Headlines / Quote of the Week
Fri., April 11, 2025
Here Comes the Deficit: The city’s budget analysts delivered the bad news to City Council on April 7 that a budget shortfall is approaching. The Austin Monitor reports that the city expects to begin Fiscal Year 2026 with a $33 million shortfall that could grow to $79.9 million by FY 2030. Property tax caps imposed by the Texas Legislature are mostly to blame, city officials said, but projected declines in overall property values throughout Travis County aren’t helping either.
The ARPA Cliff: Meanwhile, federal stimulus money doled out via the American Rescue Plan Act has been fully spent or earmarked, according to the Austin Monitor. City officials will have to find local dollars to continue funding the programs ARPA has paid for – or risk losing them. Homelessness services will be hardest hit, officials said, but career training programs and other public health services are also expected to be at risk.
Public Health Funds Hit: It’s not just the loss of federal stimulus money hampering the city, the Austin Monitor reports. Austin Public Health officials briefed City Council’s Public Health Committee, April 7, on the loss of about $15 million in federal grants. APH warned that more cuts could be coming and that programs aimed at screening refugees, promoting tobacco cessation, and offering information on diabetes care could all be affected.
The stupidity and disruption is the point: Last month, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state employees with hybrid work schedules to return to the office five days a week, despite a recent study by the Legislative Budget Board which found that remote work is helping state agencies recruit and retain employees. Meanwhile, in the first week of the Texas Department of Transportation’s return-to-office mandate, employees couldn’t find enough parking and were forced to park in the fire lane.
Paxton vs. Cornyn: Ken Paxton – Texas’ formerly indicted, impeached, and actively disliked attorney general – has formally announced a bid for the United States Senate in 2026, The Texas Tribune reports. He’ll take on John Cornyn, the state’s senior senator who is in his fourth term on the job, in the GOP primary which is now officially underway. The Tribune reports the contest promises to be “among the most heated and expensive Republican primaries in the country and in recent Texas history.” It will highlight the power struggle between the Texas GOP’s hard-line, farther-right wing – which has Paxton on a pedestal – and the Cornyn-ian, more traditional business-focused faction of the Texas Republican party.
Toy Shop Trouble: There will be an avalanche of stories like this one in coming months. The owners of Austin’s Toy Joy, the beloved toy shop that curates weird and wonderful gifts and novelties, is worried about what Trump’s tariffs will do to its business. Many of its products come from Asian countries that have been hit with tariffs from 24-54%. “We have to maybe kill some product lines because no one’s going to want to spend $12 for a bag of Japanese potato chips,” Robby Pettinato, Toy Joy’s CEO, told KUT News.
Trump Backs Down on Tariffs, For Now: Stocks surged Wednesday after Trump announced a 90-day delay on tariffs for most of the world. The New York Times reports that the S&P 500 climbed more than 7% in a few minutes after Trump’s Truth Social post announcing the delay, and that jump sharply reversed days of losses. Still, the index was about 12% below its recent high in February. And, by the way, China’s tariffs will not be among those delayed. Instead, he upped the tariffs on its exports to 125% after Beijing announced a new retaliation.
Central Texas Gardener Mainstay Passes: Tom Spencer, known for hosting PBS show Central Texas Gardener and inspiring countless Austinites to nurture a green thumb, died on April 2, nearly six years after suffering a debilitating stroke. The weekly show made him a local celebrity, but he had an illustrious career beyond that, interviewing local leaders on Austin at Issue, producing documentary films, and leading several philanthropic organizations in the Austin area, including I Live Here, I Give Here and TreeFolks, which granted him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023 for his environmental contributions.
They Live!: Apparently the scientists at Texas biotech firm Colossal Biosciences are bigger Game of Thrones fans than Jurassic Park fans, because they ignored warnings from the latter film and revived dire wolves, the animals that have been extinct for 12,000 years and were featured prominently in the hit HBO show. Per NPR, Colossal engineers used gene editing tools to combine the DNA of a gray wolf with the DNA from a 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull to make “healthy dire wolf puppies.” Some scientists are skeptical. One biologist told KUT, “It is not a dire wolf; it is a gray wolf clone with some mutations that make it superficially resemble a dire wolf.”
Immigrants Arrested: Minors are in the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang? Might sound like bullshit but that’s what state police and the Hays County Sheriff’s Office said when they arrested 40 people at a residence west of Austin last week. Social justice advocates Mano Amiga condemned the arrests, saying that similar operations have detained law-abiding workers and torn families apart. “Mano Amiga stands with those impacted and calls for due process, transparency, accountability, and support for affected families,” the group said in a statement.
15 A&M Students Suddenly Lose Legal Status: Fifteen international students at Texas A&M University may not be allowed to stay in the U.S. legally after their immigration status mysteriously changed in a federal database, per The Texas Tribune. The Tribune reported that it is unclear why the federal government revoked the Aggies’ ability to stay in the country legally but a university official said the university wasn’t aware of any offenses committed by the students. A spokesperson said one of the students has already left the country. At least eight of them are currently enrolled and and at least three already graduated.
Vaccine Hesitance: His reckless, dangerous activism has encouraged a distrust of vaccines, but that didn’t stop Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. from traveling to West Texas on Sunday to attend the funeral of an 8-year-old girl who died of measles last week. “My intention was to come down here quietly to console the families,” Kennedy said. He added, “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the M.M.R. vaccine,” referring to the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, which he has previously insinuated causes autism, though that claim has long been debunked by research. Meanwhile, Texas’ measles case count has risen to 505, The Texas Tribune reports. Most of those reported cases since January – 328 – were in Gaines County, a little over an hour southwest of Lubbock on the New Mexico border.
Sucking Up Carbon: Carbon experts speculated at the recent SXSW Conference that old-school oil companies will be major players in the emerging carbon capture industry. Sure enough, this week the EPA approved an application from Occidental Petroleum Corporation, a Houston-based oil firm, to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and inject it into deep rock formations underground. The operation will be located 20 miles south of Odessa, in the heart of Texas’ oil well country. Climate scientists warn that carbon capture is, at best, a strategy to mitigate those carbon releases that can’t be avoided, like air travel and transport.
What Makes a School Good: A bunch of public schools across Texas that are, in actuality, doing a good job of educating our kids are about to be painted as low-performing. On Tuesday, a state appeals court ruled that the Texas Education Agency can release its 2023 ratings of the state’s school districts, overturning a lower court injunction in a lawsuit challenging the legality of TEA’s accountability system. The lawsuit argues that TEA’s sudden revision in 2023 of its grading system violated the law, an argument rejected by Republicans on the newly created 15th Court of Appeals. According to the new standards, high schools will only receive an A grade if 88% of their seniors enroll in college or pursue particular careers. The previous benchmark was 60%. Education advocates predict that ratings for schools across the state will arbitrarily plummet.
Abbott Drags Feet on Special Election: Gov. Greg Abbott has set a date of Nov. 4 for the special election to fill a Houston-area congressional seat vacated by Sylvester Turner, who died last month. The delayed election date means the seat will remain empty for months, which is a gift from Abbott to Republicans on Capitol Hill, The Texas Tribune reports, because they hold a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and will have one less Democratic vote to account for now. House Democrats have threatened to sue Abbott.
... But Blames Harris County: Of course, Abbott doesn’t put it that way. As the Houston Chronicle reported this week, “Abbott went into full political mode,” saying Harris County election officials have been running elections wrong. Abbott said, “No county in Texas does a worse job of conducting elections than Harris County. They repeatedly fail to conduct elections consistent with state law.” Abbott says he’s giving the county “sufficient time to prepare for such an important election.”
Air Pollution Backsliding: The Atlantic turned attention this week to air pollution, a major factor in respiratory illness and linked to depression and other ailments. The Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration has announced that it is going for a series of rollbacks of environmental rules, including a Joe Biden-era update to standards for air quality intended to ratchet up until 2032 and that the Biden EPA projected would, in a single year, prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma. Those health benefits would amount to $46 billion in savings, the administration estimated.
Texas Wealthy Under the Microscope: Announced this week, several major journalism powerhouses in Texas and nationally will join together for an investigation into “how the powerful in Texas wield their influence in collaboration.” Over the next year, the five selected newsrooms – The Houston Chronicle, El Paso Matters, Fort Worth Report, The Texas Newsroom and WFAA – will join ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. “Local newsrooms are primed to deliver accountability reporting because they intimately know the communities they cover,” said ProPublica investigative unit’s Vianna Davila. “We hope to facilitate even more of that reporting at a critical time in Texas.”
The Show Does Not Go On: Eagle Pass’ Shelby Park, which was theatrically taken over by the state of Texas last year by Gov. Greg Abbott, was quietly reopened this week. The 47-acre park on the banks of the Rio Grande served as a staging area for DPS troopers and the Texas National Guard for over a year, despite the disapproval of Eagle Pass officials and many of its residents.
Quote of the Week
“We are an evolutionary force at this point. We are deciding what the future of these species will be.”
– Beth Shapiro, chief science officer of the Texas bio-firm Colossal, speaking of humanity’s de-extinction efforts
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