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Texas Tribune: Updated: School Finance Ruling Favors Districts

Monday, 04 February 2013 16:44 | Last Updated on Tuesday, 05 February 2013 07:07 | PDF | Print | E-mail
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  • by Morgan Smithand Elena Schneider, The Texas Tribune

    • Updated, 3:43 p.m.:

    In a decision certain to be appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, state district Judge John Dietz ruled Monday in favor of more than 600 school districts on all of their major claims against the state's school finance system.  With a swift ruling issued from the bench shortly after the state finished its closing arguments, Dietz said the state does not adequately or efficiently fund public schools — and that it has created an unconstitutional de-facto property tax in shifting the burden of paying for them to the local level.

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    Texas Tribune: Lege Could Ban Drone Surveillance of Private Property

    Monday, 04 February 2013 09:10 | Last Updated on Tuesday, 05 February 2013 06:58 | PDF | Print | E-mail
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  • by Emily Ramshaw, The Texas Tribune

    • A drone, no bigger than a toy airplane, hovered north of the Texas Capitol, floating over the heads of lawmakers momentarily distracted from their morning meetings. Several of them gathered beneath it, faces tilted skyward, marveling over a pair of goggles that allowed them to watch live video of the drone’s panoramic bird’s eye view.

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    Texas Tribune: Texas Ethics Reform: A Long, Tortured History

    Saturday, 02 February 2013 02:04 | Last Updated on Saturday, 02 February 2013 15:59 | PDF | Print | E-mail
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  • by Jay Root, The Texas Tribune

    • Bidness as UsualBidness as Usual

    This is one in a series of occasional stories about ethics and transparency in the part-time Texas Legislature.

    There was no reason to suspect that the 1971 session of the Texas Legislature would be much different from the ones that preceded it.

    Gov. Preston Smith and Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes were coming off re-election victories. A fellow Democrat, state Rep. Gus Mutscher, of Brenham, was flexing his muscles as a second-term House speaker. Preparations for an elaborate January inaugural celebration, with a parade in downtown Austin and musical entertainment by Wayne Newton and Faron Young, were in full swing.

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    Texas Tribune: Whom does the lege really represent? Themsevles

    Sunday, 27 January 2013 17:17 | Last Updated on Monday, 29 November 1999 18:00 | PDF | Print | E-mail
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    Legislators Can Carry Bills That Benefit Them

  • by Emily Ramshaw, The Texas Tribune

    • Bidness as UsualBidness as Usual

    This is one in a series of occasional stories about ethics and transparency in the part-time Texas Legislature.

    Sen. John Carona, the founder of Associa, the nation’s largest homeowners association management firm, recalls facing allegations of conflicts of interest in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the Dallas Republican carried legislation aimed at governing such property owners’ groups.

    In 2001, he authored the state’s biggest homeowners association law to date, a measure he said provided a “property owner’s bill of rights” without weakening homeowners associations.

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    Texas Tribune: Prosecutors, Defense Lawyers Argue Over DNA Testing

    Saturday, 26 January 2013 07:52 | Last Updated on Monday, 29 November 1999 18:00 | PDF | Print | E-mail
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  • by Brandi Grissom, The Texas Tribune

    • Update, Friday, Jan. 25, 4:45 p.m.: A week after condemned inmate Larry Swearingen, who is set to be executed Feb. 27, requested DNA testing that he hopes will prove his innocence in the 1998 murder of a Conroe college student, his attorneys and state prosecutors are bickering over how and when the analysis should occur.

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