Austin Daily: May 13, 2026

In this week's issue:

• Blue Origin is targeting a 1.3 million square foot aerospace manufacturing campus 25 miles northeast of Austin — $650M+, 2,000 jobs, and it turns Williamson County into the most concentrated aerospace corridor in Texas
• Austin just agreed to borrow money to pay $35 million for a wrongful conviction case from 1991 — the largest settlement in city history, and the actual killer died in 1999
• Waymo recalled 3,791 robotaxis for a flooded-road software defect — and if you read our May 10 puddle story, this is not a coincidence
• Austin hit homicide number 24 this year, and we're barely into May
• The city wants $36 million for a broadcasting studio, and the people asking the questions are not impressed

Let's get into it.

Top Stories

• Waymo recalls 3,791 robotaxis fleet-wide over flooded-road software defect. An OTA fix is coming — but recall this: we reported in our May 10 issue that a Waymo got stalled by a North Lamar puddle while human drivers passed through; that wasn't a quirk, it was the entire 3,791-vehicle fleet running software that couldn't detect or avoid flooded road conditions.
• NHTSA opens formal investigation into Avride for 16 crashes in Texas. Federal regulators called the crash behavior "excessive assertiveness and insufficient capability" — a clinical way of saying Avride's vehicles were confidently wrong at speed; the Austin-operating startup partners with Uber, and this probe now puts federal scrutiny on the AV capital's most active new entrant.
• Austin hits homicide number 24 in 2026 — and we're not yet halfway through May. The city logged its 24th murder of the year this week; May 6 coverage counted 22 after the Cinco de Mayo shooting, meaning two more in a single week, and the annual pace is running well ahead of recent years.
• Austin wants $36 million for a city broadcasting studio — and independent analysts think that number is insane. The proposed cost for what amounts to a municipal media facility has drawn pointed scrutiny, with commentary suggesting the figure implies either gross mismanagement or something worse; this lands in the same week the city revealed it may have to borrow money for the yogurt shop settlement.
• Austin Energy's board is also the City Council — and customers outside city limits don't get a vote. The structural critique gaining traction: AE overcharges customers and transfers funds to the general fund, but because the AE board is identical to the city council, the majority of customers who live outside Austin city limits have zero representation on the body that sets their rates.
• Williamson County megasite scarcity is real, and the Hutto Cottonwood Tract legal dispute is back in the news. As Blue Origin zeros in on Hutto for Project Blue Hub, ABJ reports that the best remaining large economic-development sites in the region are either legally contested or facing resident opposition — a supply constraint that could become a genuine bottleneck for the next wave of capital investment.

Blue Origin Is Building Texas's Aerospace Capital — Right Outside Austin

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is targeting Hutto, Texas — Williamson County, 25 miles northeast of Austin — for "Project Blue Hub," a 1.3 million square foot manufacturing, R&D, warehouse, and logistics campus. The Hutto Economic Development Corporation held a public hearing this week; no vote has been taken yet, but multiple sources confirmed to the Austin Business Journal (which broke the story) that Blue Origin has "squared in on Hutto" as its preferred location. The numbers are serious: more than $650 million in capital investment and 2,000+ jobs at an average salary of $88,000 over five years. This is not a feasibility study. Blue Origin has previously targeted Hutto for a separate ~$1 billion project, which means the company has been circling this county for years. The Florida comparison matters too — Blue Origin simultaneously filed permits for an 800,000 SF manufacturing facility on Merritt Island, Florida. They're building at scale in two states simultaneously.

The deeper story here isn't Blue Origin alone — it's Williamson County becoming the most densely packed aerospace corridor in Texas. Firefly Aerospace expanded its Cedar Park headquarters in April to 144,000 square feet across three buildings, locking in engineering, mission operations, and payload integration capacity as it scales rocket production. Cedar Park's EDC subsequently launched an Aerospace & Defense accelerator vertical through Plug and Play Tech Center. A separate 115,000 SF space industry R&D campus was simultaneously finalizing its location in Cedar Park. And SpaceX's TERAFAB facility is operating in Bastrop, southeast of Austin. What you're looking at, when you zoom out, is a Texas aerospace crescent running from Bastrop through Southeast Austin, up through Cedar Park, and now anchoring in Hutto — all within roughly an hour's drive. No other state has anything like this concentration of active launch and manufacturing capacity in a single metro region.

The economics of this are worth sitting with. Blue Origin's $88,000 average salary figure is nearly double Austin's median household income. Two thousand of those jobs represent a material change to Williamson County's tax base, not a rounding error. This is how Texas wins: no state income tax, permissive build environment, an existing aerospace workforce pipeline from UT Austin and Texas A&M, and EDCs that move fast and don't moralize. The Hutto EDC didn't hold a two-year environmental review — it held a public hearing. The gap between how Texas handles economic development and how California or New York does it is not subtle. It is structural. And Williamson County is about to become one of the most economically consequential zip codes in America.

Sources: Bisnow, Austin Business Journal, Cedar Park EDC / Firefly Expansion

Upcoming Events

• ACL Music Festival 2026 — Lineup Announced, Tickets On Sale. The 25th anniversary ACL Fest lineup is set — headliners include Skrillex (Weekend 1) and Kings of Leon (Weekend 2), plus Charli XCX, Lorde, Twenty One Pilots, and The xx; festival runs October 2–4 and 9–11 at Zilker Park.
• Cine Las Americas International Film Festival (CLAIFF28) — AFS Cinema, May 13–17. The 28th annual festival opens today with the Austin premiere of American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez; five days of film, red carpets, and special events across Austin.
• The Wiz (Broadway Tour) — Bass Concert Hall, through May 17. The first pre-Broadway tour of The Wiz in 40 years is in its final days at UT's Bass Concert Hall — Tony Award-winning Best Musical, running through this Sunday only.
• Chucho Valdés Royal Quartet — The Paramount Theatre, May 16. The 2025 NEA Jazz Master and Afro-Cuban jazz legend performs with his Royal Quartet at 713 N Congress Ave; 7:30 PM, tickets $58.
• Supper Club Austin — Creator Economy Builder Meetup. Austin is hosting a gathering of leaders who built the creator economy alongside active calls for engineers and designers to work on serious AI projects; check the link for RSVP and date details.

Austin Is Borrowing Money to Pay for a 35-Year-Old Criminal Justice Failure

The City of Austin reached a tentative $35 million settlement with four men wrongly accused in the 1991 murders at an "I Can't Believe It's Yogurt" shop on North Austin — the largest payout in Austin city history. The four men: Forrest Welborn, Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen, and the estate of Maurice Pierce, who has since died. All four insisted they were innocent from the beginning. A judge formally agreed in February 2026, declaring them "actually innocent" — approximately three months before this settlement announcement. The actual perpetrator, according to investigators, died in 1999. City Manager T.C. Broadnax announced the tentative deal. It still requires Austin City Council approval, and here's the kicker: the city will likely need to borrow money through bonds or loans to pay it. The National Registry of Exonerations has flagged this as among the nation's largest wrongful conviction settlements ever recorded.

The fiscal reality of this settlement lands differently when you put it in sequence. On May 9, we covered Austin's broader legal liability machine: more than $35 million spent on outside attorneys since 2020, and more than $48 million in total settlements since 2020 — including $20 million-plus to 2020 protest plaintiffs claiming APD excessive force. That was the general ledger. This $35 million is a single line item that by itself exceeds the entire outside attorney spend of the last six years. The city is not a well-managed institution. It is a city running a $26 million operating deficit that simultaneously cannot control its legal exposure, cannot staff its police department to appropriate levels, and is now contemplating a bond issuance to write a check for conduct that occurred during the George H.W. Bush administration.

The broader point: wrongful convictions are expensive, and Austin's criminal justice system has generated several of them. The yogurt shop case dragged on for decades — false confessions, contested DNA evidence, retrials — because the system kept doubling down rather than correcting. Every year that went by without resolution was another year of compounding liability. Four men spent years facing capital murder charges for a crime someone else committed. The actual perpetrator walked free and died in 1999. The taxpayers of Austin will now borrow money to settle the account. That is the honest ledger of what Austin's government actually costs.

Sources: Austin American-Statesman, KXAN, Washington Post / AP, FOX 7 Austin

Weird Austin

• Tesla robotaxi wait times are reportedly "Texas-sized" and detours are turning short trips into hour-long ordeals. The same week Austin declared itself the autonomous vehicle capital of America, critics are noting that actually booking one involves waits long enough to miss dinner — and when you do get picked up, some routes involve enough inexplicable detours that driving yourself would have been faster, cheaper, and significantly less existentially confusing.
• Rhino USA wants 182 acres in Southeast Travis County to test flood rescue gear and off-road equipment. The company makes products for off-roading and flood rescues and needs, specifically, 182 acres in the Austin metro to put them through their paces — an extremely Texas sentence that somehow does not read as unusual here.
• An Austin bar that closed in 2024 just got rescued by the original owner's friend. The original owner's friend saw the closure, decided that was not acceptable, and stepped in to reopen it — which is the most Austin possible bar story and also a minor parable about what happens when people here actually care about something.
• An Austin restaurant moving to a new location decided, mid-move, to also add a bookstore. Why not do both? The only surprising thing is that more Austin restaurants haven't done this.

One Thing

Blue Origin is deploying $650 million to build a 1.3 million square foot aerospace hub in Williamson County. Austin city government is preparing to borrow money to pay $35 million for a wrongful conviction case from 1991. Both of these things are happening at the same time, in the same metro, and they describe the same fundamental gap that is the Austin story right now: Texas builds; Austin's government costs.

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