News from the South - Texas News Feed
Gov. Abbott calls special session on flooding, redistricting
“Gov. Abbott orders special session on Hill Country flooding, redistricting, THC and unfinished GOP priorities” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday unveiled a jam-packed agenda for the upcoming special legislative session, calling on lawmakers to redraw Texas’ congressional maps and address several unfinished conservative priorities from earlier this year.
The governor, who controls the agenda for overtime legislative sessions, also included four items related to the deadly Hill Country floods over the July Fourth weekend, directing legislators to look at flood warning systems, emergency communications, natural disaster preparation and relief funding for impacted areas.
The flooding has killed more than 100 people, with more than 160 still missing in Kerr County alone.
Abbott’s call also includes redrawing the state’s congressional districts — following through on a demand from President Donald Trump’s advisers, who want to fortify Republicans’ slim majority in the U.S. House by carving out more GOP seats in Texas. Republicans in Texas’ congressional delegation have expressed unease about the idea, worrying it could jeopardize control of their current districts.
As expected, Abbott’s agenda for the session — scheduled to start July 21 — includes legislation to more firmly regulate THC products, such as new restrictions to keep them from children. Abbott had previously announced plans to take up the issue after he vetoed an outright THC ban that had been championed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
The ban on consumable hemp products that contain any THC easily passed the Senate, which Patrick oversees, then overcame scattered opposition in the House from a handful of Republicans who backed a proposal to more aggressively regulate the products instead. Abbott vetoed the bill last month, saying it would not have survived “valid constitutional challenges.”
A majority of Texans oppose a ban, according to a June statewide poll.
Abbott also included several high-profile and controversial conservative priorities that didn’t pass during the regular session, including proposals to ban cities and counties from hiring lobbyists to advocate for them in Austin; require people to use bathrooms that align with the sex they were assigned at birth; and crack down on the manufacturing and distribution of abortion pills.
More than 40 Republican lawmakers, including Patrick, signed onto a letter to Abbott in June asking him to include the abortion pill proposal on the special session agenda. Senate Bill 2880, considered the most wide-ranging legislation to crack down on abortion pills in the U.S., passed the Senate earlier this year but stalled in a House committee.
The so-called “bathroom bill” similarly failed to reach the House floor. An earlier bathroom measure also made it onto Abbott’s agenda for the 2017 special session, where it died under opposition from business interests.
The governor’s call to bar local governments from spending public money on lobbyists — a practice dubbed by critics as “taxpayer-funded lobbying” — has also failed to gain traction through multiple sessions, despite long-running support from conservative activists and a vocal contingent of GOP lawmakers.
Abbott is also directing lawmakers to reconsider a proposal to allow the attorney general to prosecute state election crimes. Texas’ attorney general does not have authority to independently prosecute criminal offenses unless invited to do so by a local district attorney, which the state’s highest criminal court has repeatedly upheld.
But after successfully unseating three members of the Court of Criminal Appeals in November, Attorney General Ken Paxton pushed the Legislature to carve out an exception for allegations of election fraud. The Senate passed one such proposal, but it didn’t clear the House. Abbott is asking lawmakers to reconsider the idea in the form of a constitutional amendment, which requires support from two-thirds of both chambers and voter approval in a statewide referendum.
State lawmakers meet every other year. They adjourned their 140-day regular session in early June. Special sessions can run for up to 30 days.
Since taking office in 2015, Abbott has called at least eight other overtime sessions, according to the Legislative Reference Library of Texas. He called four of them in 2023 — keeping lawmakers at the Capitol for almost the entire year — during a dispute over property tax cuts, border security measures and his push to create a private school voucher programs.
Other issues included in Abbott’s 18-item agenda are the creation of laws that would shield records accusing police officers of wrongdoing that are not substantiated; boost protections against title and deed thefts; and authorize political subdivisions to reduce fees for certain builders.
The brimming agenda lays the groundwork for the GOP-controlled Legislature to add to the variety of conservative victories recorded during the spring regular session. Already this year, Republican state lawmakers have created the school voucher program the Legislature failed to pass in 2023, mandated public schools to hang the Ten Commandments in classrooms and strictly defined man and woman in state records — a change that could have far-reaching implications for transgender Texans.
Many Republicans celebrated that Abbott was setting such an aggressive agenda. On X, Rep. Brent Money, a Greenville Republican, thanked the governor for including property tax cuts and shared a letter he and two dozen other Republican lawmakers signed this week asking for a “fundamental reset” of the property tax system.
Abbott did not spell out how far he wants lawmakers to go, calling broadly for legislation “reducing the property tax burden on Texans.” But he also included the option of “imposing spending limits on entities authorized to impose property taxes,” which includes cities, counties and school districts.
The agenda sparked immediate condemnation from some Democratic state lawmakers. Houston Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, blasted Abbott for pairing flood-related items with an agenda otherwise dominated by GOP priorities.
“Governor Abbott listed flood preparedness at the top of his special session call, but then buried it under a pile of cynical, political distractions,” Wu said in a statement, calling Abbott’s agenda a “stunning betrayal.”
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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/09/abbott-special-session-texas-redistricting-flooding-thc-abortion-pills/.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
The post Gov. Abbott calls special session on flooding, redistricting appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Right
The content primarily presents Governor Greg Abbott’s legislative agenda, focusing on conservative priorities such as redistricting to favor Republicans, stricter THC regulations, bathroom bills, abortion pill restrictions, and property tax cuts. The framing is factual and balanced, providing context from multiple perspectives, including opposition from Democrats and some Republicans. The inclusion of detailed information on GOP-led initiatives and conservative legislative efforts, alongside critical reactions from Democratic lawmakers, indicates a center-right bias that leans toward conservative policy positions but remains informative and relatively neutral in tone.
News from the South - Texas News Feed
Louisiana woman ‘blessed’ to be alive after being struck by lightning outside her home
SUMMARY: Rebekah Prevost of Baton Rouge was struck by lightning on July 3 while running from her vehicle to her home during a storm. The lightning hit a cedar tree near her house, traveled through the ground, up her foot, and exited her head. She sustained a broken jaw on both sides, a burn on her left hand, bruised knees, a ruptured ear membrane, a scalp injury, and burnt hair. Prevost was hospitalized for four days and is now recovering with ongoing pain and fatigue. Her recovery will take six to eight weeks, requiring rest and soft foods. A GoFundMe has been set up to assist with her medical expenses.
The post Louisiana woman 'blessed' to be alive after being struck by lightning outside her home appeared first on www.kxan.com
News from the South - Texas News Feed
Sheriff hints at ‘after action’ review, as records reveal warning of ‘worst-case flood event’
SUMMARY: Kerr County officials face scrutiny after the July 4 flash flood killed 95 and left 161 missing. Despite warnings, the county lacked sirens and effective alerts. Sheriff Larry Leitha promised an after-action review but provided few answers on emergency response timing. The county’s 2024 hazard mitigation plan, approved in April, acknowledged a likely flood event within three years and noted climate change risks. The plan emphasized improving warnings and evacuation but revealed many recommended actions, like a flood warning system, remain unimplemented. Officials said they did not anticipate the flood’s severity despite historical data and repeated floods in the area.
The post Sheriff hints at ‘after action’ review, as records reveal warning of ‘worst-case flood event’ appeared first on www.kxan.com
News from the South - Texas News Feed
Texas Counties Have Little Power to Stop Building in Flood-Prone Areas
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Camp Mystic, the private summer camp that now symbolizes the deadly Central Texas floods, sat on a tract of land known to be at high risk for a devastating flood.
Nearly 1.3 million Texas homes are similarly situated in parts of the state susceptible to dangerous floodwaters, according to a state estimate. A quarter of the state’s land carries some degree of severe flood risk, leaving an estimated 5 million Texans in possible jeopardy.
Yet, local governments—especially counties—have limited policy tools to regulate building in areas most prone to flooding. The state’s explosive growth, a yearning for inexpensive land, and a state far behind in planning for extreme weather compound the problem, experts said.
While cities can largely decide what is built within their limits, counties have no jurisdiction to implement comprehensive building codes or zoning that could limit people from living close to the water’s edge.
Camp Mystic and many of the other camps along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, where the disaster’s wreckage has been concentrated, were far outside city limits and any regulatory authority of the Kerrville City Council.
Some guardrails exist when it comes to building on flood plains. For property owners in flood-prone areas to tap federal flood insurance, localities have to enact minimum building standards set by the federal government. And counties can use a limited supply of federal dollars to relocate residents out of flood zones. However, those programs have had mixed success. Other programs to fortify infrastructure are tied to federally required hazard mitigation plans, which most rural counties in Texas do not have on file.
Keeping people out of the state’s major flood zones altogether is unrealistic if not impossible, experts in flood plain management and infrastructure said.
For one, it’s human nature to want to be near water—whether it’s to live or vacation there.
“Everybody is drawn to water,” said Christopher Steubing, who heads the Texas Floodplain Management Association. “It becomes challenging when you’re telling people what they can and cannot do with their property. It’s a delicate balance, especially in Texas.”
Families have flocked to Texas from more expensive parts of the country in search of a lower cost of living, moving to places more vulnerable to severe weather events like flooding and wildfires intensified by climate change, research shows.
The state’s population has mushroomed over the last decade, spurring a building frenzy in cities and unincorporated areas alike. The state’s total population has grown by more than 7 percent since 2020. Meanwhile, the Hill Country, which includes Kerr County, has grown by about 9 percent.
Kerr County has seen relatively little population growth in the last few years, said Lloyd Potter, the state’s demographer. But other parts of the Hill Country, including neighboring Gillespie County, have seen relatively steady population growth.
“It is a desirable area for retirees,” Potter said. “It’s beautiful, and it’s reasonably close to urbanized areas, so I think that (growth is) likely to continue.”
Some people don’t have a choice but to live in flood-prone areas, where land is typically cheaper. Often, cities and towns only allow cheaper housing like mobile and manufactured homes to go in places that carry a higher risk of flooding, said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies climate risk. When a weather disaster destroys a mobile home park, often it gets rebuilt right where it was, Rumback said.
“The only place you can build it is right back in the flood plain,” Rumbach said.
Determining what can be built on flood plains is largely left to local officials, who may feel uneasy about limiting what property owners do with their land—especially in a state like Texas, known for prioritizing personal liberty—for fear that doing so will harm the local economy or lead to retribution against them at the ballot box, experts said. Often, the aim is not to stop people from building there altogether, but to create standards that make doing so less risky. Even when places adopt new rules, development that predates those rules is often grandfathered in.
How strictly local officials regulate development in flood plains comes down to political will, said Robert Paterson, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture.
“Fundamentally, disasters are a human choice,” said Paterson, who specializes in land use and environmental planning. “We can choose to develop in relation to high risk, or we can choose not to. We can stay out of harm’s way.”
Texas adopted its first statewide flood plan last year. As more people move outside of the state’s major urban areas, cities, towns and counties have increasingly adopted flood plain management rules for the first time or enacted stricter ones, Steubing said.
“You have counties that are catching up and adopting standards, but the growth can happen a lot faster than we can get ordinances adopted,” Steubing said.
Even so, localities aren’t tackling development in flood zones quickly enough to keep up with the pace of massive weather disasters, Rumbach said, and states can’t afford to wait for every city and county to adopt stricter standards. State lawmakers, currently weighing what measures to take in the flooding’s aftermath, should consider ways to give cities and counties better tools to manage flood plain development, he said.
“States are the right level of government to do this because they’re close enough to their communities to understand what is needed in different parts of the state and to have regulations that make sense,” Rumbach said. “But they’re far enough away from local governments that we can’t have this race to the bottom where some places are just the Wild West, and they’re able to build whatever they want while others are trying to be responsible stewards of safety and lower property damage.”
There is evidence that some Texas cities are taking flood plain management seriously. Most parts of Texas saw relatively little development on flood plains during the first two decades of this century, according to a study published last year by climate researchers at the University of Miami and other institutions. But parts of the Hill Country like Kerr, Bandera, Burnet and Llano counties saw more flood plain development than other parts of the state, researchers found.
As the Hill Country population grows, people are increasingly finding themselves in harm’s way, said Avantika Gori, an assistant professor of civil and environmental at Rice University and flood expert. Local and state officials can make different decisions on how to develop around flood plains, she said.
“We can’t prevent extreme rainfall from happening, but we can choose where to develop, where to live, where to put ourselves,” Gori said.
The Hill Country, particularly the areas farther from the Interstate 35 corridor, is less developed. There could be a temptation to build more as part of the recovery.
Following the 2015 Wimberley flood, developers pressured regulators to allow for more building in the flood plain as the area’s population continued to grow, said Robert Mace, executive director and chief water policy officer of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.
“My advice is, a river is beautiful, but as we’ve all seen, it can be a raging, horrific beast, and it needs to be treated with respect,” Mace said. “Part of that respect comes from making careful decisions about where we build.”
A confluence of factors lead to structures being built on the flood plain, said Jim Blackburn, a professor of environmental law in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Rice University.
Lax regulations with loopholes that allow existing structures to remain on flood plains, out-of-date flood maps that do not show the true risks posed to residents and economic incentives for developers to build on seemingly attractive land near the water all encourage the development to continue, Blackburn said.
“I get it,” Blackburn said. “People want to be by the river. It’s private property, and we don’t like to tell people what to do with their private property, but there comes a point where we have to say we’ve had enough.”
The federal regulation of development on flood plains is largely done through the National Flood Insurance Program, which subsidizes flood insurance in exchange for implementing flood plain management standards. Under federal law, buildings on a flood plain must be elevated above the anticipated water level during a 100-year storm, or a storm with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. Local governments must implement the program and map flood plains. Local officials may impose additional building restrictions for building in these areas, such as the requirement in Houston that all new structures be elevated two feet above the 500-year flood elevation.
Kerrville last updated its rules overseeing flood plain development in 2011, according to the city’s website. A city spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.
Texas historically has been unfriendly to federal environmental regulation, which is viewed as excessive red tape that gets in the way of economic progress, Blackburn said.
That has led to the state being decades behind the curve in reacting to more frequent and intense rainstorms fueled by a warming climate. As temperatures on average go up, more water on the Earth’s surface is evaporated into the atmosphere, and the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. That extra moisture in the atmosphere creates more intense and frequent storms, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Additional development can also leave flood maps even further out of date as more impermeable surfaces replace natural flood-fighting vegetation, Sharif said.
A 2018 study authored by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and other UTSA researchers found that the 2015 Wimberley flood was worsened by new construction removing natural barriers to flooding, although natural causes were the primary drivers of the flood.
Experts said that the flooding in the less-developed Kerr County was likely not worsened in a significant way by development. Sharif did encourage the state to fund a study similar to the one he conducted on the Wimberley flood to allow regulators and residents to better understand how exactly Friday’s flood occurred.
Sharif also argued in favor of further investments in “impact-based forecasting.” That area of study combines regular forecasting with on-the-ground information about what the impact of that forecast will be and who is in harm’s way to provide clearer warnings to residents, or, in Sharif’s words, “What do 7 inches of rain mean for me as a person staying in a camp near the river?”
Many of the flood plain maps throughout the state are out of date, given the reality of more frequent and intense storms and continuing development, Blackburn said, and local officials face political pressures not to restrict new development with tougher building codes.
In 2011, the city of Clear Lake installed, then removed signs warning that a hurricane storm surge could reach as high as 20 feet in the city after concerns were raised that the signs were impacting property values.
“I think that tells us a lot,” Blackburn said. “We’re more worried about home sales than the safety of the people buying the homes.”
The post Texas Counties Have Little Power to Stop Building in Flood-Prone Areas appeared first on www.texasobserver.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This article primarily presents factual reporting on the challenges Texas faces with floodplain development and regulation, highlighting environmental concerns and the impact of climate change. The coverage emphasizes the need for stronger government intervention and regulatory tools at local and state levels, which aligns with a policy perspective generally favored by center-left viewpoints. The tone is measured and relies heavily on expert analysis without overt ideological language, but its focus on climate risks, critiques of lax regulation, and calls for proactive public policy suggest a moderate leaning toward environmental advocacy and government responsibility. It remains largely balanced, avoiding partisan rhetoric.
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