It’s time for Deep Eddy Pool’s annual spring cleaning. The pool closed yesterday and will reopen bright and shiny at 8 a.m. on Monday, April 2. The city suggests Barton Springs, Bartholomew, Big Stacy and Springwoods pools to tide you over for the time being.

The first ATXelerator City Council candidate training program cohort is wrapping up. Twenty-five men and women participated in the program, which is run by a local nonprofit, the Center for Austin’s Future. Participants attended a weekend retreat in January, which included sessions on Austin’s history and future, advice on how to run a campaign, a speech by state Sen. Kirk Watson and an electric bike tour of downtown Austin. The retreat was followed by eight weekly education sessions on topics such as city government, transportation, utilities and diversity. Now, the program culminates with the Center4ATX Games competition. The first round of the competition is taking place today and tomorrow. In this round, each participant will give a four-minute pitch about why they are the best candidate to represent Austin. Based on these pitches, the pool will be whittled down to eight finalists. Each of these finalists will be given a policy problem to develop a two-minute response to over the next week. A public event will showcase the second and third rounds of the competition on Thursday, March 29, at the North Door at 5:30 p.m. The second round will proceed as a mock Council meeting, where each semifinalist will present the solution to their problem and try to pass an ordinance to solve it. Former Austin city politicians, such as Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell, and other pre-selected speakers, will help facilitate the action. Based on these proceedings, a panel of four judges will choose three finalists to participate in the third round. In this final round, each finalist will be given a question, and the winner will be determined based on the responses to this question. The grand prize is $500, and the other two finalists each receive $250. Audience members will be able to vote for their pick, but the judges’ choice rules.

Today, Council Member Ora Houston is leading a charge to remember the 90th anniversary of Austin’s 1928 Master Plan. Houston will be joined by other members of the community at a City Hall press conference this morning to address the “plan’s relationship to the city as we know it today” and note “a shameful event in Austin’s history.” The 1928 plan created a “negro district,” pushing African-American Austinites east and institutionalizing segregation. In 2012, the city of Austin approved another master plan, the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan, and the implementation of that plan through the Land Development Code is currently underway through the CodeNEXT process.

Interim Assistant City Manager Joe Pantalion sent a memo to the mayor and City Council last week proposing the updated CodeNEXT schedule. Since its release on Feb. 12, staff and the consultants have reviewed the third draft with Council, the Planning Commission, Zoning and Platting Commission and the Environmental Commission and met with community stakeholders. The memo states that the Planning Commission and Zoning and Platting Commission have scheduled joint public hearings on April 28 and May 1. After those hearings, the commissions will form their individual recommendations to Council. Therefore, staff plans to put an item on Thursday’s Council agenda suggesting that Council schedule its public hearings on May 30 and 31. After that, the memo suggests four special called meetings to discuss the draft, “ask questions of the CodeNEXT team, and discuss possible amendments” on June 6, 7, 12 and 13, with a goal of a first reading vote on June 13. This schedule, according to the memo, would make it possible for staff to “utilize the month of July – when the City Council traditionally breaks from formal meetings – to make necessary changes based upon the direction given during first reading.” The memo continues, “Staff recognizes that setting City Council public hearings for the end of May would require action by PC and ZAP within the month of May. Therefore, during the remainder of March and April, staff is scheduling additional work sessions with PC and ZAP to continue discussions on specific CodeNEXT topics.”

The annual County Health Rankings have been released, and out of Texas counties, Travis County is in eighth place in overall health outcomes. The healthiest county in Texas is Denton County and coming in last in the list of 242 participating counties is Duval County in South Central Texas. Twelve counties were not ranked. The rankings are determined by looking at factors like the population’s exercise opportunities and access to healthy foods and rates of smoking, obesity, sexually transmitted infections and teen births.  The country ranked well in many areas such as exercise opportunities and availability of primary care physicians. However, the county ranked poorly in the category of excessive drinking: 23 percent of the population surveyed reported binge drinking in the past 30 days. This is the ninth year that the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have released the nationwide rankings. Counties can use this information to improve the provision of health resources in the community.

The city and the University of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs are hosting a Fair Housing Summit April 2-5 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the enactment of the Fair Housing Act. The Fair Housing Act, enacted in 1968, prohibits segregation and discrimination in housing and public accommodations. The event will feature a trade show, educational breakout sessions and panels focused on topics such as affordable housing, design and construction for fair housing, and homelessness. The keynote speaker is Julián Castro, U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2017 and former mayor of San Antonio. Other speakers include Anna Maria Farias, assistant secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, and Mark Updegrove, president and CEO of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation. Register here.

After last month’s school shooting in Florida in which 17 adults and children were killed, students across the nation, and even the world, have been protesting for stronger gun control laws in the U.S. On Wednesday, thousands of students walked out of their classrooms. Next Saturday, the protest broadens in scope to involve parents, teachers and other concerned citizens with the March for Our Lives demonstration. The main march is in Washington, D.C.; however, there are many satellite marches planned in cities throughout the world. As of press time, there are 763 marches planned worldwide. The Austin sister march will begin at noon on March 24, and demonstrators will march from City Hall to the Capitol. Speakers at the Capitol include public figures such as Mayor Steve Adler, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa and state Sen. Kirk Watson. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor Jack Haimowitz and Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting survivor Marie-Therese Morosky will speak as well.

The Parks and Recreation Department is looking to enhance the 26-acre Zilker Botanical Garden and has announced the first phase of developing the project’s master plan. This involves public meetings “to gather input from residents as we assess the garden’s historical development and existing site features, with an eye towards current and future needs, programming opportunities and improved access.” Three meetings are planned for next week. The first will be Monday, March 19, at Fiesta Gardens, 2101 Jesse E. Segovia St., 6-8 p.m., and the second will be Wednesday, March 21, at the Northwest Recreation Center, 2913 Northland Drive, 6-8 p.m. The third workshop will be held Saturday, March 24, 10 a.m. to noon at the garden itself, and will include a tour of the garden guided by the planning team.

Soon, November elections will be upon us. Well, that might be a bit of a stretch, but they are definitely coming, and more local campaigns are officially launching every day. On March 26, former City Council Member Laura Morrison kicks off her campaign at Threadgill’s World Headquarters, at 5 p.m. In her invite, the mayoral hopeful promises to “address our housing crisis with neighborhood-friendly solutions, prioritize the development of a mass transit system that meets our needs, and run City Hall openly, with a focus on the residents and businesses it is supposed to serve.” Then, on April 6, Natasha Harper-Madison officially joins the race for Austin City Council District 1. That event will take place at Big Easy Bar and Grill, starting at 6 p.m.

The organization charged with guiding the development of Austin’s growing health care district has entered into a partnership with a local jobs accelerator targeting employment in that industry. Capital City Innovation, the organization that will help shape the “innovation zone” located near the eastern edge of downtown around the University of Texas’ Dell Medical School, will work with Impact Hub Austin to increase the number of applicants to that group’s recently announced workforce development accelerator. That program was created to help tech companies, employers, government officials and other interested parties work together to help place Austin residents into well-paying middle-skill jobs in the health care industry, along with advanced manufacturing and information technology. The accelerator has extended its application deadline to March 19 to take advantage of the new partnership, with the first cohort expected to begin working on April 11. Other partners in the accelerator include Capital Area Workforce Solutions, Assemble, Google, JPMorgan Chase & Co., BuildFax and Digi.City.

During CodeNEXT discussion at the end of its Mar. 13 meeting, the Planning Commission impressed upon the staff to include its recommendation for the text of the proposed Land Development Code within the document itself, rather than attached as an addendum. Planning and Zoning Assistant Director Jerry Rusthoven said that staff was concerned about overloading the text with too many comparisons from all the commission recommendations. Chair Stephen Oliver, however, put his foot down, and said that he would be putting forth a resolution that asked for formatting alternatives to the planned addendum. “I’ve seen what happens with some of our recommendations on, say the Strategic (Affordable Housing Blueprint),” he said. “I don’t know of a Council member who looked at it. And a lot of work went into it. And it’s not necessarily the fault of the Council members – I think the formatting did not help.” Commissioner Conor Kenny, tongue-in-cheek, made a suggestion that if the addendum system were so effective, maybe the Planning Commission’s recommendation could be forwarded to Council first, and staff’s recommendation could be referenced to as an attachment. “If y’all want to rewrite the entire thing I wish you luck,” Rusthoven said.

The U.S. subsidiary of France’s state-owned railroad company says a high-speed rail plan that would link Dallas and Houston would kill any chance of ultra-fast trains ever servicing Austin. SNCF America announced this week that it has formally submitted to the Federal Railway Administration its objections to the Texas Central Rail project, the privately funded plan that would run bullet trains between Dallas and Houston with a stop in between near College Station. “The Texas Central Rail project has been designed around the best interest of a single company, not what is best for Texans or the state’s rail transportation future,” SNCF America President and CEO Alain Leray said. “If the federal government allows the Texas Central Rail project to move forward as proposed, it would likely close the door on the future of high-speed rail in communities like Austin, San Antonio, Waco and Temple, while placing huge risks on the shoulders of local, state and federal taxpayers.” His company has instead proposed an alternative alignment dubbed the “T-bone” that would start down the Interstate 35 corridor in DFW before forking at Temple, with one line continuing to San Antonio and the other branching off to Houston. That network would connect Texas’ major cities with 480 miles of track, as opposed to the 763-mile triangle that would be required if Texas Central builds a direct route between Houston and Dallas. The company also took issue with Texas Central’s claims that it will be completely privately financed, arguing that the project will face significant debt financing that would have to be picked up by taxpayers if revenues don’t meet expectations – a scenario that is likely, SNCF America says, because the Texas Central plan puts its Houston station far from that city’s center. In a statement published by San Antonio radio station WOAI, Texas Central clapped back on SNCF America, putting special emphasis on its Gallic provenance: “Of course, SNCF, the state-owned and heavily subsidized (at more than $16 billion a year) French National Railway would declare they are against competition and block the world’s best high-speed train technology from coming to the U.S. Contrary to the European model, railroads in Texas are privately owned and operated, and meet the needs of the market, not top-down government plans. Rather than spend the amount of time and resources that Texas Central has invested over many years, the French State Railway is one of many competitors that would prefer to skip to the front of the line and thwart Texas Central’s progress.”