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ODESSA (AP) — To cope with a growing population and increasing demand for water, a popular resort and residential complex in Terlingua told its residents that it would limit water sales.

The eight-member board overseeing 200,000 acres of privately owned land and short-term rentals called Terlingua Ranch Lodge — about 70 miles from the Big Bend National Park — sells drinking and nondrinking water to permanent residents. Many rely on the association for their monthly supply.

But for the first time starting in September, the board will reduce the amount of nondrinking water residents can purchase monthly if the well water levels begin to drop. Board members hope to avoid running out of water again, as in 2018 when one of the ranch’s five wells dried up.

“We’ve created a dependency,” Larry Sunderland, the association’s water committee chair, told The Texas Tribune last June. Sunderland said then that residents shouldn’t rely on the ranch wells because they weren’t drilled to sustain the ranch’s existing population and accommodate tourists.

The water scarcity in this West Texas village is a microcosm of the state’s own water crisis. Texas’ booming population is straining water systems and supplies, and the state is only beginning to meet the demand. The Texas Water Development Board, which manages the state’s supply, began distributing $1 billion in taxpayer-approved dollars for urgent projects addressing those needs. In Terlingua, this is the first step to conserving water and the start to understanding how much water flows underneath them.

“Everything is a guess at this point,” Sunderland said of the water coming out of the well, adding that the technology will help property owners manage their water needs by knowing how much water the board has available.

Dues-paying property owners can purchase a set amount of water monthly. The association’s charter says they can purchase 1,000 gallons of nondrinking water monthly. Each gallon costs 10 cents — $50 if they take the full amount. Property owners can get up to 25 gallons of free drinkable water every week. Anything above that is 25 cents per gallon.

Its unclear how much water these new limits will save. More than 5,000 people own property on the ranch. But most don’t live there, and the number of full-time residents changes frequently.

The ranch does not sell water to tourists. It will not issue limits for tourists who book short-term rental cabins and use the water.

Additional restriction may be possible based on water levels. The board, which owns five water wells, begin monitoring the wells using sounding tubes.

The board will use a 0-4 rating system to measure the health of its wells. At 0, sales will be normal. At 1, the ranch will begin reducing water sales by 20%, to 800 gallons monthly. At 2 it will cut water sales by 50%. At 3, its second highest status, the board will cut 75% of the water it sells to just 125 gallons. And at 4, the highest rating, the ranch will stop selling water altogether until the well recovers.

Scientists, regulators and local officials are just beginning to uncover precisely how much water is beneath the soil in Terlingua. The Water Development Board has no precise map of the body of water, called an aquifer, in South Brewster County, where Terlingua sits.

The equipment monitoring the stages of the well will offer a glimpse. Sounding tubes detect the elevation levels of a water well. When the tube reaches water, the tube pulses, indicating the water level, said Kevin Urbanczyk, a professor of geology at Sul Ross University and board member of the Brewster County Groundwater Conservation District.

The board will use the sounding tube at the start of each month and publish the results on its website.

Urbanczyk said the sounding tubes provide limited information about the water that rises to the surface. Obtaining comprehensive data about the bed of water even further below requires a team of scientists, engineers, and funding — a time-consuming and expensive process. He said the conservation district has partnered with the ranch to study the available data. He plans to solicit funding and help from the Water Development Board in the future.

“Their wells are limited in their capacity, and they’re trying to put Band-Aids on it,” he said. “And with that increasing population, I’m not surprised at all. I think that a conservation mindset is a really good step in the right direction for that.”

FORT WORTH – The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that Fox News personality Maria Bartiromo caused a stir when she posted on social media Sunday that Democrats were registering immigrants to vote at several sites in Fort Worth and Weatherford. “From a friend …,” the post on X begins. “Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license. Couldn’t get an online appointment(all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote!” The post goes on to claim that the friend’s wife (or friend of a friend’s wife — it’s unclear) saw the same thing occurring at two Department of Motor Vehicles locations in Fort Worth. It does not specify when the alleged registration activities occurred.

While Bartiromo herself did not say the word “illegal,” her followers did not hesitate to make that assumption. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “Why are Democrats setting up voter registration tables outside DMV’s and registering illegal immigrants to vote?!,” said a person whose account is named Mary M33. “This is happening in Tarrant County and you can bet it’s happening across the state.” Several other commenters took Bartiromo to mean noncitizens, as well. But, is there any truth behind the claim? Bartiromo’s statement was “simply false,” according to Sgt. William Lockridge, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety. Contrary to Bartiromo’s friend’s wife’s account, there is no office for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles in Weatherford. Folks there get their licenses at a DPS Driver License office. Still, no such tent and table were set up outside the office last week. “None of it is true,” Lockridge said, adding that the assumption that non-white Texans lined up to get their driver licenses are immigrants or illegal is “kind of racist.” “Just because these people aren’t white, that doesn’t mean they’re illegal,” he said. There was a table set outside the DPS Driver License office in Lake Worth on Friday, Lockridge said, but not at the other two sites mentioned in Bartiromo’s post. The Tarrant County Democratic Party did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French replied to Bartilomo’s post suggesting she invite him onto her show “to discuss.”

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports Sarah Malik used to think Houston ISD’s Lantrip Elementary School was a great fit for her daughter. But after the state takeover of the district in June 2023, Malik said the environmental science magnet school in Eastwood, which they loved for the tenured teachers and welcoming community, began to change. Her child’s art teacher was reassigned, and students were discouraged from reading books after finishing their work, she said. After the school’s principal and several teachers departed in the spring, Malik knew they had to go. Her daughter is now enrolled in The Kipling School, a private campus. “We were blindsided all year with the changes that were happening,” Malik said.

Malik is one of thousands of parents who pulled their child from HISD this year. Several told the Chronicle they were leaving the district due to the stringent reforms, plummeting morale, principal and teacher departures or cookie-cutter lessons that they said did not account for a child’s individual learning needs during the previous academic year. “I don’t want to risk another year of her being frustrated with learning,” Malik said. HISD’s reported “membership,” or the number of students enrolled in the district on a specific day, was about 170,800 on Thursday, down by about 9,000 students, or 5%, compared to the fourth day of school last year, according to district data. The early data, however, does not reflect the official enrollment count of the state’s largest school district. The district’s official enrollment will not be finalized until Oct. 25, but it appears to be on track to drop below 180,000 students this year. It reported an enrollment of about 184,000 students last year, and budget documents project enrollment to drop to about 179,600 this year, which would be its lowest enrollment in at least a decade.

(ABC) HOUSTON – A fire that ripped through a home on Sunday in suburban Houston is being investigated as a triple homicide after investigators found evidence that three people discovered dead inside the residence were killed before the blaze started, authorities said.

The fire at the two-story brick home in Cypress, Texas, northwest of Houston, was reported Sunday morning, and while extinguishing the blaze, firefighters made the grim discovery of the three bodies inside and investigators found evidence of foul play, according to Sgt. Michael Ritchie of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.

The remains found inside the house were those of a mother, her adult son and his girlfriend, Ritchie said during a news conference outside the burned home on Sunday afternoon.

The victims were identified Monday afternoon by the sheriff’s office as 54-year-old Kelly Ann Masciarelli, her 23-year-old son, Kolin Paul Foster, and his girlfriend Cameryn Richards, whose age was not released.

“These individuals look like they were deceased before the fire was started. So, this is definitely a homicide, not accidental death due to fire and smoke,” Richie said.

The fire broke out around 7 a.m. at the home, which sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, prompting neighbors to call 911, the sheriff’s office said in a statement Monday.

“Once firefighters went inside, they immediately located an adult female and removed her from the house into the front yard,” according to the statement. “Once the fire was extinguished, two more bodies were discovered upstairs.”

All three victims were pronounced dead at the scene, officials said.

It remained unclear Monday if anyone else had been staying at the home, officials said.

Richie said trauma on the bodies noticed by firefighters and paramedics led investigators to launch a homicide investigation. He said investigators are waiting for autopsies to determine the exact cause of death.

Before entering the home, homicide investigators obtained a search warrant. The home also needed to be inspected to ensure the fire was completely out and it was safe to go inside, officials said.

Arson investigators advised the sheriff’s office that the blaze looked to have been deliberately started by an accelerant, officials said.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen this before in homicides where an individual will commit murder and then try to set a fire inside the home to cover their tracks,” Richie said.

No arrests have been announced in the incident. But Richie said investigators are pursuing several leads.

“We are reviewing some video that we’ve been able to recover,” Richie said. “We are looking for some possible suspects.”

SANTA FE (AP) – The parents of a former student accused of killing 10 people at a high school near Houston in 2018 do not bear financial responsibility for the shooting, a jury decided Monday.

A lawsuit brought by victims and their families sought to hold Dimitrios Pagourtzis and his parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, accountable for the shooting at Santa Fe High School in 2018. During a three-week trial, attorneys for the families argued the parents failed to provide necessary support for their son’s mental health and didn’t do enough to prevent him from accessing their guns.

Jurors instead put the responsibility with Dimitrios Pagourtzis and a firearms ammunition retailer in a verdict that awarded families more than $300 million total in damages, including for pain and mental anguish.

Attorneys for the families said they were disappointed in the outcome.

“We’ve would’ve liked to have the parents share in their responsibility for this,” said Clint McGuire, who represented several of the families.

Authorities say Pagourtzis fatally shot eight students and two teachers. Pagourtzis, now 23, has been charged with capital murder, but the criminal case has been on hold since November 2019, when he was declared incompetent to stand trial. He is being held at a state mental health facility.

In April, Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison by a Michigan judge after becoming the first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. Pagourtzis’ parents are not accused of any crime.

The lawsuit was filed by relatives of seven of the people killed and four of the 13 who were wounded in the Santa Fe attack.

The jury also assigned some responsibility to Lucky Gunner, a Tennessee-based online retailer that sold Dimitrios Pagourtzis more than 100 rounds of ammunition without verifying his age and reached a settlement with the families last year. The company had previously been a defendant in the lawsuit.

Jake Felde, CEO of Lucky Gunner, said in a statement that the company isn’t responsible for any of the damages awarded by the jury because it was dismissed from the lawsuit.

“Lucky Gunner wasn’t a party to the trial, so it was easy for the jury to place some of the blame on us because we weren’t there to defend ourselves,” Felde said.

The attorney representing Pagourtzis told jurors that while his client did plan the shooting, he was never in control of his actions because of his severe mental illness.

McGuire said the parents knew their son was depressed, receiving bad grades, isolating himself, and had taken weapons from their gun cabinet and safe. McGuire said Pagourtzis also wrote disturbing Facebook posts and ordered ammunition and other items online, such as a knife with a Nazi symbol and a T-shirt that said, “Born To Kill.”

But Lori Laird, an attorney for Pagourtzis’ parents, told jurors that the couple hadn’t seen any red flags, knew nothing of his online purchases and didn’t know any of their weapons were missing.

“We need to protect our children. They need to feel safe when they go to school,” Galveston County Court at Law Judge Jack Ewing said after the verdict was delivered. “They need to feel safe at home. And that message will carry even outside of the walls and the doors of this courtroom. And hopefully it will follow into the ears of our legislators.”

Both parents testified during the trial. Antonios Pagourtzis is retired but worked for years in ship maintenance and repair. Kosmetatos works as an executive assistant at an academic health science center in Galveston.

Kosmetatos told jurors that while her son became more introverted as he grew older, he was a bright and normal child with no significant issues. She acknowledged that he “wasn’t himself” in the months leading up to the shooting but she had hoped it would pass.

Antonios Pagourtzis testified that he wasn’t aware that his son was feeling rejected and ostracized at school, or that he might have been depressed.

The family stored firearms in a gun safe in the garage and a display cabinet in the living room. Dimitrios Pagourtzis used his mother’s .38 caliber handgun and one of his father’s shotguns during the shooting. Whether he got the weapons from the safe or cabinet, and where he found the keys, were among points debated during the trial.

“You can’t secure anything 100%,” Antonios Pagourtzis said.

Similar lawsuits have been filed following other mass shootings.

In 2022, a jury awarded over $200 million to the mother of one of four people killed in a shooting at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee. The lawsuit was filed against the shooter and his father, who was accused of returning a rifle to his son before the shooting despite the son’s mental health issues.

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Yamat reported from Las Vegas. Associated Press writer Juan A. Lozano in Houston contributed to this report.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) – For years, Carmen Cavazos’ neighborhood in southeast Houston has voted reliably for Democrats up and down the ballot. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 68% of the vote in Cavazos’ voting precinct, a mostly residential enclave of about 3,000 people near Hobby Airport.

But something is changing in the precinct, where about nine out of 10 residents are Hispanic. President Joe Biden carried it by 20 points in his 2020 race against Donald Trump — a solid showing for Democrats, but half of Clinton’s 40-point advantage from just four years earlier against the same Republican.

Cavazos, a 44-year-old flight attendant and Republican precinct chair, said she expects the trend to continue in November. She has been trying to accelerate the political shift, helping organize regular meetings of the Saturday Menudo Club, a group that meets monthly at local Mexican restaurants to hear from conservative candidates and other speakers.

“The messaging and voter engagement in our community is critically important,” Cavazos said. “When presented with data, facts, and statistics, the false narrative of identity politics and ideology propaganda encouraged by Democrats crumbles.”

Republicans have logged historic gains in South Texas the last couple of elections, making political battlegrounds out of border communities that voted solidly Democratic for years. That sea change has largely overshadowed the more subtle rightward shift of Latino voters in cities and suburbs away from the border.

The threat of eroding Latino support in urban areas could spell even bigger trouble for Democrats’ abiding hopes of turning Texas blue, because far more Latino voters live in these areas than in South Texas. While Democrats may not lose precincts like Cavazos’ anytime soon, they will continue to be locked out of statewide elections if Republicans are able to continue peeling off nearly 40% of the vote there.

Latino voters have long been a steady Democratic voting bloc in Texas. In 2016, exit polls measured Clinton winning Latino voters by a 27-point margin statewide — virtually unchanged from Barack Obama’s 28-point edge in 2008.

But in 2020, Biden won the statewide Latino vote by only 17 points, as about four in 10 Latinos pulled the lever for Trump. Across Texas, including in Houston, San Antonio and other big cities, the Democratic margin fell an average of 17 percentage points from 2016 in precincts that were at least 80% Latino, according to The New York Times.

And heading into November, polls in Texas and elsewhere have shown Democrats atop the ticket still underperforming with Latino voters, with Biden even trailing Trump among Latinos in Texas before he dropped out of the race.

“Latinos are still a growing Democratic majority,” said Houston Democratic strategist Jaime Mercado. “Latinos are voting Democratic holistically, across the county and across the state. But we should be very aware of these precincts where we’re starting to see something go in the other direction. That should concern us, and we should engage in it.”

Republicans bullish
Texas Republicans are bullish about continuing their momentum with Latino voters this fall, betting a message focused on inflation and the economy, immigration, and crime — issues they are talking about with voters across the board — will resonate with Latinos.

In his reelection bid, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, is pouring $4.4 million into an ad campaign targeting Latino voters, a majority of which is going toward Spanish-language advertising. Cruz’s first spot aimed at Latinos — titled “El Valiente Senador,” or “The Brave Senator” in English — portrays him as a fighter battling high taxes and working to keep Texas “free and safe.”

“We see a massive opportunity to win a bigger share of the Hispanic vote,” said Cruz campaign spokesperson Macarena Martinez. “It has long been said that Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.”

This election is the first since the U.S. Census Bureau reported Hispanic Texans now outnumber the state’s non-Hispanic white residents. Hispanics make up nearly one-third of Texas’ eligible voting population, more than all but two other states, according to the Pew Research Center. A quarter of Latinos in Texas will be voting in their first presidential election this fall, according to the nonprofit UnidosUS.

“That means that there’s no traditional legacy of them wanting to vote Democrat or Republican,” said Jorge Martinez, the Texas strategic director for the LIBRE Initiative, a conservative Latino voter outreach group. “They are going to be voters that any side can reach out to to earn that vote.”

Robert Cardenas, outreach director for the Harris County Republican Party, said he has found a receptive audience among Hispanic voters at party-sponsored town hall events focused on crime and in settings like a recent gun show in Pasadena, where the party operated a booth where attendees could register to vote.

Most of all, Cardenas said, concerns about the inflated cost of basic goods are driving Latinos, and working-class voters of all races and ethnicities, toward the Republican Party. The issue has dogged Biden for much of his term, though Democrats are optimistic that the problem has finally begun to ease.

“Whether that’s going out, or being able to pay their bills, that is what is affecting them,” Cardenas said. “It’s the economy, and that’s why I think we’re seeing a big shift.”

In a statewide poll by Univision earlier this year, about two-thirds of undecided Latino voters put inflation, the cost of living and jobs among their top issues, more than all other topics.

Mercado said he worries that overall Democratic messaging has suffered in recent years from the influence of party elites who have spent too much time online and not enough time door-knocking. They have helped craft a message overly focused on identity politics and less on talking about jobs and opportunity, he said.

“Some of the elements of, frankly, the MAGA message, some of it has endeared itself to blue-collar, hard-working, non-college educated people,” Mercado said. “And guess who fits those demographics really well? Latino populations.”

For all the GOP gains among Latinos in urban areas, though, some Republicans think their party can do better. In urban counties across Texas, most predominantly Latino areas still lean solidly Democratic. And many of the voting precincts in these areas lack GOP precinct chairs — an issue that rankles Orlando Sanchez, founder of Texas Latino Conservatives.

Sanchez, whose group works to get Latinos more involved in politics, said that if he had to grade Texas Republicans’ recent Latino outreach efforts in urban counties, “I’d say it went from a D to a C-minus.”

“In major urban areas, we’re doing a very poor job of delivering a conservative message,” said Sanchez, a former Houston City Council member and mayoral candidate. “(Republicans) are good at criticizing communities that want to defund the police … but they’re not very good at delivering a positive message of economic opportunity to Hispanics.”

Sanchez believes Republicans should more aggressively pitch their free-market economic vision to working-class Latinos, and he said they have missed the boat on criticizing specific policies pushed by the Biden administration such as debt relief for student loans.

“Republicans are missing the opportunity to explain to Hispanics that their hard-earned paycheck is now going to pay the debt for some kid in Massachusetts who went and got a liberal arts degree at Boston University,” Sanchez said. “Explain that to the Hispanic family, and I’ll tell you, they’re not going to vote for the Democrats anymore.”

The Univision poll found that 60% of Hispanic voters in Texas “support the Biden Administration’s efforts to forgive student loans,” compared to 21% who voiced opposition.

“The Latino vote”
In 2020, some of the most astonishing political shifts anywhere in the country came along the border in Starr County, which Trump lost by 5 points after losing it by 60 points four years earlier. Neighboring Zapata County flipped red after going to Clinton by 33 points in 2016.

But while a flood of national media attention captured the changing voter sentiments there, the two predominantly Latino counties tallied only about 21,000 combined votes in 2020; in Harris County, by contrast, more than 337,000 Spanish-surname voters turned out, according to estimates from Hector de Léon, a Harris County elections official who tracks Houston-area voting patterns.

Public polling has revealed key differences between the values and attitudes of Latino voters in urban counties compared to those in South Texas — a reminder of the wide array of backgrounds, nationalities, and religious and cultural beliefs within what is often lumped together as “the Latino vote.”

An April statewide poll by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation found that Hispanic voters in major urban areas were much less likely to support GOP Gov. Greg Abbott ’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border than those in the suburbs and South Texas. The poll measured a similar regional split over the multibillion-dollar cost of Abbott’s border crackdown: 70% of Hispanic voters in border counties and South Texas supported the use of billions in state tax dollars for border security, compared to 48% in large urban counties.

Latinos in major cities are also more likely to support abortion rights than those in South Texas, the poll found. The regional disparities suggest that each party’s generic messaging on those issues will be received much differently by Latino voters depending on where they live, said Mark Jones, the Hispanic Policy Foundation’s chief information and analytics officer.

“A lot of the national Democratic policies that criticize Gov. Abbott, and sort of criticize the Republican approach to the border, are going to go over very poorly in South Texas and the (Rio Grande Valley) and, most importantly, in the two congressional races that are actually in play this cycle,” said Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, referring to the battleground races for Texas’ 15th and 34th Congressional Districts.

But there are also parallels between the regions.

Daniel Vasquez, a 35-year-old San Juan resident, regularly makes the three-hour commute to his job as a safety coordinator at a Port Lavaca refinery. He said he started paying attention to politics during Obama’s 2008 campaign and voted for him twice, along with Clinton in 2016. But he found himself aligning more with the Republican Party midway through Trump’s term, driven by a humming economy and the GOP’s petrochemical-friendly policies.

Energy politics may also be driving some of the Latino shift around Houston. Dozens of predominantly Latino precincts in east Harris County, where many residents work in petrochemical jobs around the Ship Channel, drifted to the right between 2016 and 2020.

Vasquez’s views were only solidified, he said, by some of the Biden administration’s policies aimed at combating climate change, such as an attempted pause on natural gas export permits. Vasquez said he believes environmental concerns are important, but that Biden should be striking a better balance.

“The economy, to me, it was thriving,” Vasquez said. “My paycheck had more purchasing power. And I mean, there was work all across the state. The oil and gas sector was booming.”