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FORT WORTH – The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that just over a week before Election Day, some Texas residents showing support for Vice President Kamala Harris are receiving threatening notes, authorities say. The San Marcos Police Department said Oct. 26 it received two reports of threatening flyers left on political signs. The next day, officers said they recovered more notes that threaten supporters of the Democratic presidential candidate. “YOU have been identified and are now in our National Database of miscreant Harris supporters, either by social interactions with your neighbors who are on our investigations team, or by yard signs, or vehicle bumper stickers,” the typed note read.

“Rather than the hangman’s nooses of the old days, you are now guaranteed that once the magnificent Donald Trump assumes the Presidency again YOU will be IRS tax audited going all the way back to your very first tax return – and at a minimum – 4 years of painful misery and attorney’s fees.” The flyers were signed by The Grand Dragon of Trump Klan #124 in San Marcos. The Grand Dragon, according to the Bullock Museum, is the highest-ranking Ku Klux Klan official in Texas. Police have not confirmed if the flyers are connected to the KKK. Officers said they are investigating who is responsible for leaving the notes. Officers said anyone who receives one of these flyers should call the department’s non-emergency number at 512-753-2108. “It’s a crime in the state of Texas to try to influence or coerce or even prevent a voter from voting,” San Marcos Police Chief Stan Standridge said. “When we identify the suspect or suspects, then we will present that to the district attorney’s office for consideration of applicable charges.”

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports that Attorney General Ken Paxton accused Republican Rep. Jeff Leach on Monday of making unethical contact with a Court of Criminal Appeals judge in the Robert Roberson case. In a filing Monday, Deputy Solicitor General William Cole reported the correspondence to the Texas Supreme Court, which blocked Roberson’s Oct. 17 execution after the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee issued a subpoena compelling the death row inmate to testify at a Capitol hearing four days after his scheduled lethal injection. In a notice sent to lawyers in Roberson’s case, the appeals court said Leach had contacted an unnamed judge by text message to urge reconsideration of Roberson’s case. The state’s highest criminal court has rejected several requests for a new trial for Roberson, who argues his conviction was improperly based on a now-discredited theory of shaken baby syndrome. The notice from Sian Schilhab, the Court of Criminal Appeals general counsel, said the judge promptly reported the contact.

The court, Schilhab added, viewed Leach’s contact as a “clear violation” of professional conduct rules for lawyers. The Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit lawyers from any communication outside official channels that seek to influence a judge on a pending matter. Leach has been a licensed lawyer in Texas since 2009, according to the State Bar of Texas. In text messages detailed in Schilhab’s notice, Leach told the judge he struggled with whether and how to “send you this message legally and ethically.” But he felt compelled to do so, he said, noting he has spoken publicly about the case and is neither a party to any active litigation before the court nor representing any party as an attorney. “One Judge,” Leach wrote. “That’s all that is needed to simply say … there are too many questions and too many holes and too much uncertainty … and Robert Roberson deserves a new trial.” Leach called it “my hope and prayer” that the judge would voluntarily speak out to get Roberson a new trial. “Only sending this message to you,” Leach added. “And you alone.” “As my friend and as a wonderful Judge who I have so much faith in,” Leach continued, “I hope you’ll consider doing so.” The judge replied: “I cannot consider your message nor may I discuss any pending matters with you. Thank you in advance for your understanding.” Leach responded that he wasn’t aware of any pending matters before the court but acknowledged his “error.” Leach publicly owned his error as well.

ALPINE (AP) — A hiker has been found dead at a national park in Texas after authorities discovered a car had been parked for several days and launched a search and rescue operation, officials said.

The body of the unnamed 24-year-old hiker was discovered in Big Bend National Park in Texas on Monday after an aerial and ground search by National Park Service rangers and U.S. Border Patrol. Supported by helicopters from the Texas Department of Public Safety and U.S. Customs Air and Marine Operations, they found the hiker’s remains along the park’s “rugged” Marufo Vega Trail, according to a statement from the National Park Service.

“The day before, park rangers observed a vehicle that had been parked for multiple days at the Trailhead for Marufo Vega / Strawhouse / Ore Terminal Trail,” NPS said. “Records indicated that there were no overnight backpackers listed for that area for those nights. A quick search by the park pilot was unable to locate hikers in the area.”

On Monday morning, the park search and rescue team was mobilized across three different trails and air assets were directed to the remote area, authorities said.

“The victim was located along the rugged Marufo Vega Trail. A Department of Public Safety helicopter was utilized to remove the body from the remote area,” NPS said.

The Marufo Vega Trail is a “spectacular yet challenging 14-mile loop that winds through rugged desert and along rocky limestone cliffs. No shade or water makes this trail dangerous during the warmer times of year,” park officials continued. “Even though it is late October, daily temperatures along the Rio Grande and desert areas of Big Bend remain extreme; close to 100 degrees each afternoon. Park Rangers wish to remind all visitors to be aware of the dangers of extreme heat. Hikers should be prepared to carry plenty of water, salty snacks, and to plan on being off desert trails during the heat of the afternoon.”

“Big Bend National Park staff and partners are saddened by this loss,” stated Deputy Superintendent Rick Gupman. “Our entire park family extends condolences to the hiker’s family and friends.”

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The scene was a familiar one at Austin City Hall: The City Council once again was seeking reforms to curb the capital city’s sky-high home prices and rents, and opponents had turned out in force to try to block them.

The central idea behind the reforms: Austin needed a lot more homes and it would have to relax certain city rules to see them built.

On a Thursday in May, more than 150 people signed up to denounce the changes. Among them were homeowners who complained the overhaul would wreck the character of their single-family neighborhoods and anti-gentrification activists who feared it would further displace communities of color.

Such critics — often referred to as NIMBYs, which stands for “not in my backyard” — have long held sway in Austin and other cities. But something was different this time.

As Austin grew and its housing costs soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, a diametrically opposed group of advocates who push cities to allow cheaper and denser housing — known as “yes-in-my-backyard” activists, or YIMBYs — had gained new footing at City Hall. That day at City Council, they showed up in numbers that rivaled their opponents and urged council members to pass the reforms.

By that point, they barely needed to convince anyone. Austin YIMBYs had laid the groundwork for the reforms during the last citywide election, when they successfully backed candidates who vowed to tackle the housing crisis head-on. Those efforts resulted in a YIMBY supermajority on the City Council that includes Mayor Kirk Watson. After hours of testimony that stretched past midnight, council members approved the reforms.

The moment was the capstone of a fledgling but precarious political realignment in Austin, where forces steadfastly opposed to more housing had long used their influence to kill ideas aimed at allowing more places for people to live. That philosophy, YIMBY activists have argued, hamstrung the city from adapting to needs brought on by its robust growth and caused real-world harm.

“If you put your neighborhoods in amber, you’re literally saying ‘people can’t live here,’” said Felicity Maxwell, a board member of the Austin YIMBY group AURA. “We can’t stay like that. There’s no way to make your city freeze. And if you do, there’s a lot of dire economic and social outcomes because of that.”

That reckoning now shows signs of spreading beyond Austin as the state finds itself in the grip of a crisis that has forced many would-be first-time homebuyers out of the market and left tenants paying exorbitant rents.

YIMBY activists in Dallas have pushed local leaders, with mixed results, to embrace the idea that the country’s ninth-largest city should make it easier to build homes besides standalone single-family homes on large lots and big apartment buildings. In cities like El Paso, San Antonio and Fort Worth, policymakers are eyeing ways to add more homes and beat back their housing crises.

As the nation grapples with high housing costs, YIMBY ideas have hit the mainstream and caught the attention of some of the state’s top Republican leaders, like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, as well as Democratic leaders who are increasingly nervous the state’s once-celebrated housing affordability is slipping.

“People ask me, ‘What are the things that worry you the most?’ Usually one of the things I mention is affordability of housing and where we’re going to be in another 5, 10, 15, 20 years. That worries me as much as anything else,” said Comptroller Glenn Hegar, a Republican and the state’s chief treasurer whose office published a report in August embracing the notion that Texas needs more homes to bring down costs.

The housing crisis will only get worse if nothing changes, YIMBY activists argue — but reforms to ease it are far from a sure thing.

Housing is deeply personal. Everyone needs shelter. Owning a home, the most widely accepted engine to build generational wealth, represents the biggest investment most people will make in their lives. Many homeowners don’t want to see their neighborhoods dramatically transformed. In many places, resistance to new development holds strong.

In North Dallas, neighborhood groups recently sought to recall their City Council member over her support for ongoing plans to replace a low-lying, waning shopping center called Pepper Square with shops, restaurants and almost 1,000 apartments. She later opted not to seek reelection, though she said the development fight didn’t influence her decision.

The groups argued in part the redevelopment would clash with nearby single-family neighborhoods. That flummoxed Melissa Kingston, a member of a key city panel that voted in August to advance the proposal. If they don’t want more housing in their single-family neighborhoods, Kingston told them at a recent meeting, that housing needs to go somewhere as the region grows.

“What I’ve heard you all say is, ‘We don’t want it in our neighborhood and we don’t want it anywhere near our neighborhood,’” Kingston said. “That’s not reality. Cities change, and they either change for the better or they change for the worse. But they don’t stay the same.”
A shift in Austin

The state’s housing crisis is effectively a new problem for state and local leaders — mainly because, for the longest time, Texas used to be cheap.

The state’s poorest residents have usually struggled to find housing they can afford, but housing used to be inexpensive and plentiful for middle-class families — especially when compared with Texas’ chief rivals, California and New York. Now the crisis has crept up the income ladder. Worries have begun to percolate that if Texas doesn’t contain housing costs, it could eventually wind up in the same boat as those states — with homes completely out of reach for typical families and residents fleeing for cheaper states.

At the heart of the state’s housing affordability woes lies a deep shortage of homes. Homebuilding lagged as the state’s economy boomed over the past 15 years and millions of new residents moved here. That left Texas, which builds more homes than any other state, with a shortage of 306,000 homes, according to an estimate by housing policy organization Up For Growth.

A growing body of research in recent years shows that stringent local restrictions on what kinds of homes can be built and where, known as zoning regulations, ultimately limit the overall number of homes and thus contribute to higher costs. In Texas cities, standalone single-family homes can be built almost anywhere homes are allowed. But it’s largely illegal to build other kinds of housing like townhomes, duplexes and small-scale apartments in those same places, a Texas Tribune analysis found. And cities set aside comparatively little room elsewhere for those kinds of homes as well as large apartment buildings.

Relaxing those regulations, research shows, helps cities add more homes and contain housing costs.

Austin officials have sought for much of the past decade to update those rules, but longtime homeowners opposed to new housing have often frustrated the city’s biggest efforts. Just before the pandemic, some homeowners convinced a judge to kill a major overhaul of the city’s land development code that would have allowed denser housing.

Then came the pandemic. Housing prices in the Austin region skyrocketed amid record-low interest rates, the rise of remote work and sustained population growth. The typical home in Austin went for more than $500,000. Rents took off, too, rising three times faster between 2019 and 2022 than they did in the three years preceding the pandemic, according to Zillow data.

Austin’s housing crisis had become undeniable. How to solve the problem became a dominant theme in the city’s 2022 elections.

“People just kind of got to this point where they had had enough,” Council Member José “Chito” Vela said. “They just were like, ‘okay, what we were doing on housing for the last 20 years is clearly not working.’”

The council members YIMBYs helped elect passed several reforms aimed at juicing the city’s housing stock.

The most contentious new policies aimed to broaden the kinds of homes that can go in the city’s single-family neighborhoods. Late last year, council members voted to allow up to three housing units in many places previously limited to detached single-family homes.

The council then reduced how much land the city requires single-family homes to sit on, known as a minimum lot size requirement. For more than 80 years, that requirement had sat at 5,750 square feet in much of the city. In May, they reduced it to 1,800. The idea was twofold: allow smaller and cheaper homes and make it possible to build more homes overall. At the same time, they enabled the construction of apartment buildings along the city’s planned light-rail line and closer to existing single-family homes.

Within two years, the council made more sweeping changes to the city’s zoning rules than it had since the Reagan administration. Council members recognized they needed to act fast and make up for lost time, Maxwell said.

“Everything came together so that nobody wanted to say ‘no,’” said Maxwell, who now sits on the city’s Planning Commission. “They wanted to say, ‘yes.’”

That was a marked reversal from previous years, when homeowners and neighborhood groups that wield tremendous influence made one thing clear to local politicians: Touch our neighborhoods and pay for it at the ballot box. But in the face of a devitalizing affordability crisis, complaints about how different types of homes like duplexes or triplexes might change the feel of a neighborhood lost some of their bite.

“We don’t have the luxury of not doing anything,” Watson, Austin’s mayor, told The Texas Tribune.

YIMBYs’ opponents are deeply skeptical of their proposals. They argue that some city efforts to allow more housing will spur builders to further target Austin’s low-income neighborhoods and flood them with expensive new housing that will hasten the displacement of Black and Latino residents. Those fears fueled advocates with Community Powered ATX — a coalition of progressive activists based in East Austin, which underwent rapid gentrification over the last 15 years — to rally against the changes.

“We want more deeply affordable housing to be built,” said Alexia Leclerq, a Community Powered ATX co-organizer. “What they’re proposing is not part of the solution. It’s actually making it worse.”

Zoning reform proponents have long countered that displacement in East Austin came about because city rules hampered the city’s overall housing supply and forced development pressure upon only a few parts of town. They point to research that shows loosening regulations to allow more homes across a city may actually safeguard neighborhoods more vulnerable to displacement.

Austin got a glimpse of the effect building new homes has on housing costs even before the zoning reforms were approved. Though rents remain above pre-pandemic levels, a boom in apartment construction in the Austin region drove rents down last year — in newer high-end apartments and older, cheaper apartments alike.

“You’re seeing significant price drops at the lowest end of the market that are really helping out the neediest people here in Austin,” said Vela, who represents a portion of East Austin.

YIMBYs now face the task of protecting their supermajority in the November elections. And while the reforms in Austin represent unprecedented victories for YIMBYs in Texas, their ideas face a steep climb elsewhere.
Can Dallas move forward?

Some 200 miles north on Interstate 35, an attempt to mirror Austin’s moves imploded before it had a chance to get off the ground.

Housing in Dallas, too, grew much more expensive amid the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region’s vast growth.

“If our city doesn’t do something now, it’s just going to continue to get worse,” said Dallas City Council Member Chad West, who represents the northern part of the city’s Oak Cliff neighborhood. “I want a city where my kids, when they’re old enough to want to move here after college … that they can afford to rent in the city if they want to, or eventually buy a home in the city if they want to, as opposed to having to live in a suburb of Dallas and drive in.”

West took inspiration from Austin’s efforts. Late last year, he and four council colleagues called on the city to explore similar ideas, like allowing new homes to sit on less land and up to four homes where now only one or two may go.

Opponents on the City Council moved fast to squelch the ideas.

“People who bought a home deserve to have the predictability that their neighborhood will stay intact and not turn into something that … is now single-family with multifamily mixed in,” Council Member Cara Mendelsohn, who represents Far North Dallas, said during a February discussion. “People don’t want that. I don’t want that for Dallas.”

West’s effort fizzled. Then came ForwardDallas, an update to an 18-year-old document that guides how the city should use its land. The plan seeks to encourage more kinds of housing — like townhomes, duplexes and small apartment buildings — in existing single-family neighborhoods.

A budding group of Dallas YIMBYs backed those ideas. About 40 people — a mix of homeowners and renters largely organized by the Dallas Housing Coalition, a group of housing developers and pro-housing organizations — testified in support of ForwardDallas before it landed in front of City Council.

“If we think of our city as one large single family, not only is the size of that family growing, but the members of that family are also growing and their needs and their wants and desires and priorities are changing with it,” said Hexel Colorado, a Dallas urbanist, at a council meeting.

In practice, ForwardDallas is little more than a list of recommendations, not a firm policy change. But it was enough to trigger opposition from existing homeowners and neighborhood groups who feared the plan would imperil their single-family neighborhoods.

Yard signs that said “SAVE Single-Family NEIGHBORHOODS from FORWARD DALLAS” and “HANDS OFF! SINGLE-FAMILY NEIGHBORHOODS” proliferated in some neighborhoods. Irate residents packed community centers to blast the plan. A group of homeowners trekked down to City Hall more than once to testify against it.

Single-family housing is “essential and critical to the overall mix of housing options for people who currently live in Dallas and want to move to Dallas,” said Melanie Vanlandingham, an East Dallas neighborhood advocate. “ForwardDallas doesn’t recognize that.”

More than 100 people showed up to City Hall over several months this spring to testify about the plan. More than half were homeowners opposed to allowing other housing types in their neighborhoods, most of whom bought their homes in the decades before the state’s current crisis began to kick in.

In other words, they were exactly the kind of residents local elected officials have traditionally listened to for a key reason: They’re more likely to exact vengeance in low-turnout municipal elections. Most policy decisions about what kind of housing can be built and where happen at the city level, but younger people who want more housing options are less likely to vote in local elections — and older homeowners who may oppose more housing in their neighborhoods are more likely to show up.

That’s a political reality some City Council members openly acknowledged.

“I know how I got here,” Council Member Carolyn King Arnold, who voted against the plan, said at an Aug. 6 meeting. “I know who I came to the dance with.”

For Dallas YIMBYs, that dynamic poses a significant hurdle to enacting reform.

“The most involved people are the ones who are going to oppose housing,” said Adam Lamont, a middle school teacher who leads the group Dallas Neighbors for Housing. “That small swath of the city has really, really gotten riled up and most of the city doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

Amid the backlash, ForwardDallas’ crafters scaled back some recommendations to encourage more housing types. Council members mused about ripping out any mention of housing to get the plan through — and avoid angry homeowners’ ire during the next election cycle.

Council Member Paul Ridley, who opposes allowing denser housing types in existing single-family neighborhoods, broached compromise language seeking to direct “incompatible multiplex, townhome, duplex, triplex, and apartment development” away from those neighborhoods, among other tweaks designed to ease opponents’ concerns.

“Consistently, we have heard our residents’ pleas for more housing options and also for protection of their existing neighborhoods and single-family zoning,” said Ridley, who represents East Dallas, a focal point of opposition to the plan, during a Sept. 3 meeting. “Through the input of so many stakeholders, it has become clear to me that those objectives are not incompatible.”

The City Council approved ForwardDallas with Ridley’s amendments last month — but no one seemed completely satisfied. Opponents felt the plan didn’t go far enough in enshrining the city’s commitment to single-family neighborhoods. YIMBYs weren’t thrilled about Ridley’s compromise language, though they considered the document a step in the right direction — even if it was unenforceable.

Some confusion remains. Despite Ridley’s amendments, parts of the document still encourage multifamily developments in single-family neighborhoods.

Nathaniel Barrett, a Dallas developer who helped shape the plan, said ForwardDallas will hopefully set the tone for a broader discussion on housing, but acknowledged the final document is “in conflict with itself.”

“I don’t expect any more housing to be built because of this,” he said. “That work comes elsewhere.”

Among Dallas YIMBYs, worries abound that City Hall won’t take bold action until the city’s housing crisis looks like Austin’s. Dallas rents aren’t far behind where they stand in the state’s capital. Home prices aren’t as bad in Dallas as in Austin but hover well above where they stood five years ago.

If Dallas doesn’t take more steps to address its affordability hurdles, it’s likely the Texas Legislature will do it for them, West said.

State lawmakers “love to come in and tell us what to do in Dallas,” West said. “We’re going to be handing off the decision (to them) on how to run our city because we can’t get past this gridlock.”
Who should fix the crisis?

How Texas lawmakers might address the housing crisis when they return to Austin next year isn’t clear. But the state’s top Republican officials have signaled growing unease about the issue. And polls show strong bipartisan agreement that housing costs are a problem.

Lawmakers tried to alter some city zoning rules last year but failed. Meanwhile, home prices and rents haven’t abated — and voters have become increasingly vocal about the problem, said Nicole Nosek with Texans for Reasonable Solutions, a group that pushed those proposals.

There are signs Texans are open to the proposals YIMBYs espouse. Most Texans support allowing townhouses, accessory dwelling units and small apartment buildings on any residential lot, a recent Pew Trusts poll found. Reducing cities’ minimum lot-size requirements found favor with some 45% of Texans they polled.

“It’s a clear lesson to legislators that this is something that really hits home, no pun intended,” Nosek said.

Neighborhood groups opposed to allowing different kinds of housing where they live will likely mobilize against attempts by the Legislature to alter the rules.

“It is the single largest investment for most people when they buy their home in a single-family neighborhood,” said David Schwarte, who heads the Texas Neighborhood Coalition. “How are they going to respond when they find out that the Legislature just enabled the developer to come into their neighborhood and put up five houses on a lot that was once only one home?”

How much power cities should have to decide what kinds of homes can be built and where will likely be a major dividing line. The Texas Municipal League, cities’ chief lobbying outfit, has vowed to oppose attempts to curtail cities’ authority to enact residential zoning regulations.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank, came out earlier this year in favor of completely getting rid of cities’ lot-size requirements along with limits on how many homes can go on a given piece of land.

But such a far-reaching measure may not be palatable to lawmakers, said John Bonura, a TPPF policy analyst focused on housing affordability. One alternate route for state lawmakers might be to create a statewide template to loosen cities’ zoning rules and allow cities to opt in, he said. The idea would be for cities to eventually join in once they see how the reform works in other places.

“If we can’t win big, let’s at least get something through the door,” Bonura said.

For Republicans, allowing more homes means an opportunity to slash government regulations, bolster property rights and unleash the free market. For Democrats, zoning reform holds the potential to reduce racial segregation and help fight climate change.

But there are those on both sides of the aisle who are fiercely protective of single-family neighborhoods and will push back vociferously against moves they see as harming those areas.

Weighing in on cities’ residential zoning laws is awkward territory for Democratic state legislators, who have spent much of the last decade trying — and failing — to fend off Republican efforts to sap authority from the state’s bluer urban areas. At the same time, Democrats generally support affordable housing, and defending cities’ right to uphold some of those laws might work against that cause given those rules play a key role in exacerbating housing costs.

Tackling the housing crisis will likely produce strange bedfellows. The Texas Municipal League and TPPF, usually at odds over efforts to diminish cities’ rulemaking authority, agree they want lawmakers to tweak an obscure state law that effectively gives veto power to property owners to kill new housing projects near them. A group of San Antonio residents recently wielded the law to stop a proposed affordable housing development nearby — even though most city council members voted in favor of the project.

That law “makes it hard for a council to do the right thing” and add much-needed affordable housing stock, TML executive director Bennett Sandlin said.

There also appears to be some agreement on both sides that cities should make it easier to build residences in places that allow commercial development— something many of the state’s largest cities don’t allow.

The state also spends very little on housing explicitly targeted at low-income families. State Sen. Nathan Johnson, a Dallas Democrat, said he plans to introduce legislation to start a $2 billion fund to essentially pay developers to provide housing for low-income families by buying down rents in apartments on the market.

Johnson said he’s also open to legislation capping cities’ lot-size requirements and allowing homes in commercial areas — though he hopes local officials would have a say in any statewide revision to cities’ zoning restrictions.

But the state Legislature needs to do something to rein in housing costs, Johnson said.

“Texas is growing and continues to grow very, very rapidly, and companies continue to locate here,” he said. “If we don’t have affordable housing, that can’t continue.”

Texas still adds more jobs than any other state and remains an attractive place for companies to relocate. But quietly, some circles are fretting that Texas is losing its competitive advantage on housing.

“Nobody moves to Texas for the skiing. They come here because the jobs are plentiful and the houses are cheap,” said Emily Brizzolara-Dove, a policy analyst with Texas 2036 who focuses on housing affordability. “But it is something that could easily shift somewhere else. The stakes are very, very high.”

___

This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

VAN ALSTYNE, Texas (AP) — Investigators suspect a propane leak caused an explosion that leveled a home and killed its two occupants in a community just north of Dallas early Monday morning.

First responders received the call at 1:19 a.m. after people reported hearing a loud “boom” in Van Alstyne, Texas. A fire broke out and was extinguished several hours later.

Grayson County Fire Marshal John Weda said the two occupants of the home were inside when the blast occurred. Their bodies were found among the debris. Their remains were sent to the Dallas Medical Examiner’s Office for autopsies.

The home used propane appliances which could have led to the explosion deemed accidental by investigators. “This appears to be a possible propane leak occurring inside the structure resulting in the explosion,” Weda said in a statement. The fire marshal added that an investigation is underway by his office and the Texas Railroad Commission.

Van Alstyne is about 55 miles (89 kilometers) north of Dallas.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal appeals court was asked Monday to reconsider its decision to overturn an expensive contempt finding and remove a district judge from a lawsuit over conditions within Texas’ struggling foster care system.

A panel of three 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled Oct. 11 that U.S. District Judge Janis Jack’s contempt ruling and $100,000-per-day fine violated the court’s constitutional limits of power over individual states.

The appeals court panel also said Jack had disrespected the state and its attorneys during the long-running case.

Attorneys for the child advocates in the case disagreed and on Monday asked for a hearing before all 17 full-time members of the New Orleans-based appeals court. Their filing said the decision by judges Edith Jones, Edith Brown Clement and Cory Wilson conflicted with precedent in a case involving vulnerable children.

“Removing the district judge with deep institutional knowledge poses great risks to the entire plaintiff class of children by further delaying reform,” the filing said. The state had not yet filed a reply as of Monday evening.

The case began in 2011 with a lawsuit over foster care conditions at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

Since 2019, court-appointed monitors have released periodic reports on DFPS’ progress toward eliminating threats to the foster children’s safety.

A report earlier this year cited progress in staff training but continued weaknesses in responding to investigations into abuse and neglect allegations, including those made by children.

In one case, plaintiffs say, a girl was left in the same, now-closed residential facility for a year while 12 separate investigations piled up around allegations that she had been raped by a worker there.

Texas has about 9,000 children in permanent state custody for factors that include the loss of caregivers, abuse at home or health needs that parents alone can’t meet.

AUSTIN – The Texas Tribune reports Texas is clawing back more than $607 million per year in federal funding for special education services, a move local school district officials say will likely worsen already strained budgets for students with disabilities.

The School Health and Related Services (SHARS) program provides hundreds of school districts critical funding for special education services, reimbursing them for counseling, nursing, therapy and transportation services provided to Medicaid-eligible children.

More than 775,000 students receive special education services in Texas, according to the Texas Education Agency. It is not as clear how many of them are eligible for Medicaid, though school district officials say many of the kids who directly benefit from SHARS come from low-income families.

But in the last year, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which manages the program at the state level, began imposing strict limitations on the types of services for which school districts are able to request federal reimbursement. The changes have accumulated into a $607 million slashing to the money school districts typically expect to receive under SHARS per year, according to health agency estimates.

Bewildered by the sudden changes, school district officials and special education advocates say little has been communicated about why these drastic changes are happening.

“We’re seeing an increased number of students that need more and more individualized care,” said Katie Abbott, special education director for a coalition of six East Texas school districts. “And yet, what are we doing?”

In response to their concerns, Texas has blamed the feds.

A 2017 federal audit report found that Texas was improperly billing for services not allowable under the SHARS program. The report concluded the state would need to return almost $19 million, a fraction of the $607 million currently being left behind. It also required that the Texas health commission work to ensure it was complying with federal guidelines.

Afterwards, the commission submitted “every possible denial and request for the opinion to be overturned” but was unsuccessful, the agency told The Texas Tribune. The recent changes reflected an attempt to bring the state back into compliance, according to the commission.

But federal appeals officers, in a ruling last year, said Texas produced “nothing at all” to dispute investigators’ findings that the state billed for unallowable services. The ruling also condemns the state for attempting to submit evidence after the deadline to do so had already passed.

Further, federal officials dispute the notion that Texas is being required to make certain changes to the SHARS program. In a statement to the Tribune, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services made clear that as long as states work within “broad federal parameters,” they have autonomy to make decisions about their programs.

School district officials say Texas has resorted to overcorrecting problems identified by the audit, flouting expectations from the federal government that the state administers the program using the least restrictive means possible.

Many school districts are formally appealing the funding cuts with the state, while other rural districts have decided to exit the SHARS program altogether because of the administrative burden recent changes have created. Those that remain are holding out hope that lawmakers will decide in next year’s legislative session to help fill the financial gaps left in special education services — a lofty expectation for a state with a poor track record in both administering Medicaid and serving students with disabilities.

“We’re talking about our most vulnerable kids,” said Karlyn Keller, division director of Student Solutions and School Medicaid Services for the Texas Association of School Boards. “We can’t afford to continue to make these huge clawbacks in funding when we’ve got kids that need the service.”
‘Faces of kids’

With the slashing to SHARS funding, the Texas Education Agency estimates the deficit between school districts’ special education expenses and revenue from federal and state money will grow to roughly $1.7 billion per year.

Students with disabilities make up a little less than 10% of the Shiner school district’s 700 student population. Factoring in the recent changes to the SHARS program, the rural school district located east of San Antonio can expect to lose more than $79,000, according to state health agency data.

Superintendent Alex Remschel says the loss will eventually hurt the Shiner school district’s ability to recruit and retain personnel who work to administer the one-on-one, small group special education services their students need. The district currently has three special education teachers and about a half-dozen aides who support them in the classroom. The district shares special education resources with eight other districts as part of a cooperative, which Remschel said had to dip into its fund balance this year to fill the gaps left by the SHARS reductions.

“When I look at the dollars that we have, I see faces of kids,” Remschel said. “And I don’t think that the people that are making these decisions see the faces of kids and how kids are impacted, and that’s what tears at my heart the most.”

Jason Appelt, executive director of the special education cooperative the Shiner school district is a member of, questions Texas’ decision not to take full advantage of the money being provided by the federal government. In total, the special education cooperative’s nine rural districts work with about 900 students.

In previous years, the group received about $1 million in SHARS funding, Appelt said, a number that has since been cut in half. SHARS revenue makes up nearly a fifth of the cooperative’s budget.

“We didn’t have any way to plan for this,” Appelt said. “Our districts are very fiscally conservatively minded. So if something doesn’t change with this, it’s gonna be really tough on all these districts, because there’s not too many other places to cut from.”

Larger and wealthier school districts also say they are feeling the effects of changes to the SHARS program. Of the Katy school district’s approximately 96,000 student population, nearly 18% receive special education services, said Gwen Coffey, the assistant superintendent for special education. The district will experience a cut of almost $8 million, according to the state.

Coffey also said the health commission has made participation in the program more difficult in recent years with constant “changing and shifting and adjusting,” resulting in more documentation and paperwork for staff whose workloads are already full. She said the agency does not seem to understand exactly what it’s asking of school districts.

On Oct. 1, for example, the state health agency overhauled the way school districts can bill for personal care services provided to students in a group setting — like bathing, dressing and feeding — which districts interpret as requiring second-by-second documentation of how and when they’re assisting students. Districts say the change is not feasible considering instructors typically are busy with helping multiple children at once.

“I think the bigger question that we all have is, why? Why is it being changed? What’s the purpose?” Coffey said. “Because if the purpose of the Health and Human Services Commission is to ensure that funding and services are being delivered to those students who require them right in a timely and efficient manner, then how does this accomplish that?”
Succumbing to fear

Kami Finger, who serves as assistant superintendent for school support and special services at the Lubbock school district, said ongoing cuts and changes to the SHARS program indicate a “cultural issue” in Texas where instead of maximizing reimbursement dollars available to the state, the state health agency is succumbing to fear because of the federal audit.

“We’re too fearful that we’re not going to do it the right way to begin with,” said Finger, whose district is losing more than $5.4 million from the funding cuts, according to state estimates. “All of that’s coming together at the same time, creating this very precarious situation for district administrators to make decisions about what least effective programs and services we may have to strategically abandon as a result of that.”

The federal audit was conducted from October 2010 through September 2011 and zeroed in on the Austin and Dallas school districts. It concluded that overbilling occurred because Texas “did not always follow its policies and procedures to ensure that the costs claimed for direct medical services were accurate and supported.”

In an appeal decision issued last October, federal officials further concluded that Texas had “multiple opportunities” during the process to present evidence disputing investigators’ earlier findings but failed to do so — until after the time to submit evidence had expired.

“The Board therefore will not reconsider its decision to address an issue that could have been but was not raised earlier,” one part of the ruling states.

MSB School Services is a vendor that provides consulting and support to roughly half of participating school districts in the Texas SHARS program and has also worked with schools in other states administering the program.

While acknowledging there were problems with the program as identified in the audit, Tabbatha Callaway, CEO of MSB School Services, said she has yet to see any documentation from the state suggesting that Texas was required to make funding cuts as drastic as it has. Instead, she said, the health commission has done “a phenomenal job of, at this point, making this seem hard and complicated.”

She also said Texas school districts possess the documentation that likely would have helped the state in its response to the audit. But she said the commission has not taken steps to work with school districts.

“We’ve tried really hard to get them to meet with us, have conversations, figure out what’s going on, and we haven’t been able to gain the traction necessary to understand the issues,” Callaway said. “What I can say is that there are solutions to recover these dollars, and they need to be looked at.”

The state health agency said in a statement it is working with state education officials to ensure school districts are up to date on SHARS and conducts annual meetings and training to ensure awareness. In working to identify “a greater need” for transparency and support, the agency said it recently created a Medicaid resource and training team for participating SHARS districts.

However, with drastic changes having already gone into effect, many school district officials are reconsidering whether participating in the program is worth it, while some rural school districts that didn’t receive significant funding from SHARS are dropping out, said Keller of the Texas Association of School Boards.

“If you’re counting on these kinds of programs to help you fund and then they go away after the fact, then you’re left in very dire straits,” Keller said. “They’re just making the decision that they’re not going to participate. They’d rather have to figure it out and know that they have the funding than guess and then be caught short.”
Legislative intervention

School districts and special education advocates are still holding out hope the Legislature will step up by increasing funding for special education services and transitioning to a special education funding model based on the individual needs of a student rather than how much time a child spends in a special education setting. This could help school districts cover some of the personal care services students need, advocates say.

But increases to public school funding have been difficult to come by in the last year as those dollars have been wrapped up in Gov. Greg Abbott’s failed push for a school voucher program, which would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to fund their children’s private school tuition.

Texas also has a poor track record in administering federally mandated special education services. The state was previously fined $33 million for slashing funding for students with disabilities in a way that violated the Individual with Disabilities Education Act. Later, federal officials found that Texas failed to prove it did enough to overhaul its special education system.

Neither the political terrain nor the state’s recent history with special education has stopped advocates from trying to be optimistic, however.

“I feel like special education funding is one of the very few, if not the only thing in education policy that all of the legislators agree on,” said Andrea Chevalier, director of Governmental Relations for the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education.

Rep. Mary González, the Democrat vice chair of the House budget committee, said after a recent legislative hearing where state health officials explained their rationale for changes to the program, she is working with other legislators to determine whether the state is “over-course correcting” in a way that further harms school district funding.

She is also advocating for more communication and transparency, as well as making sure school districts aren’t losing out on dollars while they’re appealing the state health agency’s decision to cut funding.

Katie Abbott, special education director for the coalition of six rural East Texas school districts that share special education resources, said more funding “would be very much appreciated,” but the services that SHARS has helped schools fund are still required — with or without the additional help.

“We’re passionate about what we do for kids, so I don’t see services stopping,” Abbott said. “It’s just squeezing blood out of a turnip to figure out how to make that happen.”