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EAST TEXAS (KETK) — Attorney General Ken Paxton has notified more than 130 Texas cities on Thursday that they are barred from raising property taxes above the no?new?revenue rate after his office determined they failed to meet state audit and transparency requirements under a new law.

According to the Attorney General’s Office, more than 1,000 Texas municipalities were asked to provide documents showing whether they complied with SB 1851, which requires every city to complete annual financial audits and meet state transparency standards. After reviewing those submissions, investigators identified more than 130 cities that allegedly failed to meet the required benchmarks for the upcoming fiscal year.
Thirteen East Texas cities appear on the AG’s list:

* Berryville
* Chireno
* Corrigan
* Elkhart
* Eustace
* Huntington
* Livingston
* Mount Enterprise
* Red Lick
* Redwater
* Rusk
* Tool
* Yantis

Letters sent by the state warn those municipalities that they may face enforcement actions and penalties under SB 1851 and cannot legally approve property tax increases beyond the no-new-revenue rate until compliance issues are resolved.

The Attorney General’s Office said the list of cities currently identified as non-compliant is preliminary and that additional municipalities could face similar restrictions as the investigation continues.

Paxton said the effort is intended to protect Texas taxpayers from unlawful tax increases and ensure local governments follow state law. State officials indicated that further enforcement actions may follow if additional cities are found to be out of compliance with the financial reporting requirements outlined in SB 1851.

“Cities cannot ignore state audit and transparency requirements without consequences,” Paxton said in a statement. “My office will continue enforcing the law to protect taxpayers across Texas.”

Statements from East Texas cities:

City of Tool

“We respect and understand the Attorney General’s determination regarding the City of Tool’s current audit status. To date, the City of Tool is completing its 2024 audit and have already corresponded with our third-party auditors in regards to our 2025 fiscal year audit, expected to be completed by the end of this fiscal year. We are committed to being fiscally responsible and strive to not only be in compliance with state law, but to continue to provide a level of transparency and commitment with taxpayers’ money.”

City of Huntington

We were notified by the Attorney General’s office yesterday afternoon that we were in violation of the provisions of SB 1851, which will effectively prevent the city from adopting a tax rate that exceeds the no-new-revenue rate for 2026.

As you are surely aware, the effective date on those provisions was September 1, 2025. The City’s 2026 fiscal year budget and 2025 tax rate had already been adopted by ordinance before that effective date, so the provisions did not apply for the setting of the 2025 tax rate.

Public hearings were published and held in accordance with the Public Meetings Act prior to those ordinances being adopted.

Our financial records have been in the hands of Mr. David Godwin and his capable staff since February 2026, but the audit was not completed by the required deadline of March 30, 2026. We are still awaiting the completed audit and expect that to be submitted for Council review in the near future. City officials are absolutely aware of the provisions that will restrict this year’s tax rate and plan to abide by the letter of the law.

As far as transparency is concerned, the City’s 2026 fiscal year budget and the audit for fiscal year 2024 are on the City’s website – http://www.cityofhuntington.org – under the Finance Department tab. As soon as the audit is completed and received by our office, it will be posted on the website posthaste.

City of Rusk

The City of Rusk has received notice from the Texas Office of the Attorney General regarding the City’s compliance with Local Government Code Chapter 103 and related requirements f fiscal year 2025.

The City understands that, based on the Office of the Attorney General’s determination, the City has been found not to have complied with the audit and financial statement requirements applicable under state law and is therefore subject to the enforcement provisions set out in Local Government Code 103.055(c).

The City has been diligently working to resolve the issue and recently completed its 2024 audit.
The City remains committed to transparency, fiscal responsibility and full compliance with Texas law.

Under the applicable statute, the City may not adopt an ad valorem tax rate that exceeds its no-new-revenue tax rate until compliance is achieved. The City intends to be in compliance as soon as possible.

The City will continue working diligently to address this matter.

KETK News has contacted additional East Texas cities for comment and is awaiting their responses.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI is offering a $200,000 reward for information leading to capture and prosecution of a former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence specialist who defected to Iran in 2013 and was later charged with revealing classified information to the Tehran government.

Monica Elfriede Witt, 47, was indicted by a federal grand jury in February 2019 on charges of espionage, including transmitting national defense information to the government of Iran. She remains at large.

Witt “allegedly betrayed her oath to the Constitution more than a decade ago by defecting to Iran and providing the Iranian regime National Defense Information and likely continues to support their nefarious activities,” Daniel Wierzbicki, special agent in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office’s Counterintelligence and Cyber Division, said in a news release Wednesday.

“The FBI has not forgotten and believes that during this critical moment in Iran’s history, there is someone who knows something about her whereabouts.”

It wasn’t immediately known why the FBI was bringing attention to Witt’s case. The United States and Iran have been at war since Feb. 28.

Witt served in the Air Force between 1997 and 2008, where she was trained in the Farsi language and was deployed overseas on classified counterintelligence missions, including to the Middle East. She later found work as a Defense Department contractor.

The Texas native defected to Iran in 2013 after being invited to two all-expense-paid conferences in the country that the Justice Department says promoted anti-Western propaganda and condemned American moral standards.

Before that, Witt had been warned by the FBI about her activities, but told agents that she would not provide sensitive information about her work if she returned to Iran, prosecutors said.

According to the indictment, Witt placed at risk “sensitive and classified U.S. national defense information and programs,” the news release said.

“Witt allegedly intentionally provided information endangering U.S personnel and their families stationed abroad. She also allegedly conducted research on behalf of the Iranian regime to allow them to target her former colleagues in the U.S. government,” it said.

HUNTSVILLE (AP) — A man who experts for both prosecutors and defense attorneys had said was intellectually disabled became the 600th person executed in Texas since 1982, put to death Thursday evening for the killing of a 77-year-old retired college professor.

Edward Busby Jr. was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. following a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay over his disabilities claims. The execution capped a series of last-minute legal efforts by Busby’s attorneys seeking to spare his life.

Busby was condemned for the suffocation death of Laura Lee Crane, a retired professor from Texas Christian University. Prosecutors said she was abducted from a grocery store parking lot in January 2004 and left to suffocate in the trunk of her car with duct tape wrapped heavily around her face, covering her mouth and nose.

The execution was the 600th in Texas since it resumed carrying out the death penalty in 1982. Busby also was the fourth person executed this year in Texas and the 12th nationwide. Earlier Thursday, Oklahoma executed Raymond Johnson for killing his ex-girlfriend and her 7-month-old daughter nearly 20 years ago.

When asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Busby repeatedly apologized and asked for forgiveness.

“I am so sorry for what happened,” he said while strapped to the death chamber gurney. “Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her.” He said he wished he could “take it all back” and added he had “no right to get in that car.”

“I’ll take the blame if that helps.”

He said he had surrendered his life to God and urged a sister, who was praying and watching through a window a short distance away, to find a church and “pick up your cross.”

“I’m here because this is the will of God,” he said before the injection got underway.

As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began flowing, he took a sharp breath, closed his eyes and gasped. Then he made snoring sounds that got progressively quieter. Within 40 seconds, all movement and sounds ceased. He was pronounced dead 38 minutes afterward.

Busby’s execution had been in doubt after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week issued a stay of execution to further review his claims of intellectual disability. But the Supreme Court overturned the stay Thursday at the request of the Texas Attorney General’s Office. The attorney general’s office had argued that similar appeals were previously rejected and were “meritless” and based on “conflicting evidence.”

Busby’s lawyers quickly sought another stay but it was denied by a lower court.

The Supreme Court in 2002 had barred the execution of intellectually disabled people. But it has given states some discretion to decide how to determine such disabilities.

Busby’s attorneys had argued against putting him to death because a defense expert as well as one hired by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, both found he was intellectually disabled.

The district attorney’s office had previously recommended Busby’s sentence be reduced to life in prison. But the trial judge in Busby’s case disagreed with the findings of intellectual disability and in 2023 upheld the death sentence.

In a statement Wednesday, the district attorney’s office said it requested Thursday’s execution date because it believed that under current law Busy was not intellectually disabled.

Two other prior execution dates for Busby had been delayed by courts.

Prosecutors have said Busby and his co-defendant, Kathleen Latimer, abducted Crane in her car from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot and later put in her vehicle’s trunk as they drove around. Prosecutors said she died in the trunk after suffocating from having 23 feet (7 meters) of duct tape wrapped over her entire face.

Busby was subsequently arrested in Oklahoma City driving Crane’s car and led authorities to her body in Oklahoma just north of the state line with Texas.

Latimer is in prison serving a life sentence for murder.

Bryan Mark Rigg, an author and historian who represented the Crane family as a witness to the execution, said they “neither support or oppose the death penalty. However, they are united in their respect for the rule of law.”

Rigg said as a child he was a student of Crane, who for decades helped children overcome learning disabilities and “was discarded in a field like a piece of trash.” He said the execution was not about vengeance but “accountability under the law and about remembering the life of an extraordinary educator.”

PORT ISABEL (AP) — Until recently, young children ran in and out of their public housing homes in this Gulf Coast town, playing on sun-dappled lawns as mothers looked over their shoulders for the school bus to drop off their older kids. Suddenly, couches, dressers and refrigerators started appearing curbside for movers or garbage collectors.

Within weeks, the neighborhood was a ghost town and the playground was empty.

What prompted the mass exodus was a bungled message from the housing authority in Port Isabel, a South Texas community of 5,000 people, many of whom are immigrants working at hotels and restaurants on the beaches of nearby South Padre Island. The Port Isabel Housing Authority indicated a Trump administration proposal was about to take effect that would end housing assistance to families with at least one member in the country illegally. The events that followed provided a glimpse of what could happen in communities across the U.S. if the proposed rule is actually finalized.

“The impact was not limited to undocumented immigrants, but really to immigrants who are here legally as well as people within their families who are citizens,” Marie Claire Tran-Leung, senior staff attorney at National Housing Law Project, said.

For decades, families with at least one legal or eligible resident have been allowed to live in public housing provided those who are here illegally or are otherwise ineligible due to their immigration status pay a full, unsubsidized share of rent. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to reverse that.

Advocates estimate up to 80,000 people would be kicked out of their homes nationwide under the measure that is part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. They include U.S. citizens, many of them children born in this country but whose parents were not.
A message from the Port Isabel Housing Authority

On Feb. 3, the Port Isabel Housing Authority sent residents a letter saying that the Trump administration wanted every household member to prove legal status within 30 days or face eviction. Three weeks later, the agency sent a note of “clarification” that no such proof was required.

It was already too late.

Half of residents living in Port Isabel public housing left within a month of receiving the first letter. The occupancy rate plunged from 91% in January to 43% in May, far below the national average of 94%.

The proposed rule from HUD still has not taken effect.

The housing authority gave no explanation for the initial misunderstanding and officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press.
Rumors and panic

Fears about eviction and rumors that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement might get involved prompted panic among some residents.

“My kids and I spoke and wondered what we were going to do, but then we said it’s better to leave and avoid any retaliation,” a single mother from Mexico raising two teenagers who are U.S. citizens told The Associated Press. She, like other former residents, spoke on condition of anonymity due to fears of being deported.

She turned to legal service organizations that told her and others they could stay in public housing. But she and her children decided it was too risky and left their home of nearly a decade, finding an apartment within the same school district that costs about $500 more per month.

The move also added about 10 minutes to the commute to the island, where both the mother and her daughter work. The 18-year-old gets home from school at 4:30 p.m. and grabs a quick dinner before her mom drives her to a job that starts at 5 p.m. The daughter is a top student in her senior class and plans to go to college in the fall with help from scholarship offers, but she worries how her family will make ends meet. Her brother was laid off, and their mom underwent cancer treatment last year, depleting her energy and straining their finances.

Other families face even greater challenges.

A mother of three said she moved her family into a one-bedroom trailer home illegally parked between two other trailer homes. Her oldest son sleeps in the living room.

Another family of three sold beds and other furniture so they could squeeze into a small trailer home, only to find out the landlord wouldn’t let them use the mailing address, affecting her children’s school and health insurance.

“Since we got the letter, everything changed from one day to the next. It wasn’t the same anymore. Before the letter, the kids were happy, playing outside,” the mother of two said.
A preview of a Trump administration proposal

The Trump administration proposed in February that any household with one ineligible resident would disqualify an entire family, estimating that 24,000 recipients were ineligible in 20,000 households.

“We have zero tolerance for pushing aside hardworking U.S. citizens while enabling others to exploit decades-old loopholes,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said at the time.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income families, estimates that 79,600 people could be forced to leave their homes, with a disproportionate impact on children and Latinos.

The rule drew more than 16,000 public comments, many of them critical, including from city leaders across the U.S.

For example, the New York City Council told HUD that an estimated 12% of city of households have at least one member who lacks legal status. Some 240,000 children are in those homes.

“This proposed rule will unequivocally lead to increased displacement, homelessness, poverty, and decreased educational and health outcomes,” the council wrote.

HUD is expected to publish a final version of the rule after considering public comments.

It is almost certain to face legal challenges.