KTBB News, Weather, Talk

AUSTIN (AP) — Jonah Paul, a California state employee, says he’s lucky if he gets home by 7 p.m. when he takes the train two days a week to his Sacramento office — a lengthy commute that’s about to become more frequent.

He is among thousands of state employees across the U.S. being pushed back to the office this year — a trend in states led by Democrats as well as Republicans. It’s happening in both California and Texas, which together have more than 350,000 public-sector workers.

The roll-back of remote work mirrors the Trump administration’s mandate for federal workers and moves by some of the nation’s largest corporations including Amazon, JP MorganChase and AT&T.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order this week cites concerns about productivity and collaboration. Starting July 1, state workers must be in the office at least four days a week, with exceptions on a case-by-case basis.

“The governor’s executive order kind of blindsided everybody,” said Paul, who is also president of the downtown Sacramento chapter of SEIU Local 1000, the state’s largest public sector union. “People have been really upset.”

There’s some evidence that rigid in-office requirements actually make workers less productive, but Republican governors in Missouri, Ohio and Indiana, among others, cited efficiency to justify this pivot away from pandemic-era flexibility.

Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Braun issued his return-to-work mandate one week before President Trump’s executive order for the federal workforce.

In Texas, some state employees got emails this week telling them to return to the office full-time as soon as possible after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott instructed state agencies to end remote work.

“Any remote work policies must ensure taxpayer dollars are being utilized efficiently,” explained Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott. “With remote federal workers returning to the office where possible, it’s important that state agencies ensure they do the same.”

Other states vary. New York, which also has one of the country’s largest state workforces, allows each agency to set its own rules. And some legislatures, like Wisconsin, have introduced bills to require in-person work by law — an idea shot down by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

These return-to-office orders shouldn’t lead to massive quitting, but they usually result in top performers leaving first, and recruitment and retention suffer, according to economist Nicholas Bloom at Stanford University.

“States are going to have to increase salaries or fatten up the benefits package in other ways if they’re asking people to forgo this flexibility,” said Chris Tilly, a UCLA professor of urban planning who studies labor markets.

While many are anxious, others are already accustomed to the change. More than half of California’s 224,000 full-time employees, such as janitors and highway patrol officers, already report for duty in-person each workday.

Texas pivoted despite a legislative committee’s findings in February that remote work has had a positive impact, said Myko Gedutis, organizing coordinator of Texas State Employees Union CWA Local 6186. The survey found 80 out of 96 agencies reported improved recruitment and 46 saw improved productivity, while 40 agencies reported no improvement.

Texas state employee Rolf Straubhaar said many are concerned that people with medical needs won’t get exceptions.

“This can push out employees who, for medical reasons, need to work from home,” Straubhaar said.

Paul wakes up around 5 a.m. for the two-hour train ride from his home in Oakland to his employment development job in the state capital. His agency already staggers in-office days due to limited office space, and now his colleagues face more logistical challenges.

“There’s a physical space constraint that makes this order even more absurd,” Paul said. “It’s not really realistic to force everyone to come back.”

GAINES COUNTY – Five years ago, Melanie Richburg used a roll of duct tape, a HEPA filter and a portable fan to draw contaminated air out of a hospital room where patients were tested for the coronavirus.

Now, as the state’s largest measles outbreak in three decades sickens an increasing number of Texans in the South Plains region, the Lynn County Hospital District, where Richburg serves as the chief executive officer, is still without specialized isolation rooms to treat patients.

So, she’s prepared to bring out the duct tape again.

“If we see the volume of patients exceeds the number of beds available at children’s hospitals, we’re going to need a contingency plan,” said Richburg, whose county is 30 miles south of Lubbock and has had two measles cases. “The biggest struggle we have is the same struggle we had during COVID.”

The coronavirus pandemic underscored the need for robust public health infrastructure. And it brought to light a remarkable urban-rural divide in access to basic health services. In the months after the virus ravaged the country, federal dollars flowed to local public health districts, and policies targeting health care deserts saw a renewed push.

Yet as a disease that had been declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000 makes a resurgence, rural West Texas communities and state officials are scrambling to respond. Aging infrastructure, a dearth of primary care providers and long distances between testing sites and laboratories plague much of rural Texas, where the measles outbreak has concentrated.

At least 198 people in Texas have been infected with measles since late January, and one child has died from measles, the first such death in the country in a decade.

More measles cases are expected, and the outbreak could last for months, state health services commissioner Jennifer Shuford told lawmakers last week.

Though different from COVID in many ways, measles is similarly revealing how a lack of public health resources leaves rural communities vulnerable. What’s left are local leaders forced to scrape together the few tools they have to respond to an emergency, contending with years of lackluster investment from the state and federal level to proactively prevent emerging public health threats.

“We’re in a public health shortage area,” said Gordon Mattimoe, director of the Andrews County Health Department.“ You have to think outside the box.”

Some 64 Texas counties don’t have a hospital, and 25 lack primary care physicians, according to the Texas Department of Agriculture. Twenty-six rural Texas hospitals closed between 2010 and 2020, according to a rural hospital trade organization, and although closures slowed in the years since, those still standing are often in crumbling buildings with few medical providers.

Swaths of Texas have scant resources for public awareness campaigns. And they lack sufficient medical staff with expertise to provide the one-on-one education needed to encourage vaccination and regular visits to the doctor.

“We have a difficult time in our area finding pediatricians for our newborns,” said Sara Safarzadeh Amiri, chief medical officer for Odessa Regional Medical Center and Scenic Mountain Medical Center. “That’s a problem. If you can’t find a pediatrician, then when a serious question comes up, who do you ask?”

Most of Texas’ measles cases are in unvaccinated school-aged children and are concentrated in the Mennonite community in Gaines County. Cases have also been confirmed in eight other counties spanning Dallam near the Oklahoma border down to Ector, south of Gaines.

To contain the illness, rural health care teams have cordoned off spaces to conduct measles testing, used social media to blast residents with information about vaccination efficacy and schlepped throat swabs across counties to ship them to a state lab in Austin — the only public state facility that was conducting measles testing until the Texas Tech University Bioterrorism Response Laboratory, part of a national network of CDC-funded labs, began measles testing last Monday.

Testing is critical for measles, experts say, because infected individuals can be contagious for several days and must isolate themselves to avoid spreading it further.

In Gaines County, runners have had to drive specimens up to 70 miles to get to a FedEx office where they could ship the specimen to the state laboratory. It could then take another 48 hours to get test results. During that time, public health officials would ask patients suspected of measles to quarantine — but they don’t know if they followed through.

“Some people need the test to say ‘I’m positive’ before they actually do something or follow the directions given,” Amiri said. “Having that testing available is very important.”

In Andrews County, just south of Gaines, Mattimoe is using the old City Hall building as a testing site because he doesn’t have a reverse pressure room.

Those rooms prevent contagious diseases from spreading to other people, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends suspected measles patients are treated there when possible. In the absence of such spaces, rural counties including Lynn and Yoakum have improvised a room for measles testing, hoping they don’t get overrun with more patients they can handle.

Mattimoe, who said he is anticipating more cases, opted to open up City Hall for testing since that building happens to be vacant.

WIthout it, Mattimoe said, he’d have to “shut down the entire department for two hours between suspected cases.”

Public health is based upon prevention, yet it’s emergencies that spur the most action, particularly in rural communities.

It was only after a school-aged child died from measles that state and federal support intensified. Twenty seven contractors were brought into the outbreak area last week to assist local health departments, Shuford, the state health services commissioner, said during a legislative hearing. A public awareness campaign with billboards and social media messaging was also launched. And, upon a request from the state, the federal CDC sent “disease detectives” to West Texas.

County officials also doubled down their efforts. In Ector County, County Judge Dustin Fawcett made media appearances to discuss the efficacy of the MMRV vaccine whose two doses provide 97% protection against measles. And the commissioners court approved the purchase of a $7,695 freezer to store measles test specimens — samples shipped after the date of collection must be kept at -70 degrees celsius.

In Andrews County, residents stepped up their communal responsibilities. Mattimoe saw a surge of people coming into the clinic to get vaccinated. “Unfortunately, the death of a child was one of the things that spurred many people to come in,” Mattimoe said.

Even as state and federal officials are sharing more information on vaccines, experts say those campaigns needed to come sooner. They have known for years that vaccination rates have been declining.

“We shouldn’t be doing it during an outbreak,” Amiri said. “We should be doing it beforehand to prevent the outbreak.”

Getting vaccines in residents is further complicated by the fact that Texas has a mostly decentralized system of public health. Cities and counties can stand up their own public health departments or districts, but the majority of rural counties can’t afford to have their own. Instead, they rely on one of 11 public health regions.

Those regions cover vast territories with limited dollars and don’t always know the ins and outs of local communities, especially on how to motivate residents to get vaccinated. The logistical challenges of traveling across counties adds another layer of difficulty.

“You have to call these tiny towns and figure out who can give you space for free to set up a testing clinic,” Wells said. “Then you’re driving from Lubbock to rural areas and that cuts how long you can keep the clinics open.”

And then, rural public health departments are having to contend with mixed messaging from the federal level as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, has cast vaccination as a personal choice while downplaying the news of the outbreak.

“I think with the changes that are occurring at the federal level, we need to realize that we do need to strengthen our local public health,” Amiri said

Years of underinvestment in public health left Texas ill prepared for the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Hospital equipment was scarce, and state and local health departments had outdated technology that limited access to crucial data.

The pandemic also exposed the rural-urban inequities in health care access. Residents of Texas counties without hospitals died from COVID-19 at 20% higher rates than residents of counties with hospitals, according to an analysis by the Austin American Statesman.

An influx in federal funding helped shore up local public health departments and stave off more rural hospital closures. Texas received $35.5 million in grants for improvements in public health infrastructure in fiscal year 2020. An additional $221 million — the most of any state — is flowing to Texas through the CDC’s five-year Public Health Infrastructure Grant.

That funding has helped some local health departments address the measles outbreak, public health officials said. The Lubbock public health department has nearly doubled in size thanks to a $2 million grant. Those extra workers have been on the front lines of testing for measles and vaccinating children.

“It moved us from undersized to right sized,” said Katherine Wells, director of the city’s public health department. “It got us to the…health department we need for Lubbock.”

In Andrews County, Mattimoe has also used grant dollars to grow his health department. Four new employees, including an epidemiologist and a social worker, have helped the county complete a population health assessment that offers a snapshot of residents’ needs. And its year-round vaccine clinics have helped stave off the worst of the measles outbreak.

“Community immunity has really saved us,” Mattimoe said. “There will be a case eventually, but there’s something to be said about herd immunity.” Andrews County does not have any confirmed measles cases as of Friday.

The influx of dollars that rural communities received during the height of the pandemic showed the meaningful changes that officials could do with more support, but it still hasn’t been enough.

Texas spends less on public health per person than the vast majority of other states, according to the State Health Access Data Assistance Center, whose analysis shows Texas spent $17 per person on public health in 2023. A decade earlier, the spend was $19.

The low levels of state funding particularly hurt rural communities that have higher rates of uninsured Texans and more senior citizens with greater health needs, according to the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals. Deteriorating buildings and the shortage of medical professionals still persist in rural areas, while lower volumes of patients means higher health care operational costs.

In Lynn County, Richburg, the CEO of the health district, had hoped the makeshift contraption she made during COVID for a reverse pressure room wouldn’t be needed again in her rural community of 5,500 people. She attempted to pass a bond last year to pay for infrastructure upgrades, including a mini intensive care unit with four negative pressure rooms.

Voters rejected the proposed tax increase, though, a gut punch to Richburg.

“We wanted those four specific beds so that when we had situations where we needed to isolate patients, they’d be adequately cared for and not in a room with a broken window with a fan duct taped in it,” she said.

In addition to isolation rooms, Lynn County’s health care system is due for a major electrical upgrade, Richburg said. The facility’s backup power generator doesn’t cover the MRI machine or the CAT scan. In the meantime, Richburg and her staff plan to do their best with what they have.

“We’re still here, the lights still come on every morning, and patients still come in for services,” Richburg said. “We’re not going away.”

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is dismissing business concerns over the uncertainty caused by his planned tariffs on a range of American trading partners and the prospect of higher prices and isn’t ruling out the possibility of a recession this year. Also, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the Trump administration had finished its six-week purge of programs of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development, and said he would move the 18% of aid and development programs that survived under the State Department.

EAGLE PASS, Texas (AP) — The cries of Liliana Olivero watching from Venezuela through a cellphone pierced through the somber Christian music and gusts of wind as her son’s casket was lowered into the ground.

Gustavo Alfonso Garcia Olivares died at 24, drowning in the Rio Grande not far from where he was buried Thursday at the Maverick County Cemetery in Eagle Pass, a Texas border town of about 30,000 people. About 10 people attended the service, which was streamed live to his parents in Venezuela.

It was the first funeral service for a migrant by Border Vigil, a human rights organization on the U.S.-Mexico border, one of the world’s deadliest.

“Today we’re trying to bring back some of that humanity not just by giving his name but also by having his photo and having his family in the service,” said Amerika Garcia Grewal with Border Vigil, which is supported by Frontera Federation.

It came a day after Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Eagle Pass, which became a flashpoint between the Biden administration and Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, over who polices the border and how. The Trump administration and Abbott are closely aligned on border policy.

Border Vigil started in 2023 amid an increase in border crossings that led to many migrant deaths. The International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project has tallied 6,438 dead and missing on the U.S.-Mexico border since 2014.

The U.S. Border Patrol’s published data goes through the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, 2022, when 895 bodies were discovered by its own agents and other government agencies.

Garcia Olivares’ parents last saw their son alive in a video shared by a friend showing him crouched in a corner of a fast-moving train heading to Mexico’s northern border in 2023.

Victor Garcia recalled their last conversation: “Dad, I’m going to make it, Dad. Don’t worry because you won’t be in need anymore. I’ll buy Mom a house and I’ll help improve your business.”

He described his son as brave and ambitious, having learned to become a barber at 14. He encouraged his son to go to college, but he decided to seek a life in the United States. His mother never had a chance to say goodbye. Not until Thursday.

The ceremony “was very sentimental, sad, but at the same time we are able to breathe a sigh of relief,” the father said.

Garcia Olivares’ body was swept up in the river and identified through Operation ID, an academic organization that partners with state, federal and international agencies. Although his family preferred to have him buried back home, they could not afford the nearly $9,000 cost.

A church volunteer built the white pine paneled coffin. As the ceremony closed, a backhoe shoveled dirt into the grave and a placard was placed by a simple, white cross near two dozen similar crosses laying nearby in a corner lot of the cemetery near a maintenance shed.

___

This story has been updated to correct the name of the organization that supports Border Vigil. It is Frontera Federation, not Fronteras Fund.

ENNIS, Texas (AP) — One man died and three of his family members were injured when their RV flipped over several times at the Texas Motorplex during a strong thunderstorm that caused widespread damage in an area about 25 minutes south of Dallas on Saturday.

Strong winds of up to 90 mph (145 kph) ripped the roof off a Days Inn along Interstate 45, damaged homes throughout Ellis County and toppled at least seven semitractor-trailer trucks on Interstate 35. The strong storms also knocked out power to nearly 20,000 people, but didn’t generate any tornadoes. Fewer than 300 customers remained without power Sunday evening, but service was expected to be restored by the end of the day. Some quarter-sized hail also fell in the area.

Becky Hogle, who works the front desk at the damaged hotel, told the Dallas Morning News that she and the owner moved quickly to evacuate everyone after the storm hit and opened up many of the second-floor rooms to the sky.

“So I pulled my hair up in a scrunchie, ran over and we started knocking on doors telling people they had to vacate,” she said Sunday.

The 42-year-old man who died was T.J. Bailey from Midlothian, Texas. His wife and two sons were inside an RV that rolled over at the racetrack, Ellis County Justice of the Peace Chris Macon told The Dallas Morning News. Bailey’s family members were treated at a hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. The boys were released, but their mother remained under observation at the hospital Sunday.

Macon said he’d never seen such strong and sustained winds in his lifetime of living in Ellis County.

“I can honestly say, I’ve known the wind to blow, but never like that for that long of a period of time,” he said.

Ennis Mayor Kameron Raburn said in a statement Saturday that the city is beginning to pick up debris and work on recovering from the storm.

“The safety of our residents is our top priority,” Roburn said.

Oncor, the power company, said some of the power restoration work was slowed by fallen trees and other debris that had to be cleared by bulldozers before the utility’s workers could get into the area.

The nearby city of Waxahachie had to cancel the weekend events for its Tulipalooza festival because of the storm damage.

GALVESTON – The Houston Chronicle reports the Battleship Texas, a staple Houston-area tourist attraction and the last still-floating ship to serve in both World Wars, has finally found a home. Tony Gregory, president and CEO of the Battleship Texas Foundation, said the warship will likely arrive at its permanent home at Galveston Island’s Pier 15 sometime between late fall 2025 to early 2026. Pier 15 is located on the east side of the island near the crossing to Bolivar Peninsula. “We have a tentative timeline of sometime around Fall 2025, but it might not be until 2026 that people actually get the opportunity to purchase tickets and climb aboard,” Gregory said.

HONDO – The Washington Post reports that Jaylee Williams needed to find somewhere to deliver her son. The 19-year-old knew more about barrel racing on her horse Bet-n-pep than the complicated metrics of who takes what health insurance. But relief for Williams and her boyfriend, Xander Lopez, came when they realized Medina Regional Hospital — just 15 minutes from their home — accepted Medicaid, the federal-state program that covers medical costs for lower-income Americans. Provider groups an hour away in San Antonio had refused to take the insurance, she recalled while cradling little Ryker. “You never know when something could happen,” Williams said, with Lopez adding, “I have no idea where we would have gone” without Medina Regional Hospital. But the lifeline that the 25-bed critical-access hospital offered to Williams and Lopez could disappear in Hondo and other communities like it.

Rural hospitals across the United States fear massive Medicaid cuts favored by the Republican Party could decimate maternity services or shutter already struggling medical facilities in communities that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump. Nearly half of all rural hospitals nationwide operate at a deficit, with Medicaid barely keeping them afloat. Already, almost 200 rural hospitals have closed in the past two decades, according to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rural hospital leaders in Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas who spoke to The Washington Post warned that the enormous cuts congressional Republicans are weighing could further destroy limited health-care access in rural America. Proposals to slash up to $880 billion over 10 years — which is expected to be accomplished largely by scaling back on Medicaid — would also impact those who do not rely on the program but do rely on the medical facilities that are financially dependent on the program’s reimbursements.

LAREDO – KSAT reports that a private prison company has signed an agreement to reopen an immigrant detention facility in Texas that previously held families with children for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the business said Wednesday. Nashville-based CoreCivic announced the contract with ICE and the city of Dilley regarding the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center, located about 85 miles (135 kilometers) north of Laredo and the Mexico border. The center was used during the administration of President Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s first presidency. But President Joe Biden phased out family detention in 2021, and CoreCivic said the facility was idled in 2024. “We do acknowledge that we anticipate housing families” at Dilley, CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin told The Associated Press.

CoreCivic said in a statement that the facility “was purpose-built for ICE in 2014 to provide an appropriate setting for a family population.” The new contract runs through at least March 2030. ICE officials did not immediately respond to messages seeking information about who will be held at Dilley and how soon. The agency — which mostly detains immigrants at privately operated detention facilities, its own processing centers and local prisons and jails — entered this year with zero facilities geared toward families, who last year accounted for about one-third of arrivals on the southern border. The Trump administration has expanded the detention of migrants to military bases including Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, via flights out of Army installations at El Paso, Texas, as it promises to ramp up mass deportations.

AUSTIN – The Dallas Observer reports Texas is one of 13 states that does not require air conditioning in its state prisons, but a new bill that would enforce humane treatment for the incarcerated has been filed for this legislative session. House Bill 2997, filed by Rep. John Bryant, a Democrat from Dallas County, would require Texas to keep prisons between 65 and 85 degrees. A similar bill failed to pass the Senate last session, with critics claiming that installing HVAC systems would be too costly. The previous bill asked the state for half a billion dollars to install and repair air conditioning units within prisons. Two-thirds of state prisons do not have air conditioning, and the temperatures within those prisons can easily exceed 100 degrees. A 2022 study from Texas A&M University found that one had topped out at 149 degrees. When the heat index is above 125 degrees, there is an extreme risk of heat stroke.

“We have the resources. We just seem to not have the compassion to do it,” a former state representative, Carl Sherman from DeSoto, said during a press conference after last year’s bill failed at the Senate. The bill comes as a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice moves through the legal system. The lawsuit was originally filed by Texas inmate Bernie Tiede. His criminal case has caught media attention and was even the inspiration for an eponymous film directed by Austin filmmaker, Richard Linklater. Tiede, convicted of murder in 1999, has been considered a model prisoner and now stands at the forefront of this branch of criminal justice reform. Now he has been joined by a group of criminal justice activist organizations that say the lack of proper temperature regulation creates inhumane conditions. “If cooking someone to death does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment, then nothing does,” the complaint said. Prison conditions don’t just affect the incarcerated, the guards and administrators working the prisons are also subject to the same conditions. “[Guards are] in the same conditions for maybe 16 hours that someone who’s incarcerated is in. It’s not fair for either one, by the way,” Andy Potter, founder of One Voice United, an advocacy group for correctional officers, said to the Observer. Aside from the death and debilitation that comes from prolonged exposure to high temperatures, an increase in heat has been linked to interpersonal violence, further perpetuating the tensions that already exist within prisons. The bill from Bryant is modeled after an existing rule within the Texas Administration Code that requires county jails to keep their facilities between 65 and 85 degrees. The law has stood since 1994. A night’s rest on the metal cot of the drunk tank is hospitable compared to the life-threatening conditions of a summer weekend spent in solitary.