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Environmental regulators in Texas issued an emergency order on Tuesday evening suspending requirements for the drought-stricken city of Corpus Christi to release water from its reservoir system in support of coastal wetlands.

On the same day, Corpus Christi lifted restrictions on watering lawns that had been in place since 2024, when its reservoirs remained below critical levels until a dramatic rebound in July.

“The city has chosen lawns over the bay,” said Larry McKinney, a former senior director of aquatic resources for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department who lives in Corpus Christi. “Without freshwater inflows, the bay becomes basically a giant sewage treatment pond.”

The emergency suspension of requirements for environmental flows is the latest episode in a fight over water that has consumed Corpus Christ, an industrial hub on the semi-arid South Texas coast, during years of intensifying drought. 

Corpus Christi hasn’t released water into the Nueces River Delta and Nueces Bay since 2024 while its reservoirs remained below 30 percent full, the trigger point for environmental flows established in a 2001 administrative order by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. 

Epic rainfall in July refilled the Nueces River reservoirs above 40 percent, but Corpus Christi delayed releasing water and requested a suspension of the rule.

“Without emergency relief, Applicants could be required to release as much as [11.9 billion gallons] of inflows,” the city wrote.

The TCEQ granted Corpus Christi’s request on Tuesday, suggesting that the region’s water crisis isn’t over yet. 

“Although the reservoir system is above recent lows, long-term data and weather forecasts suggest a return to critical levels is foreseeable,” wrote TCEQ Executive Director Kelly Keel in the Aug. 25 emergency order. “The region is not expected to experience relief from persistent drought conditions and drought conditions are expected to worsen.”

If below-average rainfall continues, reservoirs could fall back below 30 percent in April next year, said Corpus Christi Water Chief Operating Officer Nick Winkelmann in a presentation to City Council on Tuesday. 

Regardless, the city opted to lift restrictions limiting automatic sprinkler system use to once weekly, which had been in place since March 2024. 

“Why do we have to let the residents suffer? They want to water their grass,” said City Council member Eric Cantu at a City Council meeting last week. “Let them water their grass.” 

Lawn watering accounts for nearly half of municipal water consumption in the summertime in Texas, according to the Texas Water Resources Institute at Texas A&M University. 

Cantu suggested that restrictions on sprinkler systems were affecting city water sales. 

“Let them use the water so we can get paid,” he said.

At the same time, City Council members described environmental water releases as wasteful, foolish and unlikely to provide meaningful impacts to the bay. State Rep. Denise Villalobos has pledged to permanently repeal the requirement for environmental flows.

City officials and the TCEQ have pointed out no evidence of fish kills, marine life depopulation or environmental complaints since the city halted environmental water releases in 2024.

Kirsten Stansell, executive director of the Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program, pushed back last week at City Hall. 

“The suspension of releases has had an impact on our bay despite what is being said publicly,” Stansell told City Council on Aug. 18. “Since releases were suspended in 2024, salinities in Nueces Bay and the Nueces Delta steadily increased until spring of 2026.”

Salinity is a key factor in the ecosystems of bays and delta systems that form where freshwater rivers meet the sea. The myriad of creatures that use those habitats to lay their eggs depend on the characteristically moderate levels of salt.

Salinity in Nueces Bay is now higher than in the Gulf of Mexico, Stansell said, “far outside the historic range of one of our most important estuary habitats.”

The ecosystems are accustomed to drought cycles and can handle extended periods of low freshwater inflows, said McKinney, the former director at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He previously led a 10-year research project, commissioned by the state Legislature in the 1980s, to identify freshwater needs for every river delta on the Texas coast.

Aerial view of the causeway connecting Corpus Christi with Padre Island (Shutterstock)

Later, he spent 17 years as senior director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi and has researched salinity in aquatic systems around the world.

“The bay can hang on for a while,” he said. But sooner or later, irreversible damage will occur.

“I’ve seen it many times, and unfortunately we’re going to repeat it here,” he said.

If the ecosystem dies and its microbes vanish, there will be nothing to digest the large volumes of treated municipal wastewater that Corpus Christi discharges into the bay.

“Then you’re living next to a septic tank, your whole entire city, so that’s where we’re headed,” he said. “They’re creating a problem that will be much more difficult to fix.” 

The TCEQ’s emergency order on Tuesday was issued without a hearing. The agency’s three appointed commissioners will consider any changes to the order during a hearing on Sept. 9.

The city of Corpus Christi issued a statement on Tuesday thanking officials for the order. 

“The City pursued the temporary suspension as part of its continued efforts to manage available water supplies during ongoing drought conditions,” the statement said. “The City thanks our entire state delegation and partners in Austin for their support and advocacy in advancing this request.”

The post Corpus Christi Withholds Water to Wetlands While Lifting Restrictions on Lawns appeared first on The Texas Observer.

It’s a Thursday evening, and Kam Franklin is already onstage, prepping for the show she’ll be doing an hour later at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge, a dive bar and music venue in Midtown Houston. 

With Ed “Blacknintendo” Prevost on the keys, she performs two covers—Joy Oladokun’s “If You Got a Problem” and R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”—sounding like a throatier Angie Stone, baseball cap covering the wild, woolly ’fro she’ll reveal later. She recorded those songs for Mad Black Woman, a 2025 EP that was inspired by online harassment she’d received. “Yes, my racist weirdo encounter,” Franklin said after her rehearsal. “I wanted to make something reflective of Black joy. … So, I wanted to revisit what ‘mad’ meant to me. And to me, ‘mad’ meant expressing myself in a way that was fearless and embraced other people’s emotions.”

The Bryan-College Station-born Franklin, 39, has been on the road, testing out songs from her solo debut, Land of the Neon Sun, released on August 28. This Shoeshine Charley’s gig is one of several summer sets she’s been doing in Houston, a city that’s been her home since she was a toddler—and a place she believes is difficult to win over. “It’s the city of haters, you know,” she said. “If you can win over the folks here, shit, I can go anywhere—LA, New York, Chicago. It doesn’t matter because if you can win over a hater in Houston, you can win over the world.”

For nearly two decades, Franklin has been working hard at being one of Houston’s most accomplished musicians. Since 2011, she’s been the lead vocalist for The Suffers, a Houston-based R&B and funk collective whose patented brand of “Gulf Coast soul” has gotten them everything from mainstream press raves to late-night talk show appearances to their own NPR Tiny Desk Concert. She’s also performed alongside a wide array of artists: Chaka Khan, Brandi Carlile, Questlove, Houston Tejano legends La Mafia, the Houston Symphony, etc. She did a song on the Clifton Chenier tribute project A Tribute to the King of Zydeco, which won a Grammy this year for Best Traditional Roots Music Album. (As a member of the Recording Academy, she’s held several titles, including Governor of the Texas Chapter and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Ambassador.)

For Franklin, Land has been a long time coming. It took seven years of recording with musicians in Houston and Nashville, Tennessee, even launching a Kickstarter to raise $20,000 to finish the album. She also found a co-producer in country singer Margo Price, whom Franklin has toured and collaborated with. “We connected over our shared love of cannabis,” she admitted, “and I actually wrote my song ‘A Bitch Didn’t Listen’ about her. Because she gave me some of her grandma’s cancer cookies, and I didn’t listen to her when she said, ‘Take a nibble and not a bite.’ Listen to your drug dealer, right?”

Franklin (right) (Craig Lindsey)

She started working on Land during the pandemic, back when she was using her lockdown time perfecting the guitar. “I was at COVID University … playing this guitar for 12 hours a day sometimes, because I had nothing else to do,” she said. “So, I came back out with a new skill, and this album has also been an opportunity for me to showcase some songs that I thought were good enough, but possibly too aggressive for The Suffers, or too sad.”

As the songs of Land prove, Franklin can’t help but create music with her heart fully on her sleeve. “If I put my trouble on the record, will I make it go away?” is a chorus she recites on one of the tracks. It’s likely that listeners may compare her to Brittany Howard, another full-figured, guitar-wielding Southern sista who traffics in roots-rock music. But Franklin insists she was inspired by artists further afield who knew how to turn a clever phrase. “It’s John Prine, UGK, Hayes Carll—like punny and funny, but sad,” she said.

Much like the artists who inspired her, Land is all over the place genre-wise. A bulk of it is folk, country, or rock numbers that have Franklin strumming away on the acoustic guitar and providing soothing, sanctified vocals, usually about relationships. But she also changes up the tempo on several tracks, like the dance-poppy “Pho for Breakfast,” which brings to mind Brian Eno-era Talking Heads. The tonal shifts are reminiscent of the eccentric stuff Beck did back in his early Mellow Gold days. It turns out old-school Beck was indeed an inspiration for the exotic easy listener “Profit Bop”: “I told Joffrey, our bass player, I [wanted] the feel of that first Beck album,” she says. “Not the sound, but the feel.”

Franklin is also not afraid to let her Blackness shine. She pulls out the synthesizers and 808s for the anthemic “We Ain’t Going.” (“They don’t want us to breathe / Don’t you know that / They just want us to leave” is a recurring verse.) The closing song is “Sunnyside, TX,” a churchy paean to Houston’s predominantly African-American neighborhood. She says, “I could talk about things that are a little bit more risky, things that are a little bit more Black, things that are a little bit more non-monolithic when it comes to Black stories. And, for me, I want people to know, like, sure, I got this song about my uncle that keeps going back to jail because he acts like he likes it there sometimes. But, then, I have this whole other song about healed relationships and saying thank you for the church—but the church is not gonna stop me from living my life the way I want to.”

As a musician, an interdisciplinary artist, and a supporter of Black and queer voices, Franklin uses her artistic skills to make you move and think. After all, this is an artist who formed the Bayou City Comeback Chorus in 2022—a collective whose EP of psychedelic, choral funk was released on Franklin’s Homegirl Island Records label—as a response to the police-inflicted, global unrest-sparking killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. 

“This is a job I lean into,” she said. “I take advantage of the opportunity to put the message into the music. Because I’ve tried to do it the other way and try to preach and all this shit and, like, people ain’t listening to that shit. However, the same person that’ll tell you they don’t believe in whatever the fuck you’re talking about … will sing my lyrics back to me, talking about, ‘You know, we could do more.’” 

She lets out a chuckle before continuing. “I’m like, OK, great—let me just lean into what works.”

Later that night, Franklin performs in front of a reasonably populated crowd, picking away on an electric guitar and a slide guitar, getting into all the new stuff with her backup band. The audience appears appreciative (not a hater in sight!), and Franklin appreciates them back. She’d love to do a record-release party in H-Town, but she confirmed that’s gonna have to wait until the fall. 

“I told my team that I would actually like to wait until at least a month after the album comes out to do my party and my whatever, because my album’s coming out in the thick of hurricane season,” she said. “I don’t trust the last week of August to throw no event. No, sir!”  

The post Kam Franklin Goes Solo appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Last Sunday at a venue in the Austin suburb of Kyle, Merideth Keller delivered a speech to local attendees that took square aim at a man she once voted for back in 2014: Governor Greg Abbott. Over the course of her 12 years on the school board of Hays Consolidated Independent School District, a position she left in 2022, Keller began to lean more to the left as she watched a crisis unfold in Texas’ public education system. She’s not buying what Abbott’s selling with his latest education initiatives, and she hopes voters of various stripes will follow her lead.

“Greg Abbott set the fire, watched it blaze, and now wants to put it out to get the glory,” said Keller, who now considers herself more of a moderate, helping to elect both Democrats and Republicans down the ballot. She was there to kick off the first stop of the Save Our Schools tour, a statewide effort by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa to turn growing education issues in Texas into an effective electoral cudgel in November.

“I have to say, I voted for Greg Abbott, and I had to learn that that was the wrong choice, so that other people can admit it too,” Keller said.

Public school closures, private school vouchers, and state takeovers have driven a wedge between many lifelong conservatives and the Texas GOP they once trusted. For some, public education is the top issue driving their embrace of a Democrat at the top of the ticket. The Latina legislator from Austin has arisen as a guardian of public education by promising to end state takeovers, eliminate standardized STAAR testing, and to “DOGE” the Texas Education Agency (TEA). 

Her growing anti-incumbent base includes conservative mothers, educators, and school board trustees, which has, at least according to recent polls from Fox News and Texas A&M, helped put her neck and neck with the powerful Republican governor who’s seeking an unprecedented fourth term at the helm of the state government. Abbott has handily won each of his three prior contests for governor by double-digit margins; Texas has not elected a Democrat as governor since Ann Richards won in 1990. 

“I found myself in alliance with conservative MAGA moms who’ve been pushing back on the privatization of our public schools,” Hinojosa said in an interview with the Texas Observer this week. “The whole system is broken and needs to be redone.”

The Hinojosa campaign has gone all in to mobilize voters around public education with an initiative it launched back in June called Team Texas Public Schools, branded with school bus-yellow signs, swirly red pen, and a simple math formula for success: “Commit Today + Vote Early = Day 1 Change.” In weekly Zoom huddles, the team connects with parents, teachers, and school staff on organizing tactics to protect neighborhood schools and elect Hinojosa to office. Now, the Save Our Schools tour is training volunteers to take that message door-to-door throughout the state.

Some are looking at the Democratic special election upset in Texas Senate District 9 in January as a bellwether for what’s to come in November. Taylor Rehmet, a local union leader, handily flipped the deep red legislative district over a right-wing ideologue, after Abbott appointed incumbent state Senator Kelly Hancock to be acting comptroller. Rehmet’s platform emphasized raising teacher pay and repealing school vouchers.

“My theory is what happened in that SD 9 race could happen in rural Texas if you could truly mobilize people around education,” said Suzanne Bellsnyder, a lifelong Republican from Spearman who operates two rural newspapers. Bellsnyder joked that she was part of the “Republican revolution” in the 1990s, when she worked for conservative politicians in the state capitol. “Now, I’m watching it all sort of fall apart,” she laughed. In recent years, she has become a vocal critic of Abbott on social media and on her Substack page, Texas Rural Reporter.

Disillusioned conservatives like Bellsnyder have a shared feeling that the Republican Party and its leaders who run the state have not only betrayed public schools but also its principles of fiscal responsibility and small government. They believe the A-F accountability ratings have created a top-down culture of education that undermines local control, paving the way for school closures, takeovers, and a mass exodus of teachers. The state’s rainy day fund has surpassed $24 billion while 170 public schools have been confirmed to shutter since 2023.

“Why aren’t people going after Greg Abbott for hoarding our tax money and for utilizing it the wrong way?” Ruth Beasley, a grandmother from Arlington who said she’s always voted for Republicans, wondered in an interview with the Observer. 

Beasley first discovered Hinojosa on Facebook, and although she still has policy qualms about the border and abortion, she admired how the state representative stood up for public education and said she plans to vote for her in November. Hinojosa’s advocacy began in 2012 when her son’s school, Pease Elementary, was under threat of closure. She ran for school board on the Austin Independent School District (ISD) and rallied with locals to keep the campus open. She succeeded and went on to become board president. In 2016, Hinojosa ran for Texas House District 49, which covers the heart of Austin, to carry on her battle at the state capitol. 

In the 2023 session, Hinojosa fought alongside a band of rural Republicans in the Texas House to block controversial school voucher bills from passage. That December, Abbott took a $6 million donation from Jeff Yass, a billionaire backer of school choice from Pennsylvania—the largest-ever single campaign contribution to a candidate in Texas history. He received another $6 million from Yass over the next several months, a cash surplus that he used to finance an unrelenting push to enact vouchers. Abbott spent millions of dollars on attack ads targeting several anti-voucher Republican incumbents, most of whom were successfully ousted.

“It was the death of a Republican Party that I knew and loved,” said Bellsnyder.

Since the voucher battle, Bellsnyder continued to watch Hinojosa’s advocacy on the House public education committee and admired her ability to “ask the questions that were on my mind.” In March 2025, she was riding a tractor in her hometown of Spearman near the border of Oklahoma when Hinojosa reached out on social media. Hinojosa was introducing a bill to audit the TEA and requested the support of outspoken Republicans like Bellsnyder, who had grown to see the state agency as the epitome of Abbott’s wrongheaded education policy. 

“Hell yeah!” said Bellsnyder. “I drove down to Austin that week, and then we stood with her in support of that bill that she was filing—which should have been a Republican bill, in my opinion because we were DOGE-ing everything else,” Bellsnyder recalled, referring to the acronym for Elon Musk’s short-lived and disastrous federal auditing effort called the Department of Government Efficiency. 

The bill proposed to eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies and cut off costly vendor contracts to prioritize direct funding to public schools. Although it didn’t pass, Hinojosa has integrated these proposals into her campaign. On August 19, a newly released audit of the TEA found that the budget for management salaries rose nearly 64 percent from 2021 to 2025, with 1 manager for every 3.5 employees—a ratio that runs afoul of state budgeting requirements.

“It revealed what we already knew,” Hinojosa, who was born and raised in Brownsville, told the Observer. “More and more dollars are taken from the classroom and used to feed this bureaucracy in Austin.”

Attendees at Hinojosa’s Save Our Public Schools tour event in Kyle in August. (Photo by Eden Shamy)

Abbott has yet to mention his opponent by name on the campaign trail, but in recent months, the three-term incumbent has increased his efforts to shape the narrative around public education. On August 17, Abbott hosted a press conference with his new Texas Classroom Commission to announce the “Better Classrooms. Brighter Futures” initiative, which includes limiting screen time and prioritizing reading and math. The following day, he held a press conference to propose cracking down on foreign influence and predators in schools.

Hinojosa believes it’s nothing but a distraction motivated by fear.

“He has had commission after commission on teacher pay and public schools, but he refuses to do the right thing,” said Hinojosa. “It is really an insult just to convene another commission when parents, teachers, and myself included have been yelling at him to do the right thing for years.”

Abbott also called on the newly installed state comptroller Don Huffines to initiate an audit of school districts, pointing to Austin ISD and El Paso ISD for high administrative spending.

On the stage of The Railhouse venue in Kyle, Keller called out what she says is his blatant hypocrisy. She told the audience that Abbott’s “endless” list of unfunded mandates have required more administrators and higher costs. “But don’t worry,” she quipped, “Greg Abbott is about to swoop in!”

Abbott also proposed a ban on H-1B visa holders from working in public schools. Some school districts have come out and said that H-1B visa holders only make up 1 percent of all Texas teachers, yet they have been critical to fill shortages and avoid increasing class sizes. Dallas ISD employs the most visa holders as educators of any school district, at 171, according to the Texas Tribune, and said in a statement that it only does so when necessary to fill teaching shortages. 

“If the governor’s new expectation is to eliminate these teachers, then we’re going to need more Texans in the teaching pipeline,” the statement said, per the Tribune.

Hinojosa said her own son lost one of his elementary school teachers when their visa fell through, and his class was ultimately divided up and combined with others—causing a yearlong struggle for teachers and students. 

“Greg Abbott is again scapegoating and punishing school districts because of their desperate efforts to try to have teachers in the classroom,” Hinojosa said. 

Several conservative moms said they see themselves in Hinojosa; they feel like they’re all in the same fight for their kids’ future. Despite Abbott’s latest efforts, they don’t think he can be trusted with another four years in power.

“He’s deceptive and he lies,” said Beasley. “Gina has won me over on education, and he has so turned my stomach that I can’t vote for him. I just can’t do it.”

The post Will a Coalition of ‘MAGA Moms’ Rally Behind Gina Hinojosa’s Bid for Texas Governor? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Texas Observer reader,

As I write this, Texas families are getting ready to send kids back to school in districts where campuses have been vanishing. As Josephine Lee recently reported, in the first half of this year alone, boards of trustees voted to shutter more than 50 schools around the state. The reasons for this are numerous (and to learn more, just turn to the next page to read Justin Miller’s column on the subject), but what’s impossible to miss is the growing presence of shamelessly excessive wealth alongside this austerity. 

Elon Musk (albeit briefly) becomes a trillionaire while your kid’s school closes. That’s a fair summation of Texas today. 

(Illustration by Raúl Arias)

It’s not that everything is bad. There’s lots of economic opportunity in our state; that’s why people keep moving here. And the barbecue… blah blah blah, I’ll leave that part to Texas Monthly.

It’s that the inequality is sharpening. We are destabilizing the institutions that bring at least the poor and the middle class under one roof, ratcheting up the pressure on everyone to find the best lifeboat they can afford and jump ship. Of course, there will never be enough boats for everyone—but, hey, that’s why we have our sprawling prison system, which we’re no longer even trying to shrink or reform. That’s why we have our police forces, legislatively defund-proofed, expanding into every school, and our newly fused state-immigration police, which can use all the tools of the criminal code to terrorize our unauthorized working class. It’s not, after all, that we aren’t willing to invest in a certain genre of “solution.” 

These trends are percolating beneath this year’s growing (projected) blue wave, but all of this is bigger and longer-standing than Trump, and flipping one U.S. Senate seat would do very little to address any of it. At best, this year’s election can be the first step of a long hard march. 

Now, I swear I’m not directing this depressing screed at you for no reason. What I want to say, Observer reader, is that it’s within this rather overwhelming context that we’re working hard to offer you a properly calibrated journalistic product. Some hyper-specific investigative journalism that points to small-bore harm reduction; a lookback into history that reminds us that not only change but massive change is possible; even poetry to, perhaps, gift that quick upswell of feeling when your attention alights on something timeless.

Ah well, you get the idea; it’s a magazine. It won’t reopen the doors of your neighborhood school (unless you get very creative and use quite a few issues), but I hope some part of it does fuel you for the fights ahead.

Solidarity,

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