Cities across Texas are finding ever more creative ways to regulate away property owners’ rights. For Texans who rent out their homes—whether through short-term platforms like Airbnb or long-term arrangements—local ordinances have created a maze of rules that bring uncertainty, high costs, and diminished freedoms. It wasn’t always this way. For generations, Texans opened their...
New data from the Bond Review Board (BRB) shows an alarming increase in Texas local debt. In fact, according to BRB’s latest estimates, which were secured using a Public Information Act request, the total amount owed by cities, counties, school districts, and special districts grew to a combined $499.7 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2024....
Winners & Losers Digital is back for 2025! Every Friday morning at 8:30 a.m., I join the Cardle & Woolley show, Talk 1370 Radio, in Austin where we discuss who made the list of Winners and who turned up on the Losers list for the previous week. Now that the ball has dropped and we...
As we ready for the start of the 89th Texas Legislature, one issue that have been circling the Capitol for several years is whether to expand casino gambling in Texas. Members have filed various bills over the years to test the waters, but there’s been very little movement so far. One thing that seems lacking...
Politicians are trying to shift the blame for California’s wildfires onto climate change, instead of their own policies. It’s fire season again in California and again, returning like the sunrise, politicians are blaming the extent of the fires on climate change. A representative example comes from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ X account, where he posts: “…Eight months since...
We all know that if you have something valuable, you need to protect it. We lock our houses when we’re away, and we put especially valuable items in safes. But it turns out that we’ve left the safe open and the door unlocked for one of the most important institutions in our state: the education...
On Tuesday, the Dallas Morning News’ editorial board shared a bit of bad news about Coppell ISD (CISD), a public school district located in the suburbs of north Dallas. According to the write-up: “Coppell school board members got a hard pill to swallow when their demographer projected lower-than-expected enrollment numbers for the next decade…[CISD] has...
If you’ve walked around a major city in the last year, chances are you’ve crossed paths with a self-driving vehicle. San Francisco, Phoenix, Nashville, and my hometown of Austin are just some of the places where robotaxis are taking off. But are they taking off with our autonomy? Lately, it seems like for every company...
School districts, the Democrat Party, and far-left advocacy groups have called for a radical change in the way we fund our public schools. Currently, school districts are funded based on the average number of students who show up each day in a school year, a system called average daily attendance or ADA. But some on...
January not only brings the new year and resolutions, but also new laws enacted by the 88th Legislature, which convened in 2023. Three of these new laws are big wins on the private property rights frontier. Beginning January 1, 2025, Texans will no longer have to purchase vehicle safety inspection stickers thanks to the passage...
Are Brownsville-area governments treating taxpayers well? To answer that question, I recently gathered data from several different sources—including the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index; Texas Comptroller of Public Account’s Tax Rates and Levies; and Texas Education Agency’s Student Enrollment Reports—to determine the 5-year growth rate of population...
Industry has a history of overpromising and underdelivering. Liberals are worried: Will President-elect Donald Trump succeed in killing the offshore wind energy industry? “I believe this is a tipping point for the offshore wind industry in America,” said Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, according to The Associated Press. “They have been given a glide...