The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved the final discharge permit for the Harbor Island desalination plant on Sept. 23, two days before a Corpus Christi lawmaker told a Texas Tribune Festival audience that seawater desalination is a key issue for the next legislative session.
The seven people who oversee every public pension plan in Texas meet Sept. 30 to vote on rules that change how the state decides whether a struggling local retirement fund is back on track.
Waco and Corpus Christi both started new budget years on Oct. 1.
For years, a half-acre lot outside Converse, in northeast Bexar County, disappeared under trash — mattresses, a couch, a barbecue pit and truckloads of other debris that kept arriving no matter how many times neighbors complained.
Farms, factories and city water systems that pump from the Edwards Aquifer must cut their withdrawals by 35 percent after the aquifer's key monitoring well dropped below 640 feet, six weeks after the region had climbed out of the same drought stage.
The board that runs retirement for more than 940 Texas cities meets Sept. 24 to settle what, if anything, it will ask the Legislature for in 2027.
Texas cities are holding $633 million in local hotel tax money they have collected but not spent, a comptroller's official told the Senate Committee on Economic Development Sept. 22.
The Austin City Council will meet Sept. 24 with four contract amendments on its consent agenda that would add $854,872 to the city's payments to two nonprofits that provide immigration legal services, including what the city's own contract history calls "deportation defense." The vote comes four days after a federal immigration agent shot a 28-year-old Venezuelan delivery driver in North Austin, an incident that has produced two sharply different accounts of what happened, a federal investigation, calls from the mayor and most of the council for an independent inquiry, and a habeas corpus petition in federal court.
Dallas adopted a $5.97 billion budget on Sept. 16 that leaves in place a program mounting cameras on city garbage trucks to photograph houses along their routes and rate them for blight.
Texas local governments owe $552 billion in debt service, and $330 billion of that is principal.