Community Colleges Beat the State’s Targets, Then Watched the Money Get Prorated
Texas community colleges hit the performance targets lawmakers set for them, and the state paid out less than the formula promised.
Texas community colleges hit the performance targets lawmakers set for them, and the state paid out less than the formula promised.
The federal government's statistical agency for energy has cut its forecast of how fast Texas electricity demand will grow next year from 14 percent to 6 percent, and it named a single cause: Gov. Greg Abbott's Aug. 3 decision to pause new data center development in the state.
Rep. Pat Curry spent much of the House Transportation Committee's Aug. 17 interim hearing asking a question that no state agency wants asked out loud: why does the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles exist?
Drought expanded across nearly eight percent of Texas in a single week, and the most severe category on the federal scale returned to the Panhandle after a five-week absence — even as the state's reservoirs, refilled by July flooding, remain about three-quarters full.
Federal animal health officials have confirmed a case of New World screwworm in a sheep in Val Verde County, the first detection reported anywhere in the United States since Aug. 5 and the first in that county since the outbreak began.
Harris County commissioners meet in special session at 9 a.m. Aug. 17 to take up proposed budgets and tax rates that one member has already called the largest increase in the county's history — four days after Tarrant County commissioners were handed a recommendation to cut their rate for a fourth straight year.
Texas health officials have proposed letting the state take Medicaid payment room that some hospitals do not use and hand it to other hospitals in the same category, in a rule change open for public comment only until 11:59 p.m. Aug. 21.
The bottles Americans put in a curbside bin were worth noticeably less in August than they were in July, according to pricing figures published Aug. 17 by the trade publication Resource Recycling — the second month of decline after a spring price surge that traders now describe as an overreaction.
Texas school districts have until 5 p.m. Aug. 17 to place a tax-rate increase or a bond package on the Nov. 3 ballot, and over the past week several of the state's largest districts have done exactly that — the first broad test of whether voters will pay more for schools one year into the Legislature's rewrite of the school funding formulas.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas has called a special meeting for Aug. 21 devoted entirely to two of the giant power lines proposed to carry electricity out of the Permian Basin, and has moved it out of its own hearing room to a hotel ballroom across town.