2009-2010 Legislators’ Guide to the Issues

January 31, 2009

The 2009-2010 Legislators’ Guide to the Issues is a comprehensive guide to the most important issues facing Texas in the upcoming 81st Session of the Legislature. Among the issues covered in this Guide are education, taxes and spending, health care, effective justice, private property rights, insurance, telecommunications, tort reform, energy, and natural resources.

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Fool Me Twice: Why the Texas Grid is Still Vulnerable to Winter Storms | Part 3: How Texas Can Solve Its Winter Reliability Problem

Part 3: How Texas Can Solve Its Winter Reliability Problem Five years after Winter Storm Uri, the ERCOT grid is still not ready for the next major winter storm. The first two installments of this series showed that demand has grown more than 20% since 2021 while firm generation capacity has barely budged, and the...

February 12, 2026

Energy & Environment

Fool Me Twice: Why the Texas Grid is Still Vulnerable to Winter Storms | Part 2: Projecting Winter Outage Risk Through 2030

Part 2: Projecting Winter Outage Risk Through 2030 As Texas approaches the five-year anniversary of Winter Storm Uri, the ERCOT grid faces growing vulnerability to winter power outages. This analysis projects that by 2030, the same type of storm that would cause approximately 12 hours of outages today could result in nearly 24 hours of...

January 29, 2026

Taxes & Spending

Assessing Tax Trends in the City of Austin

Does history suggest that property taxes are too high in the city of Austin? And, if so, have local decision-makers actively helped or hurt the situation? To help answer these questions, let’s review the city’s 2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) and gather four types of data—i.e., tax levies, local population, total tax rates, and taxable values—over a 10-year time horizon. Using these audited estimates, we can gauge the growth of government (i.e., tax levy trends), assess its reasonability...

February 19, 2026

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Fool Me Twice: Why the Texas Grid is Still Vulnerable to Winter Storms | Part 3: How Texas Can Solve Its Winter Reliability Problem

Fool Me Twice: Why the Texas Grid is Still Vulnerable to Winter Storms | Part 2: Projecting Winter Outage Risk Through 2030

Assessing Tax Trends in the City of Austin