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Friday June 05, 2026
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SMITH COUNTY — A Tyler man has been taken into custody following an investigation that uncovered the theft of over $96,000 in hay and connected revenue. According to our news partner KETK, in February, Brandon Wiginton was arrested on charges of misapplication of fiduciary property and two counts of theft. He was subsequently booked into the Smith County Jail.
The investigation began in August 2022, initiated by the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association after they received a report about a business partnership that allegedly led to the theft of hay and revenue. The offenses were found to have occurred in Cherokee County and Smith County.
Read the rest of this entry »
SMITH COUNTY — A man was sentenced to prison on Tuesday after admitting to murder in connection with a deadly crash in Smith County. Jeremiah Munoz was sentenced to 37 years in prison following his guilty plea. Munoz was charged with murder on October 15, 2025, after a crash in Smith County resulted in the death of one woman.
According to officials and our news partner KETK, Munoz had stolen a Ford-250 truck he was driving before colliding with another vehicle, driven by Brandi Carter, on the intersection of FM 2015 and FM 16. When deputies arrived at the scene, they observed the truck facing south and the vehicle driven by Carter in a ditch. Carter was found dead beside her car.
Deputies conducted a sobriety test after detecting a strong odor of alcohol coming from Munoz. Munoz failed the sobriety test and stated he had a couple of beers. Munoz was arrested for intoxicated manslaughter, unauthorized use of a vehicle and three counts of possession of a controlled substance and transported to the Smith County Jail.
LONGVIEW – The Longview Kite Festival has been postponed until Friday because of expected storms moving through East Texas this week. The 5th annual Longview Kite Festival was originally scheduled to start at 12 p.m. on Wednesday at the Lear Park but will now be held on Friday to avoid a chance of severe storms on Wednesday.
The annual family-friendly festival welcomes thousands of East Texans to Lear Park for free kites, arts and crafts, games, live entertainment, food vendors and more. Longview Parks and Recreation said they would share any updates about the festival online.
SMITH COUNTY — The Smith County Sheriff’s Office is searching for a 31-year-old man accused of shooting a woman on Monday night. Deputies were dispatched on Monday at around 10:19 p.m. to Highway 69 near Joe Mea Road. They found a woman shot in the leg by Christopher Hatfield. The woman was taken to a local hospital and remains in stable condition, the sheriff’s office said.
Hatfield allegedly fled before law enforcement arrived. Investigators believe he may have been picked up by someone in a vehicle or may have made his way to a different area. He was last seen wearing all white and is considered to be armed and dangerous.
Anyone with information regarding Hatfield is urged to contact the Smith County Sheriff’s Office.
RAYMONDVILLE, Texas (AP) — A family whose two teen boys are in a nationally recognized mariachi band in South Texas was reunited Monday afternoon after bipartisan criticism that the Trump administration’s campaign for mass deportation overreached by detaining the family.
Brothers Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar, 18, and Joshua, 14, were detained along with their 12-year-old brother and their parents Feb. 25. The teenage boys were prominent members of the McAllen High School Mariachi Oro band, which has visited the White House, performed at Carnegie Hall and won eight state championships.
The two younger boys and their parents were released Monday from a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat who visited them, marking his third visit to the detention center.
Antonio was released on Monday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from a detention center in Raymondville, Texas.
“They were ecstatic. They were crying. They were excited to be reunited with their son and brother, Antonio, who was being held separately in Raymondville,” Castro said at a news conference in San Antonio. “But their mom kept asking, ‘What did we do wrong? We followed all the rules. We went to court, we haven’t done anything wrong.’”
The family had been checking in regularly with immigration authorities, as instructed, when they were detained, according to a relative and a girlfriend who organized a GoFundMe account for the family.
The Department of Homeland Security said the parents, Emma Guadalupe Cuellar Lopez and Luis Antonio Gamez Martinez, were arrested by immigration authorities and “chose” to bring their three children with them. The department said they entered the U.S. illegally in 2023 near Brownsville, Texas.
Efrén C. Olivares, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center representing the eldest son, Antonio, clarified that the family entered lawfully through the CBP One app, a legal pathway, in 2023.
Olivares said Antonio was released after attorneys filed a parole request with ICE which ICE granted, and attorneys did not need to ask for a judge’s order.
Elected officials from across the political spectrum voiced support for the family, who are from Mexico and had sought asylum in the U.S. and were going through their immigration proceedings.
“I challenge my colleagues to work together for new enforcement policies that not only secure our border but make safer communities and that ultimately are common sense,” U.S. Rep. Monica de la Cruz, a Republican congresswoman representing McAllen, in Raymondville after Antonio’s release.
McAllen’s Republican mayor, Javier Villalobos, said he supported the family and said he continues to advocate for “responsible pathways for law abiding individuals who want to contribute to our economy, support their families, and become productive neighbors in McAllen.”
U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called the family’s detention “outrageous.”
The boys’ mariachi directors visited the family held in Dilley earlier Monday. Alex Treviño, the mariachi director and Neri Fuentes, the assistant director, said the kids were concerned about losing their playing abilities.
“They were worried that their fingers weren’t going to work, because they don’t have instruments,” Treviño said.
Antonio, who had been held apart from the family due to his age, recently won the first chair for trumpet in a state competition.
“This year he’s going to be graduating from high school and going to college and joining some other groups in college. He wants to be a music educator,” Fuentes said.
Castro attributed the release of the family to an “ensemble” effort and said he continues to push for the family detention center in Dilley to be closed. He said the population at the detention facility had gone down from about 1,100 people in January to about 450 people, with about 100 of them being children.
(AP) – After two legislative sessions in which Republican lawmakers hammered universities as bastions of liberal indoctrination, campuses across Texas are restricting how race and gender can be taught and requiring instructors to present controversial subjects in a “balanced” way. At the University of Houston, some deans have taken the unusual step of requiring faculty to certify they “teach, not indoctrinate.”
Tensions on campus escalated when a five-page checklist instructing professors on how to review course materials was unveiled last month during a faculty council meeting.
Some professors say the checklist, coupled with the certification effort, reinforce what they see as a false premise: that indoctrination is widespread in university classrooms. They say the efforts pressure instructors to avoid controversial topics altogether.
University officials say the certifications are not required — even though some deans described them as mandatory, with one saying punishment was an option for noncompliance — and that the checklist is a draft that is optional for faculty use.
The officials say the reviews are part of efforts to comply with Senate Bill 37, a new state law that requires boards of regents at least once every five years to review the core classes all undergraduates must take to graduate and ensure they prepare students for civic and professional life. The law does not prohibit teaching of certain topics or require instructors to submit written assurances about their teaching.
In her annual State of the University address last fall, Chancellor and University of Houston President Renu Khator opened by warning that universities face mounting attacks and declining public trust.
“The landscape of higher education is changing fast,” she said, “The attacks — justifiable or not — are constant.”
Khator pointed to a 2024 Gallup survey that found public confidence in higher education had fallen to a record low, with only 36% of Americans saying they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in colleges and universities. A July 2025 update showed trust ticking up to 42%, the only major U.S. institution to see an increase regardless of party affiliation.
The certification requirement and checklist trace back to a series of messages and internal reviews that began late last year.
Language about indoctrination appeared in Khator’s Nov. 21 message urging “faculty colleagues” to review their course titles, syllabi and content, writing that the university’s “guiding principle is to teach them, not to indoctrinate them.” She also directed department chairs and deans to help provide an objective assessment of courses and asked the Provost’s Office and the Office of General Counsel to begin reviewing the core curriculum for compliance with SB 37.
In a Jan. 27 campuswide update, Khator said the SB 37 core curriculum review had been completed and would be presented at the March 12 meeting of the board of regents.
In early February, some deans began requiring faculty to sign written statements affirming they were teaching critical thinking, not indoctrinating students.
In a Feb. 3 email, Daniel P. O’Connor, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, said he had “no evidence” any instructor was violating the university’s academic commitment but described the acknowledgement as necessary “to document that all instructors are aware” of the expectations, review their courses, and make revisions as needed.
In email replies to O’Connor, some faculty declined to sign the acknowledgment, calling the premise of widespread indoctrination a “straw man.”
Using language drafted by the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, faculty wrote that signing the acknowledgement could be construed as “some admission of guilt concerning these false accusations.”
“I have never engaged in indoctrination and … take offense, as a scholar, at such insinuations,” the emails said. “To have them paired with insinuations that I might have done otherwise … seems like it would bind me to admission of guilt for doing something that I have not done.”
The emails also asserted that administrators lack the authority to require faculty to sign the acknowledgment or punish them for refusing.
Two other UH deans — Heidi Appel of the Honors College and Yarneccia D. Dyson of the Graduate College of Social Work — also described the certification as required in emails to faculty. Both cited language stating SB 37 requires that courses “do not endorse specific policies, ideologies or legislation,” wording that appeared in earlier drafts but was removed before the law was passed. In a message to Honors College instructors, Appel wrote that full-time faculty who declined to sign the acknowledgement would be ineligible for merit salary increases, while part-time faculty — many of whom work on semester- or year-long contracts — could risk reappointment. She gave them a deadline of Feb. 9.
O’Connor, Appel and Dyson did not respond to an email containing detailed questions and a follow-up phone call.
Robert Zaretsky, who has taught at UH for 36 years and holds a joint appointment in the Honors College and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, declined to sign.
“When I saw the word indoctrination, for me, that’s a red line,” he said. “It was as if there was a good chance that we are indoctrinating our students.”
Zaretsky said he felt able to refuse because he has tenure, but he worried the policy could pressure instructors and adjunct faculty who “have bills to pay and don’t have job security.”
Amid disagreements over the acknowledgments, instructors got their first look at the draft checklist during a Feb. 11 meeting of the faculty council’s curriculum committee. The document asks faculty to rate their courses “yes,” “partially” or “no” on whether they require students to adopt a particular political or ideological viewpoint, present multiple perspectives and avoid requiring students to express their personal beliefs or penalizing them for those beliefs.
According to faculty members present at the meeting, the agenda said nothing about the checklist, with committee members saying they were not involved in drafting it.
University officials said the checklist was written by a faculty group, but they have declined to name participants or explain how members were selected.
The confusion over the document’s origins comes as SB 37 also reshaped faculty governance at public universities. Faculty senates have traditionally operated as independent bodies elected by professors. The new law requires boards of regents to establish any faculty council or senate and allows university presidents to appoint members.
Zaretsky said he first saw the checklist when it circulated among faculty on a private email list after the meeting. He said it could complicate classroom instruction, particularly the recommendation that faculty present multiple perspectives on controversial topics.
“Our students struggle with even one article,” he said. “To have them read multiple articles … it’s going to sink the course. It’s too much ballast.”
In a March 2 letter, 174 UH professors who are members of AAUP urged the faculty council to formally vote on the checklist rather than allow it to move forward without a recorded position.
The professors argued that nothing in SB 37 prevents the faculty council from voting and warned that failing to do so would amount to “silent approval of the administration’s actions.”
“We understand the pressures you are under, and we understand how difficult this moment is. Nonetheless, we prevail on you to be courageous and accurately represent the sentiments of the faculty at this critical juncture,” the letter said.
The dispute has also prompted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to write to the university and argue that requiring faculty to affirm they present multiple perspectives or avoid certain viewpoints could violate First Amendment protections for academic freedom. University officials disagreed, saying the guidelines were drafted by faculty for voluntary use and that no mandatory affirmations or enforcement mechanisms exist.
Dona H. Cornell, UH’s chief legal officer, said in a letter responding to FIRE that the broader course review is intended to demonstrate the strength of the university’s academic standards.
“Our comprehensive, transparent review of all courses is intended to publicly verify what our faculty and alumni already know: that a UH education is built on the highest standards of excellence,” she wrote.
Documents reviewed by The Texas Tribune show the review process has already led to revisions in at least one course in the Graduate College of Social Work.
In November, Dyson, the college’s dean, sought volunteers to review 12 spring courses and offered a stipend as compensation.
By mid-December, faculty scheduled to teach those courses were sent revised “approved” syllabi for the spring semester. The revised syllabus for one class cut several readings focused on race, gender and sexuality and removed more explicit references to those topics from the course’s objectives.
The controversy at UH is part of a broader wave of scrutiny across Texas public universities. After SB 37 took effect in September and a video of a Texas A&M professor discussing gender identity sparked backlash from leading conservatives, public university systems moved to preempt further criticism by reviewing and revising courses.
Texas State University flagged hundreds of courses for review and told faculty to use an artificial intelligence tool to revise titles, descriptions and learning outcomes in favor of more neutral language.
At Texas Tech, the chancellor created a review process requiring certain instruction on race and gender to be disclosed, and, in some cases, approved before it can be taught.
Texas A&M regents approved a policy restricting courses that address “race or gender ideology” without written approval, while University of Texas regents adopted a rule requiring campuses to ensure students can graduate without studying what they describe as “ unnecessary controversial subjects ” and to take a “broad and balanced” approach when those topics arise.
McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The detention by U.S. immigration authorities of two teen brothers who were prominent members of a nationally recognized mariachi band in South Texas has triggered bipartisan criticism that the Trump administration’s campaign for mass deportation has overreached.
Brothers Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar, 18, and Joshua, 14, were detained along with their 12-year-old brother and their parents Feb. 25, according to a relative and a girlfriend who organized a GoFundMe account for the family. The family had been checking in regularly with immigration authorities, as instructed, when they were detained, the relative and girlfriend said.
The teenaged boys were prominent members of the McAllen High School Mariachi Oro band, which has visited the White House, performed at Carnegie Hall and won eight state championships.
Antonio was released Monday afternoon. Neither he nor his attorneys commented to reporters they left a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Raymondville, Texas. The other four family members were being held at a separate detention center for families in Dilley, Texas.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
Elected officials from across the political spectrum voiced support for the family, who are from Mexico and had sought asylum in the U.S. and were going through their immigration proceedings.
“The Gamez-Cuellar family’s story breaks my heart. South Texans know better than anyone that we can secure our border and still treat people with dignity — these are not competing values,” said Rep. Monica de la Cruz, a Republican congresswoman representing McAllen.
McAllen’s Republican mayor, Javier Villalobos, said he supported the family and said he continues to advocate for “responsible pathways for law abiding individuals who want to contribute to our economy, support their families, and become productive neighbors in McAllen.”
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, visited the four family members at the detention center in Dilley, near San Antonio on Monday.
Castro had visited the facility before when he advocated for the release of a 5-year-old from Minnesota, Liam Conejo Ramos, and his Ecuadorian father.
U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called the family’s detention “outrageous.”
“This family followed the rules, showed up to their immigration appointment in good faith, and is now being torn apart by ICE, with their 18-year-old son separated from his parents and younger brothers,” he said.
OVERTON – The American Brahman Breeders Association has named the AgriLife Research Brahman cattle program in Overton as their Breeder of the Year for 2025. According to our news partner KETK, the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Overton has operated a Brahman cattle breeding program since 1974 as a way to improve Brahman cattle through scientific research and testing.
The breeding program’s 200 Brahman herd helps AgriLife researchers collect long-term data on the Brahman breed’s reproduction, temperament, grazing, feed efficiency and carcass merit. The data they collect from the herd is then submitted to the Brahman Herd Improvement Registry, which shares their information with cattle producers and researchers around the nation.
TYLER — A Smith County court judge has extended the probation for Patrick Mahomes Sr. by two years on Monday. Mahomes Sr., was arrested earlier this year for allegedly violating his probation from a conviction for driving while intoxicated.
According to our news partner KETK, the defense said, Mahomes Sr. should be “out by today” after the state of Texas retracted the claim that he was drinking and driving during his probation. Instead, the state said it was only an event in his SCRAM device. Today meaning Monday.
The court approved the dismissal and the following changes have been granted to his probation: Read the rest of this entry »
CORPUS CHRISTI (AP) — The imminent depletion of water supplies in Corpus Christi threatens to cut off the flow of jet fuel to Texas airports and other oil exports from one of the nation’s largest petroleum ports, triggering potential shockwaves through energy markets in Texas and beyond.
Without significant rainfall, Corpus Christi is headed for a “water emergency” within months and total depletion of the system next year, according to the city’s website. “The impacts are going to be felt tremendously through the state, if not internationally,” said Sean Strawbridge, former CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, the nation’s top port for crude oil exports, in a 40-minute interview Thursday. “This should be no surprise to anybody. We were talking about this over a decade ago.”
Other current and former officials, alarmed at what they call a lack of preparations, have suggested the potential for an economic crisis involving mass layoffs, disruption of fuel supplies and billions of dollars in emergency spending to avoid an evacuation of the city.
Strawbridge, who now lives in Houston, laid the blame on city leaders, citing “their lack of experience, their lack of knowledge, their lack of recognizing the risks” in a bumbling, decade-long endeavor to build a large seawater desalination plant that would veer the region off its clear course toward calamity.
“They’ve found themselves in quite a dire predicament as a result of those poor decisions,” Strawbridge said. “Time is up.”
A spokesperson for Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo declined interview requests, citing “prior commitments,” and did not respond to follow-up questions. City manager Peter Zanoni also did not respond to questions. Instead, Corpus Christi public information manager Robert Gonzales provided an emailed statement.
“The water shortage in the Coastal Bend is the result of a historic five-year drought,” it said. “Currently, the City of Corpus Christi has $1 billion in City Council-approved and funded water projects underway to address our water needs. The City remains committed to ensuring water security for the more than 500,000 residents and our commercial and industrial customers.”
Depletion of this region’s reservoirs would lead to “controlled depression” for the local economy, “mass unemployment” and “industrial total shutdown,” according to a two-page report by Don Roach, former assistant general manager of the San Patricio Municipal Water District, which supplies many of the region’s large industrial water users.
That includes refineries operated by Flint Hills Resources, Valero and Citgo that provide jet fuel to Texas airports and meet much of the state’s daily demand for gasoline.
“This waiting disaster is under the radar for the rest of the state,” said Roach, who worked 20 years at the water district and retired in 2014. “We hear nothing from the Texas politicians about the seriousness of the situation or any state plan to mitigate it.”
He no longer had access to current water data and contracts, he stressed, but produced the report based on his own knowledge. It said the costs of trucking in emergency water “would bankrupt many local small businesses and low-income households” while state emergency managers would need billions of dollars to “build emergency temporary pipelines or subsidize desalination barge rentals to prevent a total evacuation of the city.” Strawbridge, a former director of the Port of Long Beach, said Roach’s assessment was “spot on.”
Corpus Christi faces an imminent water crisis after a decade of city government failures, according to several former officials. Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
“No time to panic”
Zanoni, the city manager who has overseen Corpus Christi’s descent toward water depletion since 2019 and receives a $400,000 salary, rejected notions of imminent disaster during a press conference Thursday, when Lake Corpus Christi, one of the city’s main reservoirs, dropped below 10%. The press conference took place three days after Inside Climate News asked the city for comment about the impending water crisis.
“I think we are going to get through this,” he told TV cameras as he stood before the dwindling remnants of the lake. “We have confidence in what we’re doing. This is no time to panic.”
Zanoni, who holds a master’s of public administration from Florida State University, said the city had “worked tirelessly over the past months to bring everything that we humanly and possibly could to forgo what could be this supply and demand issue.”
“Now we’re going to focus, with the city council and the region, on being prepared in case supply doesn’t meet demand,” he said.
“The best-case scenario, that assumes some level of rain, has this lake here going to about the early fall,” said Zanoni, who indicated that the summer months would give the city enough time to boot up its portfolio of new groundwater water projects.
Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni at a press conference on March 5, 2026, when Lake Corpus Christi, one of the city’s main reservoirs, dropped below 10% full.
James Dodson, a former director of Corpus Christi’s water department who retired this year as a private consultant and was involved in several of those projects, disagreed. He said residents and officials “are crazy not to be panicking.”
“It’s the very worst scenario that I’ve ever seen,” said Dodson, who oversaw a historic expansion of Corpus Christi’s water supply in the 1990s. “It’s going to be an economic disaster.”
For years, he said, the city dismissed repeated opportunities to develop groundwater import projects as it maintained a singular and fruitless focus on desalination. That includes projects that the city only recently scrambled to get started. Dodson doubted any will materialize in time.
“They’ve been kicking the can down the road for a long time and they’ve finally run out of road,” said a current regional water official who requested anonymity to preserve a working relationship with the city. “They’re looking at projects to do that they should have done five, six, seven years ago.”
The last hope to avert disaster, the official said, was a 20- to 30-inch rainfall.
“It would basically have to be a hurricane,” he said.
A spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Andrew Mahaleris, didn’t address specific comments about an impending water catastrophe or disruption of the state economy. In an emailed statement, he said: “Corpus Christi is an important economic driver not only for Texas but also the nation. The State of Texas has made significant investments into ensuring the Corpus Christi area has the water resources it needs to serve citizens and industry alike.”
He added that the governor “will continue working with the legislature to ensure Texans have a safe, reliable water supply for the next fifty years.”
“I wouldn’t say that it’s a disaster”
Mere months remain, according to Corpus Christi’s online water dashboard, until the city enters a “Level 1 Emergency,” which begins 180 days from projected depletion of water supplies. Functional failure of the water system, or “dead pool,” will occur before total depletion.
In a level one water emergency, the city’s plans call for an immediate 25% curtailment of water consumption. But city planners are only beginning to discuss what that would even look like and still haven’t determined how they would implement it.
“We can’t close and open everyone’s valves,” said Nick Winkelmann, chief operating officer of Corpus Christi Water, in an interview at city hall last week. “One way to enact water restrictions is through pricing.”
The region’s largest industrial users, which collectively consume the majority of the region’s water, remain exempt from emergency curtailment. These multi-billion-dollar refineries, petrochemical plants and liquified natural gas facilities are built to run at a steady rate and can’t simply throttle down production in accordance with water availability. They consume large volumes of water primarily in cooling towers to prevent excessive heating and explosions.
Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, a plastics production facility operated by Exxon Mobil and Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, started operations in 2022 and is the largest water consumer in the
“It has not gone as smoothly as it should have,” said Bob Paulison, a member of the Texas Chemistry Council, director of the Coastal Bend Industries Association and architect of the desalination project. “There are a lot of reasons for why that happened.” He said he worked on desalination for 12 years, but the projects got bogged down by political fights, administrative processes, the COVID pandemic and “a tug of war which has resulted in very slow progress.”
“I wouldn’t say that it’s a disaster,” he said of the current situation, expressing faith that the city would complete new water projects before supplies run out. It was “too early” to assess when that could happen, he said.
Presented with Roach’s report, Paulison expressed a longstanding respect for the veteran water manager and said, “It looks like it’s very dire, more dire than we’ve been looking at.”
“We’re relying on the model that the city has put together,” Paulison said.
Regarding a potential shutdown of the entire refining and petrochemical complex, he said, “that could certainly shut down at some point, but we don’t see that happening in the early stages.”
Asked about plans to develop alternative jet fuel supplies for Texas airports in the case of a shutdown, Paulison said, “I’m sure that someone somewhere is working on that.”
Charles McConnell, a former assistant energy secretary with the Obama administration, wondered why concrete plans hadn’t been prepared.
“Did it take them all the way to yesterday to figure out they’re going to run out by the end of the year?” he said. “That’s pretty pathetic.” McConnell, who now teaches at the University of Houston, doubted that a shutdown of Corpus Christi’s industrial sector would have acute or long-lasting impacts beyond Texas. New producers would fill the gap, while new pipelines and supply chains would bypass the city.
“It’s a surprise to me that none of those refineries and industries down there have their own desal plants,” said McConnell, who worked 31 years for the chemical manufacturer Praxair in Houston. “They’re using municipal water, for Christ’s sake!”
An iron ore plant behind a playground at Simpson Park in Portland, near Corpus Christi, on March 4, 2026. Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
Rapid expansion followed the shale boom
The roots of this situation stretch back more than a decade, to the period of rapid downstream industrial expansion that followed the shale revolution in the oilfields of Texas. Strawbridge joined the Port of Corpus Christi Authority in 2015, as a surge of major industrial projects sought to build in the area. Even then, Strawbridge said, everyone knew Corpus Christi needed more water.
In January 2016, Abbott traveled to Israel, where he toured the world’s largest seawater desalination plant and met with Israeli officials to discuss desalination.
Later that year, an industry group called H2O4Texas, with sponsors including Dow, Chevron and Marathon Oil, hosted an event in Corpus Christi. “They were basically saying because of the growth in the Coastal Bend, we were gonna need desalination,” said Isabel Araiza, then a professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, who attended the event.
That was the first that Araiza, a Corpus Christi native with a Ph.D. from Boston University, had heard of desalination. She said she was at the meeting for a different reason, finding it strange how many business and political leaders were there.
The oil and gas industry wanted to build enormous projects in the region, processing oil and gas from Texas’ shale fields into myriad fuels, chemicals and plastics before loading them onto tankers for export.
In March 2017, then-city manager Margie Rose sent a letter to ExxonMobil, the world’s largest private oil company, that said, “because the City aggressively protects water resources for the future by implementing a matrix of supply strategies, we feel that we have sufficient water supplies to meet your needs.”
Six days later the city requested funding from the Texas Water Development Board to study feasibility and do preliminary design of a seawater desalination plant.
Around that time, Strawbridge said, “it became very clear to the port authority that there was a difference of opinions as to how much water was available and how much would be needed to continue to attract large industrial investors.”
“The city felt that it had enough water to last, based on its forecast, until 2040,” Strawbridge said. “We, the port authority, had a very different view of what that demand curve looked like.”
That’s when the port began developing plans for its own desalination plant, he said.
In 2018, a new, interim city manager, Keith Selman, promised another large volume of water to Steel Dynamics, which then built a steel mill in the area.
The emerging solution: four desalination plants
That same year, Corpus Christi created a program exempting the region’s largest industrial water users from water curtailment restrictions during drought for a fee of $0.25 per 1,000 gallons. The city said it would use the money to fund the development of a new water source. The city’s water reservoirs were two-thirds full at the time.
In 2019, the city’s staff presented the city council with a plan to build a seawater desalination facility. Exxon had taken up the city’s offer for water and planned to build a massive plastics plant called Gulf Coast Growth Ventures in partnership with Saudi Arabia’s national oil company. It would be the largest water user in the region, consuming as much as all city residents combined.
“Large increases in water demand are projected to occur in 2022,” said a presentation authored by Paulison and given to the city council by then-Assistant City Manager Mark Van Vleck. “To meet expected water demand, we need to move forward with the procurement of a seawater desalination plant now.”
The plant would produce 10 million gallons per day, cost $140 million and take two years to build, the presentation said. It needed to begin supplying water by the start of 2023. The council voted unanimously to move forward.
By 2020 the size of the proposed plant had doubled. “We were recognizing that we’re going to need more water,” said Roland Barrera, a city council member who has served since 2018. “If we want to expand our economy, then we have to recognize that’s the way to go.”
As the scale of the situation came into focus, the city proposed a second desalination plant, and the port also proposed two.
Encarnacion Serna, a retired chemical engineer, explains a diagram and calculations he made of one of the city’s desalination projects. Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
Sounding the alarm
That’s when Encarnacion Serna, a retired chemical plant operations manager, found out about plans for one of those plants just up the shore from his waterfront home on Corpus Christi Bay.
Serna, an engineer who had worked on reverse osmosis water systems for Valero and Occidental Chemical, reviewed the project’s application. What he saw, he said, astounded him: flimsy assumptions, unrealistic estimates and missing information.
A facility of that scale, he knew, would require railcars full of pretreatment chemicals, create a mountain of sludge waste every day and consume a tremendous amount of electricity. But he didn’t see serious plans for any of that, he said.
He dug deeper into the desalination boom and quickly saw what was going on: Politicians and businessmen had oversold their water supply, he said, and were scrambling for more as shortages approached. But none of them had any idea what they were doing, Serna remembered thinking as he reviewed the applications.
“I’ve been trying since 2020 to let them know how catastrophic this is going to be,” he said in an interview at his home. “They’ve acted with a profound ignorance.”
Serna, a father of four who worked his whole life at chemical plants in Texas, didn’t think any of the proposals would produce as much freshwater as projected, come online as quickly as expected or cost as little as any of the applications stated. These were not going to solve the crisis that officials had teed up, he believed.
In calls, emails and public comments to city and port officials, Serna raised the alarm at what he saw unfolding. He felt brushed off and soon stopped receiving responses.
Serna knew that chemical plants and refineries can’t just throttle down water consumption at will. The multi-billion-dollar facilities are meant to operate consistently at a steady state with a set inflow of water. Changing that balance raised risks of explosions. The whole region was skidding toward catastrophe, Serna thought at the time, with no realistic solution in sight.
In 2022, Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, the Exxon-Saudi partnership, began to draw water while the desalination facility meant to supply it still didn’t even exist on paper.
Strawbridge, then CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, insisted a private desalination operator should build and run a large facility that could sell its water to the city. But the city wanted to operate its own. Strawbridge considered the location of the city’s project unsuitable. Both sides said the other took steps to undermine the project.
Meanwhile, veteran local scientists rejected envrionmental studies from developers claiming the massive discharge of brine from the plants wouldn’t turn the coastal bays and estuaries into hypersaline wastelands.
“I’ve read the engineering studies,” said Paul Montagna, an endowed chair at the Harte Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, in a 2022 interview with Inside Climate News. “And I just don’t get it.”
Environmentalists organized against the plants. Araiza, the college professor who attended the first desalination meeting, had become a leader among groups that were fighting desalination as a means to resist the onslaught of petrochemical projects in their area, which they saw as wealthy, outside interests swooping in to hijack their resources, institutions and environment.
“They really thought it was just going to be a yes,” she said from her office at Del Mar College, beneath a poster of Che Guevara. “I think we helped slow things down.”
Barrera, the city council member, started to feel uneasy as controversy and constant turnover on the council seemed to leave them unable to push the project forward.
“I’ve been accused of being a fearmonger,” he said in an interview at his office in downtown Corpus Christi. “Now everybody’s scared.”
Encarnacion Serna, at his home on Corpus Christi Bay in March, spent years trying to warn local officials that they were steering the region toward disaster. Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
It all falls apart
Strawbridge took an entourage of about 30 Texas lawmakers, businessmen and lobbyists to Israel in November 2022 to visit desalination facilities “to see that it is possible to solve for our water issues,” he said.
Strawbridge encouraged the lawmakers to support the port’s development of a private desalination plant, which he said was urgently needed to cover for the failures of the city. But he drew public outrage from city officials when he applied for state funding for a facility that struck them as a competitor to theirs.
Strawbridge said the trip to Israel ultimately led the Texas lawmakers to pass legislation in 2023 that created the state’s $1 billion water fund.
But the trip, not disclosed to the public at the time, ultimately ignited a scandal that led to Strawbridge’s resignation when an investigation by KRIS 6 revealed that the port, which is not a taxing entity, spent more than $200,000 taking the crew to Israel. The station described “a pattern of lavish spending” on that trip and in prior port activities.
Strawbridge earned $750,000 in the prior year and had expensed an average of $10,000 per month on food and alcohol, including parties. One day later, Strawbridge resigned, but maintained that all expenses were incurred properly through his work representing the port.
In an interview, he characterized the report and scandal as “a hit job” by political opponents and “an effort to hasten my departure from the Port.”
“They used the expenses from the Israel trip as a basis for smearing my good name, although the trip ultimately proved fortuitous for the state and its water funding,” Strawbridge said. “Ultimately an independent audit of the previous five years of my expenses found absolutely no irregularities or departures from policy. But of course that wasn’t covered by KRIS 6.”
That year, 2023, was the hottest on record in Texas. Water levels in Corpus Christi reservoirs continued to plummet as the drought intensified. Desalination had moved to the center of Corpus Christi’s public conversation. Local politicians spoke for or against it while activists flocked to city council meetings and permit hearings.
“Blessed be the environmentalists,” said Serna, the retired engineer. “But 90% of them don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”
In January 2024, Corpus Christi City Council produced a new cost estimate for its proposed desalination plant of about $550 million to produce 30 million gallons of freshwater per day.
“These numbers are ridiculously low, fraudulent and deceitful,” Serna wrote in an email to city officials.
By that time, Serna was angry. The subject line of his email read: “The Legacy of the Imbeciles.”
Where was the city even getting this cost estimate from, he asked, if it “does not have engineering and construction drawings.”
“All the city has at this time are deficits and bills incurred by lunatics in the millions of dollars already spent in the pursuit of this Scam project with nothing tangible on hand yet,” Serna wrote.
Later that year, a new cost estimate put the project at nearly $760 million. Another estimate, in July 2025, said $1.2 billion.
Two months later, Corpus Christi City Council, dominated by newly elected members and unable to stomach the cost, voted to cancel the project after a rancorous, 12-hour public meeting that broke repeatedly into yelling from the audience.
By then, the Port of Corpus Christi Authority also handed off one of its desalination projects to the nearby Nueces River Authority and mothballed another.
Corpus Christi city leaders expressed optimism over plans to quickly pipe in groundwater from the Evangeline Aquifer about 20 miles away. But when users of that water, like the small city of Sinton, requested in February 2026 that an administrative law judge review Corpus Christi’s groundwater permits, hope faded for a timely solution, other than hurricane-scale rainfall.
“Let the shit hit the fan,” said Serna. “Let dog eat dog.”
What does he think will happen to Corpus Christi? In time, he said, the refineries and chemical plants will probably build their own water projects, somehow, and possibly restart their facilities that they will have to mothball in the meantime. For residents, he said, life might be like it used to be for him, 70 years ago, as a boy in the Rio Grande Valley, when he would hang plastic jugs on mesquite branches and carry them on his shoulder to ask nearby companies for water.
“This is the legacy of the imbeciles,” he said.
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(AP) – Thunderstorms ripped across Oklahoma prairies Thursday night as severe weather was expected to intensify Friday and bring the threat of powerful tornadoes to multiple states in the nation’s heartland.
Powerful storms were forming Friday afternoon from North Texas all the way to Michigan, where a tornado warning was issued southwest of Kalamazoo. There were no immediate reports of any tornado on the ground.
In an eerie scene captured on video Thursday, a first responder drove straight at a storm near the western Oklahoma town of Fairview, where flashes of lightning illuminated a giant funnel that appeared to reach the ground. That storm, among the first outbreaks of severe weather on the verge of the spring storm season, was filmed by a camera mounted on the deputy’s car.
Nearby, a 47-year-old woman and her 13-year-old daughter from Fairview were found dead in a vehicle near an intersection of a highway and a county road at about 10 p.m. Thursday, authorities said. The crash “appears to be tornado related,” Sarah Stewart, a spokesperson for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, said in a statement.
“Severe weather struck Major County last night and tragically claimed the lives of a mother and daughter,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement Friday. “I am praying for the family as they grieve this tragic loss, as well as all those impacted by the storms.”
The National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma, planned to send out a damage survey crew Friday to see whether Thursday night’s storms were confirmed tornadoes, meteorologist Ryan Bunker said. “As of right now, we’re still investigating that.”
Storms could be even more intense Friday, as more than 7 million Americans are at the highest risk of severe weather in an area that includes the metropolitan areas of Kansas City, Missouri; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Omaha, Nebraska, according to the national Storm Prediction Center. Nearly 25 million people are at a slightly lesser risk in a zone that includes Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Severe, scattered thunderstorms are expected Friday afternoon and evening from areas of the Plains states to the Ozarks and Midwest, the National Weather Service said.
“The greatest potential for a few strong tornadoes and very large hail should exist across eastern portions of Oklahoma/Kansas/Nebraska into western Arkansas/Missouri and southern Iowa,” it said.
The general setup for the strong storms is a clash between warm air streaming north from the Gulf Coast and cooler Canadian air behind cold fronts, according to meteorologists with the private forecasting service AccuWeather.
“This is probably our first real event this season where people are really starting to pay attention getting into the spring storm season,” said Melissa Mayes, deputy director of the Washington County Emergency Management Agency in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, north of Tulsa.
The spring storms in the forecast come near the start of what many call tornado season, which generally begins at different times in different parts of the U.S. Experts recommend a few simple safety steps to take before tornadoes hit, including having a weather radio and a plan for where to take shelter.
Meanwhile, parts of the Northeast were under winter weather advisories as rain, snow and slush made for a messy morning commute from Pennsylvania to Maine on Friday. Several vehicle slide-offs were also reported on the Maine Turnpike as drivers contended with sleet and snow.
Some schools canceled or delayed classes in states including New Hampshire and Maine.
The weather began to ease at midmorning in some areas, but Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut remained under weather advisories. In Ohio, flood warnings were issued in the southern part of the state.
In parts of the southern U.S., the weather pattern is also expected to usher in extremely warm temperatures for this time of year by the weekend.
“Temperatures will be 20-30 degrees above average, with 80s reaching as far north as parts of the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic,” federal forecasters wrote in their long-range forecast discussion. “Daily records could become widespread.”
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HOUSTON (AP) – In 2020, Raysall Wiggins decided she no longer wanted to rent a home in the Houston neighborhood where she grew up. She wanted to buy.
“I wanted to have something of my own, something that I could eventually pass down to my children,” said Wiggins, who has two teenage sons. “My parents never had that, and I wanted something different for my own children.”
Wiggins, who works in health care, put in multiple offers on homes in Houston’s Acres Home neighborhood. But more times than not, she was beaten not by another family, but by an investor or company, her real estate agent said.
“It’s devastating to continuously go through the same thing, for a person to constantly be told, ‘no’ or ‘we didn’t get it,’” Wiggins said. “It’s a complete letdown.”
President Donald Trump highlighted Wiggins’ story as he pressed lawmakers at his State of the Union address to bar so-called institutional investors, large corporations that buy homes, as well as investors big and small, from purchasing single-family homes.
Trump blamed investors for “stealing away her American Dream.”
Homeownership is viewed as the most accessible way for Americans to build wealth. By that measure, the idea of corporations owning homes is offensive to Americans, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, an online real estate brokerage. Going after them carries populist appeal.
But, she and other housing economists said, such a prohibition does not attack the root of the nation’s housing problems.
“Declaring a ban on institutional investors works as a political talking point,” Fairweather said. “It works in terms of it emotionally resonating with people who understand the problem but don’t necessarily understand what the right solution is. The real solution, which is to build more homes in the places that people most want to live, is much harder for the President to achieve.”
Republicans, including Trump, and Democrats, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have sought to cast blame on Wall Street and other kinds of investors driving up home prices and making it too hard for would-be first-time homebuyers out of the market.
They’ve sought ways to give first-time homebuyers a leg up in the housing market. Trump signed an executive order in January aimed at discouraging federal agencies from facilitating sales of homes to large institutional investors. Trump called on Congress during his State of the Union address to make that ban permanent. Senators are expected to vote on a bill this month that would limit firms from owning more than 350 single-family homes.
Texas officials, too, have shown an appetite — including Gov. Greg Abbott and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat challenging Abbott in this year’s gubernatorial race — to curb investors from buying up too many homes.
Kicking Wall Street out of the housing market, housing economists argue, wouldn’t blunt the country’s affordability problems — and could make the problem worse.
For one, estimates show large institutional investors own only a small percentage of the nation’s stock of single-family homes — between 1% and 3%. Investors have pulled back considerably since the height of their activity during the pandemic and are now selling more homes than they buy. Those homes aren’t just sitting there — they’re rented to tenants who may not be able to afford to purchase them.
“When you ban institutional investors, you’re potentially banning the people who might not otherwise have access to local schools in single-family neighborhoods or other amenities in those neighborhoods,” Fairweather said. “That reinforces income segregation and racial segregation.”
The primary driver of the nation’s high housing costs, experts have argued, is a deep shortage of homes to buy or rent. By various tallies, the nation is short millions of housing units. Texas, in particular, needs 319,500 homes of all kinds, according to one oft-cited estimate. Banning institutional investors from buying homes, or at least making it more difficult for them to do so, would do nothing to create more homes.
“If you stop them from buying, will it result in more housing construction? No,” said Edward Pinto, co-director of the AEI Housing Center at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Low rates led to rush of investors
Institutional homebuying took off during the COVID-19 pandemic as low-interest rates and high housing demand made owning a home an attractive investment. At one point, they bought one in nearly every 10 homes sold nationwide, according to figures provided by ATTOM Data Solutions, which tracks property transactions and real estate data.
Investors bought even more homes in Texas during the same period. Institutional investors bought 68,482 homes across the state in 2021, or 14.2% of all homes sold in Texas that year, ATTOM figures show. ATTOM defines institutional investor purchases as “residential property sales to non-lending entities that purchased at least 10 properties in a calendar year.” In 2019, such investors bought 26,735 — some 7% of homes sold in Texas that year.
The Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin regions emerged as particular hot spots for investor homebuying in 2021 and 2022.
Institutional buyers significantly ramped up their presence in the Houston region’s home-buying market just as Wiggins began her hunt for a home. In 2019, institutional investors bought fewer than 4,500 homes in the Houston area, ATTOM data show, some 5.3% of all homes sold there that year. Two years later, they bought more than 15,000 — and accounted for more than 13% of sales.
With that influx came a flurry of anecdotes of would-be homebuyers getting outbid by one corporation or another.
Kim Gartner, a Fort Worth real estate agent, said it was common during the pandemic for investors of all sizes to beat out her clients for homes. Often, corporate buyers, she said. Some buyers stuck it out, putting in offers on multiple homes before finally securing one, Gartner said. Others gave up.
“They got frustrated and didn’t feel like they could compete, so they just kind of decided to hold off,” said Gartner, who is secretary and treasurer at the Greater Fort Worth Realtors Association.
There’s no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes an institutional investor. A corporation that buys a single-family home could be a major company that owns tens of thousands of homes or a mom-and-pop landlord that owns one or two homes.
Whatever their size, investors own very few of the state’s single-family housing stock, estimates show.
Less than 1% of Texas’ single-family housing stock is owned by corporations that own 100 units or more as of June 2025, according to estimates from the American Enterprise Institute. Smaller landlords who own between two and nine properties own about 13.2% of the state’s single-family homes, while owners with 10 to 99 homes hold about 1.8% of the stock.
It’s not clear whether institutional investors ultimately have any effect on home prices, housing policy wonks said.
A home renovated by an institutional investor will likely rent for more than it did before that investor bought it, said Daniel Oney, research director at the Texas Real Estate Research Center. But he said he hasn’t seen convincing evidence that investors have driven the state’s housing prices upward.
“We see a role for (institutional investors), and regulating them may not actually have that big of an impact on home prices,” Oney said.
But tales of would-be buyers’ struggles to purchase a home when matched against a Goliath investor have garnered sympathy from Texas lawmakers, who in 2023 sent a bill to Abbott’s desk compelling the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University to keep track of institutional buyers’ activity in the state’s housing market.
Abbott vetoed the bill among a slew of bills he vetoed to try to force Republican legislators at the time to reach a deal to cut property taxes.
The following year, he called on state lawmakers to rein in Wall Street homebuying when they convened in 2025.
“I strongly support free markets,” Abbott wrote in a post on X. “But this corporate large-scale buying of residential homes seems to be distorting the market and making it harder for the average Texan to purchase a home.”
Lawmakers left Austin last year without touching the matter. Hinojosa, who has pushed bills targeting investors, reintroduced a similar measure to track investor activity as well as one to prevent them from buying a home for at least 30 days after it first hit the market. Neither went anywhere.
“Making housing affordable in Texas starts with holding private equity and institutional buyers accountable,” Hinojosa wrote in a Facebook post in December. “As governor, I will do just that — make it easier for working Texans to buy a home.
An Abbott representative did not directly answer questions about the governor’s stance on banning institutional investors, referring a reporter to his past comments. Hinojosa’s campaign did not return requests for comment.
A slight edge
The U.S. Senate this week advanced a bill aimed at easing the nation’s housing affordability crunch. Within that bill is a provision banning large investors from owning more than 350 single-family homes. That doesn’t count homes in build-to-rent developments, subdivisions of single-family homes intended for tenants.
The bill includes a provision that requires companies to sell those build-to-rent homes within seven years, Bloomberg News reported. Builders and a coalition of housing advocates, including the group Dallas Neighbors for Housing, have called on lawmakers to strike that language from the bill.
Would-be homebuyers might gain a slight competitive edge should officials pass laws to force those homes back onto the for-sale market, some experts acknowledged, because supply would be increased. But that injection of supply wouldn’t be big enough to put a real dent in home prices, they argue. What’s more is that supply infusion in the for-sale market would bite into the country’s rental supply, which plays a role in the country’s overall housing ecosystem. Rents could go up as a result.
Depending on the scope of whatever law gets passed, an institutional investor may wind up selling their home to a smaller investor, not a homebuyer who wants to live there, housing experts noted.
Instead of targeting Wall Street, housing experts said officials should focus on ways to allow more homes to be built like speeding up local permitting processes, allowing smaller homes on smaller lots and a wider array of housing types like duplexes, townhomes and smaller apartment buildings in places that now only allow single-family homes. Housing advocates are fond of noting that firms with a large portfolio of single-family homes have said that they’re less profitable in places that allow more homes to be built.
The power to enact those kinds of changes largely rests with states and cities, not the federal government — and those kinds of changes often face pushback from existing homeowners. But policymakers at the federal level could pass measures encouraging states and local governments to allow more homes to be built, housing experts said.
Texas lawmakers enacted several measures, which Abbott signed and Hinojosa voted for, to boost the state’s housing supply last year like allowing smaller homes on smaller lots in some places and apartments in commercial areas in the state’s biggest cities. Austin officials, too, have relaxed a slew of local regulations in recent years to allow more homes to be built, but few other major Texas cities have.
There are additional solutions.
When Wiggins finally purchased her home in 2023, she bought it through the Harris County Community Land Trust, which uses a method housing advocates have touted to help lower-income families secure affordable homeownership. Under the program, Wiggins owns the house but the trust owns the land underneath, which lowers the overall cost of the home — an arrangement Wiggins said she has mixed feelings about. But the setup allows her to build equity and pass the home down to her kids, Wiggins said.
“It was another way of still obtaining the dream,” Wiggins said.