News from the South - Texas News Feed

Will Dan Patrick’s Senate Stymie Fentanyl Test Strip Legalization (Again)?

Published

4 months ago

May 6, 2025

www.texasobserver.org – Jason Buch – 2025-05-06 08:00:00

On April 11, 2023, the Texas House voted 143-2 for a bill that would have legalized strips that test for the presence of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, only for the legislation to die without a hearing in the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.

Since then, at least 3,200 Texans have died from opioid overdoses, according to state data. A little more than a year after that House vote, in April 2024, at least nine people—that’s the official count, though the Texas Observer found it could have been as many as 12—died in just a few days in and around Austin, victims of a tainted batch of crack cocaine that caused dozens of fentanyl overdoses across the city. As the Observer reported earlier this year, legalized testing strips could have detected the presence of fentanyl in the adulterated crack, saving lives.

Now, this April 23, the House unanimously passed House Bill 1644, a similar measure that would legalize strips that check for fentanyl as well as xylazine, a non-opioid tranquilizer that has been found in the U.S. drug supply. That legislation is now exactly where its predecessor died, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, chaired by Senator Pete Flores, a Pleasonton Republican. Its supporters on both sides of the aisle are anxiously waiting to see if it fares better this session.

Current state law makes it a misdemeanor to possess any materials for drug checking. That can include things like advanced laboratory equipment, but advocates have focused on strips: little pieces of paper that look like take-home COVID tests and alert to the presence of certain drugs.

“They’re tools. These are testing strips. They’re not expensive. They’re incredibly effective and they’re drastically needed in our community,” said Eli Cortez, an organizer with Vocal-TX, an organization that advocates for reform on a wide range of issues including the war on drugs. “Having testing equipment so people know what’s in the substance they’re about to use is just so important right now.”

A test strip on a black background (Gabriella Angotti-Jones)

As the Observer previously reported, Texas has been slow to embrace practices associated with harm reduction, a broadly defined term for helping people who use drugs without stigmatizing or imposing strict parameters while also involving drug users in planning and implementation. The Observer’s investigation of the April 2024 overdoses in Austin found that many of those affected did not know they were consuming fentanyl. Though some Texas harm reduction organizations quietly distribute testing strips, their prohibition here limits what funds can be used to purchase them, and government agencies like Austin-Travis County EMS, which was instrumental in the response to the tainted crack, cannot distribute them. And in an atmosphere in which drug use is highly stigmatized, local officials did not share with the public information that experts said could have prevented additional overdoses. Though Texas has lagged behind other states in facilitating access to naloxone, the overdose reversal drug commonly sold as Narcan, the state government, along with Austin and Travis County, has recently ramped up distribution. Its widespread availability undoubtedly saved lives in Austin.

The year the testing strip bill failed, 2023, was the deadliest for overdoses in Texas history: More than 5,000 people perished of overdoses from all types of drugs, according to state data. (Researchers say Texas probably undercounts overdose deaths because most counties rely on poorly trained justices of the peace to handle death investigations.) Last year, Texas partly followed the national trend of overdoses decreasing. From July 2023 to July 2024, Centers for Disease Control numbers showed overdoses nationally falling nearly 17 percent, whereas Texas saw a smaller 4 percent decrease.

The liberal bastions of Oregon and Washington, which have taken less punitive approaches to addressing overdoses, saw slight increases in overdoses. Texas leaders have attributed this to the tough-on-drugs approach they’ve embraced. But researchers and harm reductionists say that when a new drug hits the market in a region, overdoses almost inevitably spike, then recede as health workers and people who use drugs adapt. They say Texas is lagging behind the rest of the country to implement policies, like the testing strip bill, that would save lives.

November 2023 to November 2024 CDC numbers show Texas has made more progress reducing overdoses with a nearly 15 percent decrease, but it still didn’t keep up with the nationwide decrease of 26 percent. Washington and Oregon, meanwhile, showed significant turnarounds with decreases of 12 and 20 percent.

The prevalence of naloxone and people adjusting how they use drugs are likely part of why overdoses are falling. A darker explanation looms as well: Many people who were most at risk of a fentanyl overdose have passed away.

“People are getting better and better over time at safer using practices,” said Claire Zagorski, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin who’s worked in harm reduction for years. “And the denominator is changing. People are dying and we have fewer people being exposed to these high-risk drugs.”

That means the narrowness of Oliverson’s bill may limit its utility. “Over the years, this is going to keep changing,” Zagorski said. “It’s going to be less fentanyl and more something else.”

But the bill’s supporters say giving people who use drugs and public health workers a better idea of what’s in the supply will still save lives, even if some would like to see all forms of drug checking legalized. Fentanyl remains a huge issue, especially for people who don’t regularly use opioids. And while xylazine is a big problem in other states, researchers in Texas don’t believe it’s widespread here—yet.

What the testing strip bill’s chances of passing are this time around is unclear. Lege watchers say that some Republicans in the Senate—generally run as a tight ship by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick—remain opposed to any legislation around drug use that isn’t enforcement-focused.

Flores, the Criminal Justice Committee chairman, hasn’t given a hearing to an identical Senate bill referred to his committee back in February, even though it has bipartisan support. One of that bill’s authors is Senator Bob Hall, an Edgewood Republican who rose out of the Tea Party movement in 2014. Oliverson, an anesthesiologist and the legislation’s House shepherd two sessions in a row, has staked out far-right positions on other issues. But their conservative bona fides haven’t been enough to get their bills a hearing before Flores, who didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“Obviously people use drugs,” Oliverson said during an April hearing of the House Public Health Committee. “I wish they didn’t. I want to be clear that I’m not somebody who supports the idea of illicit drug use, but we live in a country, we live in a world, where drug addiction is a mental illness, and I want everyone to get treatment for it. But I can’t treat you when you’re dead.”

The post Will Dan Patrick’s Senate Stymie Fentanyl Test Strip Legalization (Again)? 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

The content leans center-left as it emphasizes harm reduction strategies for drug use, such as legalizing fentanyl testing strips, which are often supported by progressive and public health-oriented perspectives. It criticizes the slower legislative response in Texas, a conservative state, and highlights bipartisan support for these measures while noting resistance from some Republicans. The article advocates for public health solutions over punitive approaches, aligning with center-left views on drug policy reform and prioritizing saving lives through evidence-based interventions.

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News from the South - Texas News Feed

Trump delays mercury pollution rule, helps Texas power plants

Published

15 hours ago

August 27, 2025

Staff Editor

feeds.texastribune.org – By Elena Bruess, Capital & Main – 2025-08-27 05:00:00

By Elena Bruess, Capital & Main

Aug. 27, 2025

“Texas power plants and chemical companies benefit as Trump eases pollution rules, experts say” 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.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

The nonprofit publication Capital & Main produced this article. It is co-published with permission.

For Donna Thomas, smokestacks are a typical sight from her home in Fort Bend County. Since she was a child, she has seen the coal and natural gas-powered W.A. Parish Generating Station puff clouds of haze during the day and light up brightly at night. The facility — which has been around since 1958 — is both part of the background and all she thinks about.

Thomas is not alone. For decades, residents have expressed concerns over the pollution emitted from the Parish coal plant — a separate facility from the natural gas plant — and called for its closure. The plant, located about 30 miles southwest of downtown Houston, is ranked by Texas environmental regulators as one of the worst polluters in the state for certain hazardous emissions. These include mercury, a toxic heavy metal particularly harmful for children and pregnant people.

This year, mercury has been top of mind for environmental activists and residents like Thomas. In April, President Donald Trump announced an exemption for companies from implementing stricter Biden-era mercury regulations for two years. Of the 163 eligible coal plants, 11 are in Texas and six have been approved, including Parish’s operator, NRG Energy. In Missouri and Illinois, five coal plants have been exempted, and in Pennsylvania, all 12 of the coal plants seeking approval have been approved.

Then in July, Trump exempted chemical companies for two years from Biden’s 2024 HON Rule, a set of regulations that control hazardous air emissions from chemical plants called the Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.

The Trump administration determined the exemptions are in the country’s best interest and represent a burden on industry, and that the technology is not available to meet stricter regulations. Companies like NRG agree.

However, critics say the Biden administration’s 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards — called MATS for short — and the HON Rule were long overdue and the two-year delay in implementing them is merely a tactic to protect industry profit margins at the expense of public health.

Moreover, critics point out that the MATS delay may be giving companies the freedom to ignore toxic air emission rules until the Trump administration repeals the Biden-era regulations altogether. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump proposed a rule to eliminate the 2024 MATS rule completely.

The two rules together have set off alarm bells for experts and environmentalists in Texas, home to one of the world’s largest petrochemical sectors and 11 coal-powered plants. The exemptions will run from 2027 — when the Biden rules were supposed to take effect — to 2029.

“We know these rollbacks are not good for anyone, especially for those that are community fenceline,” said Thomas, also the founder and president of the Fort Bend Environmental — a grassroots organization focused on environmental justice. “We have around 1,000 homes within three miles of Parish, so that’s going to affect all of them.”

A two-year delay

The EPA has been working on stricter environmental regulations for chemical plants since the early 1990s. Only in 2020 did Biden’s EPA begin drafting new rules in earnest.

But owners of the chemical plants should not act so surprised, said Neil Carman, a former regulator for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

“The chemical industry has known for decades that this was all coming, but they don’t like rules, because it means they have to put on more pollution control and they have to do more leak inspections,” said Carman, now the clean air director for the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club. “These plants will always tell you safety first, safety first, but then you run into this thing called money.”

Of the 79 chemical facilities in Texas requesting exemptions, 15 have been approved, including 13 along the Gulf Coast and the so-called petrochemical corridor.

Carman pointed out that the heads of chemical companies have been in talks with Trump’s EPA since the election. In March, the administration announced that companies could apply for exemption from MATS, HON and seven other sets of emissions standards.

That same month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin met with Dow Inc. Chair-CEO Jim Fitterling to discuss regulations imposed by the Biden administration, according to public records and emails obtained by the Sierra Club.

In one email sent on March 17, Dow reps asked to discuss “clarity” on the EPA’s recent announcement that it will reconsider the HON rule and “Dow has met with the Office of Air and Radiation regarding an extension of the current compliance deadline, which is impossible to meet.”

In May, Zeldin met with Fitterling and other chemical company CEOs to discuss the industry at large. Then in July, Trump announced the exemptions for HON, including for two chemical plants in Louisiana and one in Seadrift, Texas, operated by Dow and its subsidiary Union Carbide.

In a statement to Capital & Main, a Dow spokesperson said that “safety and integrity are at the core of both companies’ operations” and the “extensions are appropriate and necessary to address the technical challenges and to ensure the continued safe and efficient operation of these facilities.”

Carman doesn’t buy it. He worked as an environmental regulator in Texas for 12 years. Even then, he said, companies never seemed to be able to find the budget to limit their emissions and chemical leaks. For him, it’s still the cost.

“A lot of these are old plants and so when they go in and do all this work,” Carman said, “they have to find a place where they’re going to put in new controls and they have to engineer it. They have to design it all. It’s months of planning, but these rules were out there. They knew they were coming. They just want two more years of delay.”

Limiting mercury

When the EPA implemented the 2012 MATS rule, mercury emissions dropped 86% — or four tons — in five years.

In 2024, Biden’s EPA approved a rule to strengthen MATS by tightening the emissions standards for mercury by another 70% and reducing pollutants discharged through wastewater from coal-fired plants by more than 660 million pounds per year.

The rule could prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths, 2,800 cases of chronic bronchitis and 130,000 asthma attacks, according to the EPA under Biden.

However, in April, Trump approved the exemptions for 47 coal-powered plants across the nation. As of mid-August, 70 are now exempted, including Parish.

“These rules were just so critically important to people’s health,” said Surbhi Sarang, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. The Trump administration “was doing this process that was just not transparent. I mean, there was no process. Whereas in rulemaking, there’s public comment. This is just like a presidential action that was kind of taken in a vacuum and then announced.”

In response to the exemption, Erik Linden, senior director of communications at NRG, said the time is needed and will be used to evaluate the technology for air quality systems and monitoring equipment for compliance.

“All existing MATS emission controls will be properly maintained and remain in service,” Linden said of the current MATS rules that began in 2012. The exemption would give NRG until 2029 to implement the changes.

However, in July, Trump’s EPA proposed eliminating Biden’s rule entirely by the end of the year. Interested parties had three weeks to submit comments, and the Environmental Defense Fund’s request for an extension was denied.

“Rule-making usually takes 12-18 months if not longer,” Sarang said. “They’re moving very quickly.”

All of this is alarming for residents living near industry. With the extent of the changes to environmental regulations coming down from the Trump administration, there’s a lot for Thomas, the Parish generating station neighbor, to process. But she hasn’t given up. Increasingly, Thomas is talking to her neighbors and fellow residents about fighting back.

This means sending letters to representatives in Texas and in Washington, D.C. Thomas said it pays to be loud.

Parish is “going to do the same thing it’s been doing,” Thomas said. “If the EPA does not put a stop to these [emissions] getting out, then everyone is going to pay for this with their lives and in their water and in their air.”

Disclosure: Environmental Defense Fund and NRG Energy have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

More all-star speakers confirmed for The Texas Tribune Festival, Nov. 13–15! This year’s lineup just got even more exciting with the addition of State Rep. Caroline Fairly, R-Amarillo; former United States Attorney General Eric Holder; Abby Phillip, anchor of “CNN NewsNight”; Aaron Reitz, 2026 Republican candidate for Texas Attorney General; and State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin. Get your tickets today!

TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/27/texas-trump-mercury-rule-mats-coal-power-plants-pollution/.

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 Trump delays mercury pollution rule, helps Texas power plants appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content focuses on environmental regulations and critiques the Trump administration’s rollbacks of Biden-era pollution controls, emphasizing the potential public health risks and environmental justice concerns. It highlights the perspectives of environmental activists and regulatory experts who advocate for stricter pollution standards, while portraying industry and the Trump administration’s actions as prioritizing economic interests over health and safety. This framing aligns with a center-left viewpoint that supports stronger environmental protections and regulatory oversight.

News from the South - Texas News Feed

It's a love story: Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce announce engagement

Published

1 day ago

August 26, 2025

Staff Editor

www.kxan.com – Addy Bink – 2025-08-26 12:17:00

SUMMARY: Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce are engaged, announcing it on Instagram with a photo of Kelce proposing in a garden and showcasing Swift’s dazzling “Old Mine brilliant cut” ring. The couple, both 35, began dating in 2023 after Kelce attended Swift’s Eras Tour. Despite early challenges, including Kelce’s unsuccessful attempt to give Swift a friendship bracelet with his number, their relationship blossomed. Swift has supported Kelce at numerous games, including two Super Bowls, while Kelce frequently attends her concerts. Their relationship has garnered massive media attention and was featured in ESPN’s documentary “The Kingdom.” Kelce’s parents praise their bond as genuine and deserving.

Read the full article

The post It's a love story: Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce announce engagement appeared first on www.kxan.com

News from the South - Texas News Feed

We're excited for National Dog Day!

Published

2 days ago

August 26, 2025

Staff Editor

www.youtube.com – KHOU 11 – 2025-08-26 07:44:49

SUMMARY: To celebrate National Dog Day, the studio welcomed three dogs: Mac, Sandy, and Leo. Sandy sports a playful lipstick kiss from Kim Castro, while lively one-year-old Leo kept everyone entertained. The dogs’ owners, also producers, shared that it’s usually breakfast, walk, or nap time for them. The studio enjoyed the furry therapy vibe and encouraged viewers to treat their dogs with special offers from PetSmart (buy one, get one 25% off on treats), Lazy Dog Restaurant and Bar (coupon with dog bowl and entree), and free Puppuccinos from Starbucks. Viewer-submitted dog photos added to the joyful celebration of our furry friends.