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AUSTIN (THE TEXAS TRIBUNE) – In legislative hearings after last year’s July 4 floods, the state’s emergency management chief made some recommendations to state lawmakers. They included empowering the agency to vet volunteers who show up after disasters and establishing clearer guidelines for local officials to decide whether to do autopsies during mass casualty events.

There was another glaring problem that Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd told legislators about: Unlike paid firefighters and police officers, the state has no required training for all local emergency management coordinators, the people tasked with planning for and helping to lead the response to disasters.

“I do think it’s time that we as a state decide there needs to be a baseline for people that get appointed into that position,” Kidd told lawmakers at a July 23 hearing focused on the floods.

Nine months later, in April, he told another state committee investigating the disaster: “To be an emergency management coordinator in the state of Texas, you need the signature of a mayor or judge. Period. That needs to change.”

Two bills meant to address that issue, and others Kidd highlighted, failed in the final special legislative session of 2025. And as the one-year anniversary of the disaster arrives, that lack of action means that leaders in Texas’ 254 counties, as well as all of its cities, can hire people with no formal training in the field.

After the floods, which left more than 130 people dead, state lawmakers required flood warning sirens to be installed in areas struck by the summer disaster that also have histories of flooding. In Kerr County, where the vast majority of deaths happened, six of the first eight planned sirens are in place.

Legislators also passed two camp safety bills, championed by the parents of 27 girls who died at Camp Mystic, which include requirements for camps to have more robust emergency plans and move cabins from flood-prone spots by rivers. Nearly 300 camps have been licensed under the new regulations, according to state data.

Legislators’ next opportunity to address Kidd’s recommendations — if they choose to — happens in January when they return to the Capitol for their regular session.

“We have work to do next session,” state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican from Lubbock who authored the failed bill to address licensing, said in the April hearing. “We just don’t have to start from ground zero.”
Absent leaders

Then-Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator William “Dub” Thomas was notably absent early on the morning of July 4. He’d been feeling badly since July 2 and taken the day off on July 3, according to his testimony to lawmakers. Legislative investigators later found no evidence that a representative of Kerr County dialed into a state emergency preparation call on July 3 to learn about potential storms over the holiday weekend.

County Judge Rob Kelly was at his Austin-area lake house for the holiday, he testified. According to the county’s emergency plan, in their absences, the judge’s role should have fallen to the most senior county commissioner, while the coordinator’s role should have fallen to someone designated by the judge.

The state legislative investigation concluded that the state’s “alerts and warnings effectively were disregarded by Kerr County officials, who were substantially absent from duty, and who failed to conduct effective local emergency coordination relating to summer camps in advance of the storm. As flooding began, the county judge was away and unaware, and the county’s emergency coordinator was sick and asleep in bed with no delegate at the watch while the entire tragedy unfolded.”

Amid a series of increasingly urgent National Weather Service alerts that night, a 911 call came in from upstream on the Guadalupe River’s south fork at 2:52 a.m., warning the river was rising high and fast. The flooding started its precipitous rise around that time in Hunt, where the north and south forks of the river meet. It peaked around 6:45 a.m. downstream in Kerrville, the county seat, according to US Geological Survey data.

As the morning wore on, county law enforcement helped lead the response. Text messages among a group that included a number of Sheriff’s Office officials, obtained through an open records request by the Texas Newsroom and shared with The Texas Tribune, reveal some issues they faced. The text thread included Thomas.

By 7:18 a.m., the sheriff’s office leaders and others were working through where to send evacuees. At 9:15 a.m., they were texting about where to stage media and, at 9:40 a.m., where to stage resources. Later in the morning, they considered whether to set up a hotline or email for families to report missing relatives.

“It’s very common in the middle of a response for there to be a lot of back and forth and for people to be confused where resources are, how things are changing and evolving in the moment,” said Samantha Montano, an associate professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. “That’s really why you want to have an emergency manager, somebody who is overseeing all of that and funneling correct and updated information out to the people who need it.”

According to his resume, Thomas had spent much of his career moving up the ranks of the Texas Highway Patrol and had spent less than two years working as regional preparedness manager with the local American Red Cross when he took the Kerr County job in 2015. Thomas had completed various state and federal training courses related to emergency management before the flood, county records showed.

Thomas retired from his post at the end of March, according to county records. Kelly, the county judge, did not seek reelection this year.

County commissioners hired Shorey Harmon, the Texas Division of Emergency Management’s liaison officer for Kerr and Bandera counties, to replace Thomas.

Harmon had earlier served in the U.S. Navy and worked for Texas Parks and Wildlife and Texas A&M Forest Service, according to his resume, then became a TDEM cadet in 2022 — attending what the resume described as “the first-ever emergency management academy in the United States for training in all-hazards emergency preparedness and response.”
A developing field

The emergency management field is relatively young, with beginnings tied to Cold War concerns about nuclear war, said Romeo Lavarias, lecturer at the University of Central Florida’s emergency management program. The field has developed because emergency management became more complicated and expensive, involving much more than the immediate disaster response, Lavarias said.

A recent study from Argonne National Laboratory found that an emergency management director’s professional background could matter greatly. The study found most local directors had worked in the field more than 10 years and that nearly a third of them were between 50 and 59 years old.

As one person told the researchers: “In our agency, the director position has historically been occupied with people with no formal training in emergency management (myself included).”

In 2024 in Florida, lawmakers passed a new law for all county managers to have minimum emergency training.

“We haven’t got a choice anymore,” Lavarias said. “With the nature of hazards we’re dealing with here, their drastic impacts on everyone, the complications of politics, of social (issues) and economics, it’s going to take a heck of a lot more than what we’ve got going for us.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump reshaped this year’s U.S. Senate map by sidelining some Republican incumbents and promoting loyalists to replace them. Now the question is whether he’ll put his money where his mouth is.

With four months to go until November’s elections, it’s still unclear how much MAGA Inc., the country’s largest political war chest with $382 million in the bank as of last month, plans to spend on key races. The silence has persisted even as Senate Republican leaders have urged Trump’s team, both privately and publicly, to pick up the tab for the president’s decisions.

Front and center is Texas, where Trump successfully endorsed fiery conservative Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn, a choice that some Republicans grumble has turned a safe election into a toss-up that will drain resources away from other battlegrounds. Democratic nominee James Talarico, a state lawmaker, has made Paxton’s history of corruption allegations a central target of his campaign.

“The president picked Paxton, and he’s got $350 million dollars,” Cornyn recently told Semafor. “I think he can spend his money.”

Another challenge has emerged in North Carolina, where Sen. Thom Tillis declined to run for reelection after feuding with Trump last year over healthcare spending. Trump backed Michael Whatley, his former handpicked chair of the Republican National Committee, to run instead, and Democrats hope to flip the seat with former Gov. Roy Cooper.

Some in Republican campaign leadership are expecting MAGA Inc. to pitch in for Whatley in North Carolina, where the state’s several metro media markets can be pricey.

Republicans will likely be able to count on generous support from well-funded official party committees, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this week should be allowed to make unlimited direct contributions to candidates’ campaigns. But even that sum falls short of what Trump has stockpiled in MAGA Inc. Even though the president is constitutionally barred from running again, he began raising money shortly after winning a second term, and he’s regularly held fundraisers at his resort properties where tickets cost $1 million per person.

James Blair, the former White House political director who left his government job to coordinate the president’s midterm efforts, was evasive in an interview with Sean Spicer, a former Republican spokesman who hosts a podcast.

“The president is going to expend substantial resources to win the midterms,” said Blair. “He cares deeply about the party winning.”

As a super PAC, MAGA Inc. can raise unlimited money from individuals and corporations. However, it is barred from coordinating with individual campaigns or national Republican committees, which adds to the sense of mystery surrounding its plans.

It’s been more than two months since Blair, along with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, pollster Tony Fabrizio and political adviser Chris LaCivita huddled at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria to discuss MAGA Inc.’s strategy.

The huddle was focused on assembling teams of vendors, such as advertisers, canvassing providers and digital media company leaders who had worked with the Trump team in key states during previous elections and who would be dispatched once plans were in place.

The president has spent much of the year waging a war of retribution against Republicans who have crossed him. He viewed Cornyn as insufficiently loyal, held a grudge against Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana for voting to convict him in an impeachment trial and assailed Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky as the “worst Republican Congressman in history.” All of them lost their primaries to Trump-backed challengers.

Cornyn’s loss weighs heavily on Senate Republicans, who suggest that Paxton could cost the party an extra $100 million to defend the seat.

Senate Leadership Fund, the principal super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, is still expected to spend money on advertising in Texas but not play a central role given its obligations elsewhere.

Democrats must net four seats to take the majority, and they see Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio as their best opportunities. The Senate Leadership Fund has already committed to spending $342 million across these four states, plus Iowa, Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire.

When Paxton came to Washington after winning the nomination on May 26, he had a cordial meeting with Thune focused on moving forward together, according to people with knowledge of the conversation who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Later that day, Thune suggested that Trump should be putting up money for a candidate whom Senate Republicans hadn’t asked for.

“We will do what we need to do to make sure the state stays red,” Thune told reporters. “But I’m certainly hopeful the president and the resources he can bring to bear will be engaged.”

“It’s going to be an expensive race,” he added.

DALLAS (AP) — Prosecutors say a video shows rapper Pooh Shiesty pressing for his release from fellow rapper Gucci Mane’s record label while an armed man blocks a door during an alleged robbery at a Texas music studio in January.

A court record shows the video was submitted as evidence in federal court in Dallas, where Pooh Shiesty and eight others have been indicted on kidnapping and extortion charges. Prosecutors say the victims were robbed at gunpoint after traveling to the city to discuss Pooh Shiesty’s recording contract with Mane’s 1017 Records.

The victims have only been referred to by their initials in court documents. One, R.D., is described as the owner of 1017 Records. Mane’s legal name is Radric Delantic Davis. The song “Crash Dummy,” which Gucci Mane released this spring, includes the lyrics: “I thought it was a business meeting, but it was a set up.”

The court document was filed by prosecutors in response to a motion Pooh Shiesty filed last month proposing home confinement, arguing that the evidence against him did not warrant keeping him in custody pending trial, as was ordered by a judge in April.

But prosecutors said in their filing that the motion from Pooh Shiesty, whose legal name is Lontrell Williams Jr., should be denied and that evidence against him was “extraordinarily strong.”

Prosecutors said they have the cooperation of all five victims and witnesses in the case and cellphone location data. There is also surveillance video placing the defendants at the scene, according to prosecutors, in addition to the video of the owner of 1017 Records being forced to declare that Pooh Shiesty was “dropped” from his label.

Prosecutors said in the filing that just before that video was made, Pooh Shiesty produced a printed contractual release for the record label owner to sign. The man initially refused but signed after Pooh Shiesty allegedly pointed an AK-style pistol his head.

Prosecutors also said BIG30, whose legal name is Rodney Wright, recorded the video with his cellphone while another defendant blocked the door holding a firearm that resembled an AK-47 style rifle.

According to prosecutors, Pooh Shiesty robbed the record label owner of about $450,000 worth of items including his wedding band, a watch, a pair of earrings and cash.

Prosecutors have said that at the time of the alleged confrontation, Pooh Shiesty was on home confinement for a prior firearms conspiracy conviction out of Florida and was required to wear an electronic monitoring device.

Attorneys for Pooh Shiesty and BIG30 did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Thursday.

Gucci Mane is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of trap music alongside fellow Atlanta rappers T.I. and Jeezy. He emerged in the mid-2000s with his breakout single “Icy” and went on to build a vast catalog.