Thanks Sam for suggestion & encouragement! 
I had minimal time yesterday, so I just had a chance to minor modify your instructed command line to make sure it worked on loading weights into models (I tested on colab)
!gsutil -m cp -r gs://t5-data/pretrained_models/cbqa/t5.1.1.small_ssm_nq .
!python transformers/src/transformers/convert_t5_original_tf_checkpoint_to_pytorch.py --tf_checkpoint_path t5.1.1.small_ssm_nq/model.ckpt-1110000  --pytorch_dump_path t5.1.1.small_ssm_nq  --config_file t5-small-config.json

UPDATED:
I just realized that the newly shared T5 weights have minor different config than the original as it based on T5.1.1 here 6 .
Therefore, weights cannot convert directly due to architecture different between original T5 and T5.1.1
And the moment, I could not modify T5 config file on T5.1.1
UPDATED 2: Okay, I found an ongoing progress 22 by Patrick in our own HF github about T5.1.1 :