Club owners in the Red River Cultural District are expressing reserved optimism at the progress made on cleaning up an alley between Seventh and Eighth streets that has long been a hotbed of criminal activity. At last week’s Music Commission meeting, Cody Cowan, executive director of the district, said the alley has been boarded off, cleaned and graded, and showed a marked improvement after years of being used for selling and using drugs, soliciting prostitution and as a repository for human waste. Cowan said a gate system will be installed to allow emergency response crews into the alley when needed, and that the district is looking for the budgetary resources to install murals on the building exteriors along the alley. “Right now it is probably the cleanest an alley has ever been in the history of Austin,” he said.

The University of Texas’ new downtown basketball arena will have a familiar name when it is completed in 2022. Thanks to a $130 million donation from the Galveston-based Moody Foundation, the new sports arena and entertainment venue will be known as the Moody Center. The replacement for the 42-year-old Frank Erwin Center will be built on university-owned land located just south of the Mike A. Myers soccer stadium, with groundbreaking set for Dec. 3. The donation, along with a partnership from the California-based Oak View Group, will give the school a new $338 million state-of-the-art arena with capacity of up to 15,000 fans at no cost to the school. The university will have up to 60 dates per year to use for men’s and woman’s basketball games, with the rest of the calendar available for concerts and other touring events.

The Mayor’s Committee for People With Disabilities will hold its Annual Disability Employment Awards today at City Hall. The event, which starts at 6 p.m., aims to promote the full employment of Austin residents with disabilities and will recognize businesses that have demonstrated positive employment practices in that community. Recipients include Convo Relay for providing video relay and other communication solutions for the deaf; Scan Mailboxes for committing to hiring people with disabilities at every opportunity; Dr. Beth Hamilton for her work advocating for the deaf and hearing impaired communities; Texas School for the Deaf CEO Claire Bugen for her work in the national Education of Deaf Students program; and Tracey and Steve Brown, promoting athletics and other inclusion activities for children with disabilities. The awards ceremony is free and open to the public.

The Austin Parks Foundation has entered into a partnership with 4ATX, the philanthropic arm of the Austin FC professional soccer club, to have soccer nets installed at 10 soccer fields around Austin beginning late this year. The partnership is part of the team’s requirement by the city to provide access to soccer for youth throughout the city, which was among the conditions included in the agreement to provide city land as the site for an under-construction 21,000-seat stadium in North Austin. The initial set of nets will be installed at Tillery Fields, Edward Rendon Sr. Park at Festival Beach and the Delwood Sports Complex in Bartholomew District Park. Backup nets for each site will also be provided as part of the partnership, which will be expanded in coming years. A press release announcing the partnership didn’t specify when installation will be completed at all 10 initial sites.

A collaborative initiative has received a grant to address a widespread yet rarely acknowledged societal problem: the adultification of black girls. The women’s philanthropic organization Impact Austin awarded its first-ever social innovation grant of $110,000 to the Innocence Initiative, a partnership between MEASURE Austin, Girl Scouts of Central Texas, Hearts 2 Heal, Lone Star Justice Alliance, and Community Advocacy and Healing Project. A press release from Impact Austin announcing the award describes adultification “as a social or cultural stereotype that is based on how adults perceive children in the absence of knowledge of children’s behavior and verbalization. With adultification, racial stereotypes become more important than the fact that they are children, depriving them of the safety and security they would be granted otherwise.” Meme Styles, the founder of MEASURE Austin, said, “Black girls receive disproportionate rates of punitive treatment in the education and juvenile justice systems. The Innocence Initiative will elevate the data, listen to the real-life stories of black girls, and address disparities that perpetuate adultification through advocacy, training, and a public awareness campaign.” Christina Canales Gorczynski, the executive director of Impact Austin, noted that this is the first time the organization has focused its grant-making on a collaborative effort rather than on a single nonprofit, which she said makes the award particularly meaningful.

Impact Austin awards its first-ever social innovation grant to the Innocence Initiative.

The city of Austin will honor the late Mary Gay Maxwell by naming a unit of Austin Water Quality Protection Lands after her. As noted in a press release about the dedication ceremony planned for Thursday morning, Maxwell devoted “much of her life to protecting Austin’s unique environmental features and sensitive natural resources. She was a strong, zealous and influential advocate for Barton Springs and the entire Edwards Aquifer.” Maxwell served on the city’s environmental board, later named the Environmental Commission, for 15 years and was chair of the commission at the time of her death. She was also a leader in the Save Our Springs Alliance during the 1990s, at one point serving as the group’s volunteer executive director. Maxwell died in a head-on collision on Highway 71 near Smithville in 2016. The city notes that wildlands are “not parks, but are public lands held in trust for a specific purpose based on the mission of the program under which they are managed.” Find more information here.

The Austin Independent School District announced an effort this week to ensure that all of the district’s 80,000 students and their families fill out forms and be counted in the 2020 U.S. census this spring. The historic outreach effort involves all of the district’s 130 campuses. AISD is partnering with parent-teacher associations, the city and Travis County to provide information about the census count and “to ensure that everyone in our diverse community is counted,” according to a press release. AISD officials are acutely aware that an accurate count is critical to the allocation of federal funding to programs like special education, free school lunches, Title 1 and HeadStart. “I think we realized we were leaving money on the table. We were leaving people uncounted,” Lynn Boswell, president of the Austin Council of PTAs, told KXAN. Since the state Legislature declined to fund census outreach efforts, it’s up to efforts like this one to educate Texans about why participating in the census is so important. District staff and volunteers will be getting the word out about the census count at school carnivals, holiday events and PTA meetings over the next several months, putting a special focus on low-income families, undocumented people and those who are experiencing homelessness. “Dollars are scarce and our students have infinite needs,” district CFO Nicole Conley told KXAN.

Council Member Leslie Pool is turning her focus to the Capital Metro Red Line, with two separate resolutions at Council’s Nov. 14 meeting. The first asks staff to work to find funding for two new stations at Broadmoor and McKalla Place. The second resolution “would advance the Red Line Parkway, a linear and urban trail running generally along the Cap Metro Red Line railway,” according to a post from Pool on the City Council Message Board. Council members Ann Kitchen and Jimmy Flannigan have signed on to co-sponsor the stations item, while Council members Kitchen, Natasha Harper-Madison and Paige Ellis will be co-sponsors on the Parkway item.

More than 200 volunteers gathered yesterday to construct a playground in a single day at Wooten Neighborhood Park. The new playscape, which includes swings, slides and climbers, was a collaboration between the Austin Parks and Recreation Department and several other groups. “We are thankful for KaBOOM!, Austin Parks Foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the 200 volunteers who built the dream playground designed by Wooten Elementary School students,” said Kimberly McNeeley, director of the parks department. “The new equipment will create community for our youngest Austinites by improving access to healthy play opportunities and carving out a special space for young folks to gather, learn and grow.” After two days of prep, it took volunteers less than six hours to construct the playscape from start to finish.

Volunteers paint a colorful map of the U.S on the basketball court.

Two hundred volunteers gather for the ribbon-cutting.

Et voilà’! A playground built in a single day.

Election Day has dawned, and the polls will be open today from 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Voters in Texas will be deciding on 10 proposed amendments to the state constitution; Austin voters have two city propositions to decide. If you haven’t made up your mind how to vote yet, here is a bipartisan voter guide from the League of Women Voters Austin Area (and here is the voter guide in Spanish). Travis County has a spiffy new touch-screen voting system; if you’d like to learn more about it before using it, watch this short informational video. Now, before you trot down to the polls, confirm your voter registration status on VoteTravis.com. Check! Make sure you’re going to the right place on this list of Election Day voting locations. Check! Got your ID handy? Check! Now go exercise your civil rights and vote your heart out.

The Eastside Memorial ECHS Vertical Team and Austin Voices are throwing their annual Harvest Festival, a free community event featuring live music, a raffle, crafts and activities for kids, and mounds of delicious food. In addition to the festive stuff, the day includes family resources for housing, jobs and health. Saturday, Nov. 9, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., Eastside Memorial ECHS, 1012 Arthur Stiles Rd.

With Revel having launched 1,000 electric mopeds onto the city’s crowded streets on Nov. 1, the Austin Transportation Department has issued a statement reminding motorists to exercise caution – more caution than usual. The department also wants to remind Revel users that helmets are required and that Revel drivers “are required to follow all uniform traffic laws in the State of Texas. Low-speed electric motorcycles are prohibited from using bike lanes and expected to operate in vehicle travel lanes. At no time may these vehicles operate or be parked on sidewalks or urban trails.” The mopeds can reach speeds of up to 30 mph, so keep an eye peeled – there could be one behind you right now.