Three war memorials are moving to Veterans Park and the city’s Parks and Recreation Department is holding a community meeting to discuss that proposal and other plans for the park. The memorials are being moved from Waterloo Park. The city is also contemplating creating space for events (like holiday observances and ceremonies). Those wanting to discuss these plans and the future of Veterans Park are invited to attend the meeting, which will take place on March 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the American Legion, Travis Post 76, which is located at 404 Atlanta St.

A brand new Texas Historical Marker will officially post up in downtown Austin today. State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, Texas Historical Commissioner Wallace Jefferson and Travis County Historical Commissioner Joe Ramirez will headline the event put on by the Texas Historical Commission at 600 Wood St. The marker will account for the long-lost Wood Street Settlement at Shoal Creek, a community of African-American and Tejano residents lasting from the end of the Civil War to its eventual extinction in the 1980s. The Shoal Creek Conservancy teamed with the Parks and Recreation Department and the Travis County Historical Commission to secure the state’s official recognition of the Wood Street Settlement. “Awareness and education are among the best ways to guarantee the preservation of our state’s history. This designation is a tool that will help increase public awareness of important cultural resources,” Mark Wolfe, executive director of the THC, said in a press release. Friday’s dedication ceremony kicks off at 9 a.m.

Ashley Fisher has joined the staff of Mayor Steve Adler as a policy adviser. Fisher has considerable City Hall experience, having served as an aide to Council Member Pio Renteria and former Council Member Bill Spelman. In addition, Fisher has worked as a planner in Austin Resource Recovery, and she served as interim publisher of the Austin Monitor from June 2017 to January 2018. She joins another new member of the mayor’s staff who has worked at City Hall, Michael McGill. McGill worked for Sheryl Cole when she was on City Council and then moved to the Office of the City Auditor before joining the mayor’s staff last month. Jim Wick has taken a leave of absence to work on the mayor’s re-election campaign, and Lesley Varghese, who is expecting a new baby shortly, will soon be on maternity leave. This whisper has been corrected to reflect Fisher’s job duties at ARR.

Local activists have taken to the Change.org petition site in an attempt to remove a second city park site from consideration for a possible 20,000-seat stadium to host a professional soccer club. The petition was originally intended for both the Butler Shores Metropolitan Park as well as Roy G. Guerrero Colorado River Metropolitan Park, but Precourt Sports Ventures – the group pushing to move an Ohio Major League Soccer team to Austin – opted to remove Butler from consideration last month after public outcry. That means East Austin activists are now using the digital petition to push City Council members to get Guerrero Park pulled as well, claiming the stadium would cause environmental damage, disrupt the nearby community and overburden local infrastructure. As of Thursday night, the petition had just over 9,700 signatures toward its goal of 10,000. Council Member Pio Renteria, whose district includes the parkland, supports keeping the park as a possible stadium site despite a recent protest there against the issue. Renteria’s staff told the Austin Monitor that Renteria wants to see a possible development proposal from Precourt and then involve the community in evaluating its merits. Staff emphasized that any stadium project would see the city retain ownership of the property, and would need to include “significant community benefits” to earn support from Council members.

The effort to tackle homelessness in Austin received a boost from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 2018 Mayors Challenge this week, in the form of a $100,000 grant to fund a six-month project to increase access to public services by utilizing blockchain technology. The project’s intent is to provide a unique consistent identifier to the estimated 7,000 people who experience homelessness in the Austin area. Those people typically lack identification documents, which creates obstacles and delays in accessing assistance for housing, employment and other needed services. Austin was chosen as one of 35 Champion Cities by Bloomberg, and it joins Los Angeles in using the grant money to address homelessness. Issues that other cities chose to address include transportation, opioid addiction and reducing food waste.

Today, members of the Anti-Displacement Task Force will be joined by Mayor Steve Adler, Council members Ora Houston and Leslie Pool, and community leaders at a press conference. According to a notice about the press conference, those gathered will “discuss next steps for the citizen-led group to provide the Council with an action plan to finally do something about displacement in the eastern crescent” and preview the task force’s first forum, which will take place on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Conley-Guerrero Senior Activity Center. Earlier this month, a city memo hinted at the fact that the task force members might soon angle for an official consultant to help them with their considerable workload as they study a wide swath of issues that deal with affordability and preserving culture in the city. Today’s press conference will take place at 10 a.m. at Mt. Zion Baptist Church.

Central Health announced Wednesday that Baltimore-based Wexford Science and Technology has withdrawn from master developer consideration for the Brackenridge Campus. In addition, the health care district is considering moving away from its master developer strategy on the campus altogether, in an effort to move more quickly through its redevelopment process. The press release reveals that on Wednesday the Budget and Finance Committee of Central Health’s board of managers recommended that Mike Geeslin, Central Health president and CEO, “negotiate with parties, including The 2033 Fund, who are interested in developing two blocks on the 14-acre campus.” The 2033 Fund is a nonprofit established by Sandy Gottesman, a graduate of the University of Texas. The release shares that the nonprofit “is interested in two specific blocks on the Campus for health and research operations. The tracts are Block 167, the former University Medical Center Brackenridge hospital tower, and Block 164, which is located along Red River Street south of the existing parking garage. Block 164 would be used for future health-related needs and to support the joint mission of Central Health, Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, and their partner Seton Healthcare Family.” The UT Board of Regents will discuss leasing those blocks “both for Dell Medical School activities and to potentially sublease portions to other entities with an aligned health care mission” next week. A partnership with UT through The 2033 Fund would provide a quick and steady opportunity for income for the district to help support its development of the rest of the site. The press release promises that this potential agreement does not mean that the Central Health Brackenridge Campus Master Plan, which was developed with community involvement and adopted by the board in 2016, is being abandoned. “If Central Health reaches an agreement with The 2033 Fund, it will not preclude the health care district from redeveloping the remaining blocks in alignment with the Central Health Brackenridge Campus Master Plan. With or without a master developer for the project, the Master Plan can serve as a guiding document.”

Eighty years ago, the Tom Miller Dam curtailed the waters of the Colorado River for the first time. Now, after eight decades, all nine of its floodgates need replacement. At the last meeting of the Lower Colorado River Authority’s board of directors, General Manager Phil Wilson requested that a $9.9 million lifetime budget be approved for this two-year project. Although expansive in scope, he explained that the repairs were critical for operational safety. To underscore the necessity of the situation, he offered to take the entire board on a field trip to the site in order to show them the condition of the dam. Wilson also noted that because the dam was located right across from the LCRA offices on Lake Austin Boulevard, the floodgate replacement project would need to make sure to dot its “i’s” and cross its “t’s.” “This is high profile. It’s across the street. Everyone is going to see it,” he said. The LCRA board unanimously approved a motion to “authorize our big spender over there to build some dams,” as Chair Timothy Timmerman said.

The Bicycle Advisory Council on Tuesday evening gave its support to the Transportation Department’s use of concrete buttons to physically separate bike lanes on roads with moderate to low speeds and volumes. Also known as “tortoise shells,” the white cake pan-shaped buttons are affixed to the ground with bituminous or epoxy adhesives and, at $2 to $4 per foot, offer a far less expensive alternative to other treatments such as the precast concrete barriers seen on portions of the Lance Armstrong Bikeway in downtown Austin. However, not all stakeholders in the bicycling community support the buttons, according to city bikeway designer Nathan Wilkes. Thus, the BAC’s resolution of support, which passed with the unanimous support of all members present, bolsters the department’s continued use of the delineators, which will likely start appearing on more and more streets as the city starts to spend the $20 million in bicycle improvements approved by voters in 2016.

Early voting opened yesterday for the March 6 Republican and Democratic presidential primaries. The League of Women Voters has a tool that will provide you with a personalized ballot, if you’d like to check it out before you head to the polls. The Texas Tribune has good coverage of the legislative side of things. As far as Travis County goes, only two incumbents out of the 11 Democratic candidates have drawn challengers: Precinct 4 County Commissioner Margaret Gómez (Susanna Woody) and Precinct 3 Justice of the Peace Susan Steeg (Sylvia Holmes). In addition, Democratic Party Chair Vincent Harding is resigning, meaning that his seat is up for grabs as well. Wondering where to vote? KUT has a complete list of early voting locations by county. There are 25 early voting locations in Travis County, and they will be open Feb. 20 through 24: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Ben Hur Shrine Center: 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Feb. 24), Feb. 25: noon to 6 p.m., and Feb. 26 through March 2: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. There are also several mobile voting sites, which will have variable opening hours. So far, things are off to a predictably slow start. The Travis County Clerk reports that 7,123 ballots were cast Tuesday, representing just 0.97 percent of registered voters.

The election results in this whisper have been corrected.

IndyAustin, the specific purpose political action committee led by Linda Curtis that is gathering petitions to force a public vote on CodeNEXT, has a complaint about its treatment at city libraries. It seems the library’s managers believe that petitioners like Bill Bunch, Jeff Jack, Debbie Russell and other, lesser-known Austinites are violating a previously unknown city policy that prevents petitioning on library property. In one instance “a petitioner was threatened with criminal trespass and issued a warning notice by police,” according to attorney Bill Aleshire’s letter to Mayor Steve Adler and City Council. Aleshire and his client contend that the threats and the warning citation are a violation of the city charter. Aleshire said Tuesday night that he had not heard anything back from the city about his cease-and-desist letter. Tuesday was a rainy day and it’s likely that not a lot of petitioners were standing in the rain outside libraries. Rain is also forecast for today and tomorrow, so there may not be a test of the city’s resolve on this issue until the rain stops.

According to the Lower Colorado River Authority, in 2022, Colorado County can expect to have a new freshwater reservoir at its disposal. Called the Prairie Conservation Reservoir, this small 2,000-acre-foot off-channel reservoir is intended to help improve the stability of the fresh water supply for Austin and the surrounding areas. The reservoir will be located on a 1,988-acre tract of land that was purchased in 2015, but the engineers have yet to determine the exact location for construction. This, coupled with the ever-increasing cost of construction caused John Hofmann, LCRA’s executive vice president of water, to explain to the authority’s board of directors last Wednesday that “the (current) cost numbers have a lot of contingencies in them.” Currently, he said, “we’re estimating the construction cost somewhere around $16 million,” he said. According to him, this is a very high-level estimation and is subject to change by 20 percent in either direction. To help offset the expected costs, the LCRA received an $8 million federal partnership award. However, this grant comes with strings. Before construction can begin, the project is required to complete a watershed plan, which Hofmann explained is a “significant undertaking.” Nevertheless, with the engineering and design help of AECOM, Hofmann was confident that the reservoir would be up and running by the planned 2022 date.