Texas News in Brief
Texas Tribune Looks at Latest School Funding Bill
Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday signed into law a bill providing roughly $8.5 billion in new funding for Texas public schools, offering relief to districts for teacher and support staff pay, operational expenses, special education, educator preparation, early childhood learning and campus safety.
The new dollars in House Bill 2, which lawmakers have dubbed “historic” because it marks the largest one-time public education investment in recent memory, will arrive after years of stagnant funding. That includes 2023, when the state gave schools targeted money in areas like school security but left billions more on the table due to the political fallout over private school vouchers.
Abbott signed a $1 billion voucher program into law last month. The Legislature granted final approval to the 231-page public school funding proposal in the last days of the 2025 legislative session, which concluded on Monday.
“It’s time that we Texans collectively recast our gaze to Texas being ranked number one for educating the children of the great state of Texas,” Abbott said Wednesday during a bill signing ceremony at Salado Middle School, a campus located north of Austin where he was surrounded by cheerful students, educators and lawmakers.
Property-Tax Cuts on November Ballots
Voters will be asked to approve property tax cuts for Texas homeowners and businesses in November.
If voters agree, homeowners will see increased breaks on the taxes they pay toward school districts, with those above the age of 65 or living with disabilities seeing even bigger cuts, if Texas voters approve them in November. Business owners will get help, too, on the taxes they pay on their inventory.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a champion of tax cuts, said Friday he plans to sign the deal, one more procedural step before the fall election. Abbott urged voters to approve the increases.
“Never before has the Texas Legislature allocated more funds to provide property tax relief than they did this session,” Abbott said in a news release.
Texas lawmakers plan to put $51 billion toward cutting property tax cuts — maintaining ones enacted in previous years as well as enacting new ones — over the next two years. That’s a gargantuan figure, state budget analysts and some lawmakers worry will come back to haunt the state. Legislators tapped once-in-a-lifetime multibillion-dollar budget surpluses, the result of inflation and massive influxes of federal stimulus dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic, to pay for tax cuts in recent years.
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News From THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Legislature Takes Snacks, Cokes Away from SNAP Citing Health Concerns
AUSTIN — For years, Texas lawmakers have tried to stop food stamp recipients from purchasing snack food.
With support from the federal government, Texas’ first step to root out unhealthy foods from the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, or SNAP, will become reality after Senate Bill 379 from state Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, made it through in the last week of the legislative session.
It comes just four months after fellow Texan and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins signaled to states that the agency would green light measures that prohibit SNAP recipients from using their subsidies to buy certain foods.
The measure is likely to be signed quickly by Gov. Greg Abbott, who has already notified Rollins’ office he wants a waiver from federal rules to keep junk food from SNAP purchases. Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska have filed similar legislation and have been granted waivers.
But opponents of such measures say keeping unhealthy foods from only SNAP recipients — and not all Americans — ultimately penalizes poverty.
“On its face, it sounds fine, right? … Let’s restrict soda. Sodas are bad for everyone,’” said Amber O’Connor, food policy analyst for Every Texan, a left-leaning nonprofit research group. “Exactly. Sodas are bad for everyone. So, if we want to make Texas healthy again, let’s talk about those ingredients.”
Middleton’s original bill covered a wide range of snacks including sweetened drinks, cookies, chips and candy. But lawmakers from both chambers negotiated it down to only sodas and candy. A banned sweetened drink is defined as “a nonalcoholic beverage made with water that contains five grams or more of added sugar or any amount of artificial sweeteners,” but excludes fruit juices and milk beverages.
“The USDA’s stated purpose for the SNAP program is nutritious food essential to health and well being,” Middleton said when he presented the bill before the Senate Health and Human Services Committee in March. “The bottom line is that taxpayer-funded junk food turns into taxpayer-funded health care.”
Republican Push to Making Voting Harder Fails in Legislature
AUSTIN — President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have made it a priority this year to require people to prove citizenship before they can register to vote. Turning that aspiration into reality has proved difficult.
Trump’s executive order directing a documentary, proof-of-citizenship requirement for federal elections has been blocked by a judge, while federal legislation to accomplish it doesn’t appear to have the votes to pass in the Senate. At the same time, state-level efforts have found little success, even in places where Republicans control the legislature and governor’s office.
The most recent state effort to falter is in Texas, where a Senate bill failed to gain full legislative approval before lawmakers adjourned on Monday. The Texas bill was one of the nation’s most sweeping proof-of-citizenship proposals because it would have applied not only to new registrants but also to the state’s roughly 18.6 million registered voters.
“The bill authors failed spectacularly to explain how this bill would be implemented and how it would be able to be implemented without inconveniencing a ton of voters,” said Anthony Gutierrez, director of the voting rights group Common Cause Texas.
According to elections administrators and experts,voting by noncitizens is very rare. already illegal, and punishable as a felony, potentially leading to deportation, but Trump and his allies have pressed for a proof-of-citizenship mandate by arguing it would “improve public confidence in elections.”
Before his win last year, Trump falsely claimed noncitizens might vote in large enough numbers to sway the outcome.
In 2020, Trump falsely claimed the presidential election in America was “stolen” from him, and used that claim to fundraise hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters, despite offering no real proof in any U.S. courts.
‘King of the Hill’ Actor Slain at Houston Home
HOUSTON — Jonathan Joss, a voice actor best known for his work on the animated television series “King of the Hill,” was fatally shot near his Texas home, authorities said Monday.
Police were dispatched to a home in south San Antonio about 7 p.m. Sunday on a shooting in progress call. When officers arrived at the scene, they found the wounded 59-year-old near the street.
“The officers attempted life saving measures until EMS arrived. EMS pronounced the victim deceased,” San Antonio police said in a statement.
Joss’ husband, Tristan Kern de Gonzales, confirmed the actor’s death to The Associated Press in a text. The two were married earlier this year on Valentine’s Day.
In an email, San Antonio police did not immediately provide any information on what prompted the shooting.
In a statement, de Gonzales said he and Joss had previously faced harassment, much of it “openly homophobic.” Joss’ husband said the person who killed the actor yelled “violent homophobic slurs” before opening fire.
“He was murdered by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other,” de Gonzales said.
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News From THE TEXAS OBSERVER
Anti LGBT Bills Head For Governor’s Desk
A gay-rights group tracked 200 anti-LGTBQ+ bills through the legislature this year, more than any other state in any point in history.
A dozen of those bills were ultimately passed by the Legislature and have made it to Governor Greg Abbott’s desk or already been signed into law.
Those various bills could threaten to negatively impact queer Texans with restrictions targeting public schools and healthcare and new legal standards that could create unsafe environments for LGBTQ+ people, particularly children.
Jonathan Gooch talks about how this deluge of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation isn’t anything new (in 2023, legislators filed 160 such bills), but said that this session, the bills that gained the most traction tended to seem less overtly harmful.
“[The harmful provisions are] sometimes buried in other bills or deal with complicated policy areas that might not be immediately evident to queer people or allies across the state who are concerned about what’s going on,” Gooch said.
