Our Bodies protest at the Texas Capitol in May.
Smith also serves on the board of directors for the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, a national nonprofit organization that helps fund abortions or medication abortion—like Plan C pills—in all 50 states. Most recently, Smith has been attending protests in Washington, D.C. leading up to the ruling.
“This is land of the free. This is where you get to choose how you live your life,” Smith said. “Overturning Roe v. Wade violates everything that we have come to believe about what it means to live in this country. I think a lot of people aren't willing to accept that this is a human right that is most likely just going to be gone for over half of the country within the next couple of weeks.”
Bracing for the next steps, Smith gave some tips for supporters:
- Find a protest to attend.
- “I would say invite somebody to go to those protests with you, invite a couple of friends, invite people into the movement,” Smith said.
- Talk about the issue on social media—use the platform you have.
- “Have these kinds of conversations where people can just talk about their fears and then find ways to go and advocate for yourself,” Smith said.
- Volunteer at a nonprofit near you.
“I feel like a lot of the reason things have gotten as bad as they have within the abortion rights world is that people are not making a scene, not protesting, not putting the effort into ensuring that the government doesn't take away this right,” Smith said. “I want to emphasize that if you're not doing anything, don't expect the best scenario, expect the worst because that's the direction that we're going in.”
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(Council Member Chito Vela/Twitter)
The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion, Friday morning. Moments later, Austin City Council set a special meeting for next month to pass a resolution aimed at decriminalizing abortion.
The GRACE Act, which stands for guarding the right to abortion care for everyone, is a twofold plan submitted by council member Jose “Chito” Vela. It recommends that city funds shouldn’t be used to surveil, catalog, report or investigate abortions. It also recommends that police make investigating abortion their lowest priority.
Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, who co-sponsored the resolution along with council members Paige Ellis, Kathie Tovo and Mayor Steve Adler, said the importance of the GRACE Act cannot be overstated.
“By introducing this resolution during a special session, City Council is doubling down on fighting back for reproductive health,” Fuentes said. “Items like the GRACE Act will promote essential healthcare while enabling individuals to exercise their bodily freedom.”
The act takes an approach similar to when former council member Greg Casar moved to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Ultimately, state law doesn't allow city officials to order police chiefs to adopt specific enforcement policies so the resolution would be a request to Police Chief Joe Chacon. In May, Politico reported that Vela is having "ongoing conversations" with Chacon about the proposal.
Austonia contacted Attorney General Ken Paxton for comment on the GRACE Act but did not hear back by time of publication. On Friday, Paxton celebrated the overturning of Roe and announced an annual office holiday on June 24 in recognition of the high court's decision.
In a press release, Vela said the Texas state government has a history of overturning municipal protections of human rights. Thirty days after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Texas will ban all abortions, with exceptions only to save the life of a pregnant patient or prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function.”
Still, Vela expressed hope for the GRACE Act’s longevity. Council’s special meeting on it is set for the week of July 18.
“We know this resolution is legally sound, and Austin is not alone in this fight,” Vela said. “We are working with several other cities who are equally horrified by the prospect of an abortion ban and want to do everything they can to protect their residents.”
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