If you have driven anywhere in the city of Denton over the past few years, you have noticed it. Orange barrels. Lane closures. Freshly churned earth where sidewalks used to be. Here is my opinion, formed by watching this city tear itself apart and rebuild wider: we are committing more than $1 billion to projects that will worsen our air quality, and we are doing it while congratulating ourselves for having a climate plan.

The scale is hard to overstate. A $583 million I-35 widening that runs through January 2029. A separate $584 million I-35E/W Split project will span nearly five years. Denton County has allocated another $295 million from a road bond for roughly 120 additional projects since 2023. All told, state and county agencies have committed more than $1.4 billion to major road projects affecting Denton—work that will reshape the city’s streets well into the next decade. The justification is familiar: Denton’s population has grown about 26 percent since 2020, and the roads must keep up. Addressing that growth often requires immediate capacity improvements, even as longer-term solutions are harder to implement.

In August 2024, Denton adopted its first Climate Action Plan, committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It is, in many ways, an admirably honest document. It identifies transportation as the single largest source of community emissions, 53 percent of the total, and states plainly that getting people to drive less matters more than switching to electric vehicles. Passenger cars account for more than 85 percent of all driving in the city. The plan knows what the problem is. The construction program unfolding across the city reflects a different set of priorities.

Denton’s predicament is not unique; it is a local expression of a statewide structural problem. During the 89th session last year, the Texas Legislature allocated $39.9 billion to TxDOT for the current 2026–2027 biennium, marking the largest transportation budget in the state’s history—with state law requiring that nearly all of it flow to roads. A proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed highway funds to be directed toward transit-oriented projects was left pending in a House subcommittee and did not advance. Meanwhile, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act—nicknamed the Deathstar bill—has narrowed the space cities have to pursue local policy that departs from state priorities. (The law is currently being challenged in court by the cities of Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso). The state builds most of the roads. It also limits many of the alternatives available to cities. Municipalities like Denton are left to write climate plans against a structural current they did not create and cannot redirect alone. Much of this reflects long-standing state funding structures and rapid population growth, rather than any single policy decision. And the research makes clear that the current runs in one direction: toward more driving, not less.

The research on this is unambiguous. Adding road capacity leads to more driving, not less congestion—a well-documented phenomenon called induced demand. New lanes make driving cheaper and more convenient, so more people make more trips. Traffic fills the new space. Studies consistently find that a 10 percent increase in highway capacity produces roughly 10 percent more driving within a decade, canceling out congestion relief and generating additional emissions. And more sprawl means more car ownership, longer commutes, and higher household transportation costs for the families who can least afford them. Transportation research has documented this dynamic for decades, yet public investment still tends to favor expansion.

This is not an abstract debate for those of us who live here. Denton sits inside a metro area that ranks third in the world for transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions and already violates federal air quality standards for ground-level ozone, the pollutant that triggers asthma attacks and sends children and the elderly indoors on bad air days. By June 2025, the region had already recorded six unhealthy ozone days. Nor is this a distant policy concern: It is a daily public health reality. More driving means more ozone-forming pollution in a region already struggling to meet federal air standards.

The tension does not live only on the construction sites. In July 2025, just months after the Climate Action Plan was adopted, the City Council directed its utility to explore a new natural gas plant. Mayor Gerard Hudspeth said he did not see 100 percent renewables as a goal of the plan. Energy planning, like transportation, often involves balancing reliability, cost, and long-term sustainability. The city’s own Climate Action Plan cites research showing that compact, walkable development reduces household costs, emissions, and infrastructure spending—yet the dashboard shows transportation improvements at only 30 percent completion, the slowest of the three goal areas. Denton wrote a plan that diagnosed the problem correctly. Then it kept doing the thing the plan warned against.

Population pressure is real, and much of this construction is driven by state and county decisions Denton cannot fully control. But the city still holds levers it is not using. It can prioritize sidewalk and trail funding at the same urgency it funds road bonds. It can align development approvals with transit access rather than car dependence. And it can ensure that its positions on state-level highway expansion are consistent with its net-zero commitment.

That choice has a concrete cost. Ground-level ozone—the pollutant that keeps children and the elderly indoors on bad air days—is already a documented crisis in this region, and every additional lane mile compounds it. The Climate Action Plan already identifies the tools needed to change course. The question is how consistently those tools are applied in practice. The orange barrels will eventually come down. The question is whether Denton will use the years of construction ahead to make different choices, or simply wait for the next plan to also go unread.

The post Denton Promised Net Zero. Then It Kept Building Roads. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Fifteen years ago, in May 2011, dozens of newly inducted Teach for America (TFA) corps members gathered at Trinity University in San Antonio to prepare for a five-week summer training institute, which would be hosted at Rice University in Houston. It was the first time I had ever been selected for anything exclusive—TFA’s acceptance rate was around 15 percent at the time—and I had all the attendant feelings of imposter syndrome. You can briefly see this much thinner, less-hot version of me teaching summer school at Madison High School in Houston in this promotional video that TFA San Antonio still has on their YouTube page.

By my account, everyone here dressed well, maintained straight posture, and had impeccable hair. It appeared more like a casting call than teachers’ professional development. I was one of a few born, raised, and educated San Antonians present in a group that represented every corner of the country, many recently credentialed from the nation’s most prestigious institutions.

In meeting my new colleagues, I felt compelled to be my city’s ambassador, but as a functional shut-in during leisure hours I was an imperfect one at best. I was a few years older than most of the new recruits who were predominantly fresh out of undergrad, and as a boring married person I didn’t do much socializing outside of work. On the other hand, many of my fellow corps members lived together in large, rented houses, forming lifelong bonds with one another. This facet of being a TFA corps member underscores how the organization is more than a job opportunity; it is a network that fosters career advancement beyond the classroom for its members, a network whose intimacy is forged in the crucible of early-career experiences as classroom teachers. 

One of those new colleagues I met that week was a University of Texas grad who, like me, studied government and would be teaching on San Antonio’s West Side. His name was James Talarico.

My impression of him from the TFA training sessions was that he was serious but not humorless, carrying himself with a firm, gentle confidence uncommon for a 22-year-old. For the next two years of our corps member commitment, these TFA professional development sessions would be the extent of our acquaintanceship as he and most others would eventually leave San Antonio for greener pastures. It came as little surprise to me that, five years after the conclusion of our time in TFA, we’d see one of our own reach the Texas Legislature.

TFA’s recruitment, with its many rounds of interviews and an ostensible audition, promises to field an annual crop of future leaders in education. For most participants, their plans involve this short stint in the classroom before heading off to work in law, campus administration, policymaking, business, or the sprawling tentacles of the nonprofit industrial complex. TFA is less a teacher preparation program than it is a finishing school for future decision-makers in the multilayered technocracy of education policy, one dominated by elites who have historically boosted charter-school expansion. I am a rarity in that I still teach in the city and campus where I did my TFA stint.

TFA’s mission is to ensure that its members are among that elite. That includes those in the upper echelons of elected office.

In this way, it’s impossible to understand Talarico’s meteoric political rise without understanding the network that incubated him. Most writeups on the 36-year-old state legislator tend to gloss over his Teach for America tenure (though Talarico’s campaign bio has leaned heavily on his two years of teaching at San Antonio’s Rhodes Middle School). But TFA and its spinoff organization Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE) are significant nodes of access that helped make possible both his career as a Texas state representative and his unlikely rise to both political celebrity and a primary victory to become Texas Democrats’ U.S. Senate candidate.

LEE started in 2007 as a way to channel TFA alumni and other affiliated partners toward careers in politics and policy, offering workshops, leadership coaching, and fellowships, among other things, to its members. Its website boasts that over 1,100 LEE members are current or former elected officials and that two-thirds of LEE members win in general elections.

TFA CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard serves on the LEE board alongside Emma Bloomberg, daughter of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The two also serve on the board of the LEE Foundation with hedge fund manager and TFA board member Stephen Mandel. 

Given my academic background as a political science and economics double major in undergrad and my professed interest in politics and policy, I was encouraged by TFA to join LEE when I was a corps member. I still got emails as recently as a year ago asking if I’d be interested in running for local school board, but after my child was born in 2013, my answer has always been “No thanks.” My desire for a quiet, private family life has always triumphed over the allure of holding any levers of institutional power beyond the high-stakes thrill of being an after-school club sponsor.

LEE’s theory of change is top-down, meritocratic, and technocratic, and it openly embraces the aims and generous funding of oligarchs to further its ambitions. This means a cozy relationship with funders who are deeply committed to charter school expansion. In Texas, the now-dissolved Educational Equity PAC was financed almost entirely from a nearly $2 million check from Netflix cofounder and education reformer Reed Hastings. Most of those funds were in turn funneled into the Charter Schools Now PAC and Legacy 44, both of which have directed tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Talarico’s state House campaigns. Charter Schools Now and Legacy 44’s major donors also include Hastings as well as pro-charter Walmart heirs Jim and Alice Walton, along with ex-Mayor Bloomberg.

Talarico’s first electoral victory came with his initial run for the Texas House in 2018, when he successfully flipped a red seat that included his native Round Rock. His largest donor was plaintiffs attorney-backed Texans for Insurance Reform. But in second place was the LEE Texas PAC, which contributed $50,000. 

This PAC has contributed primarily to local school board races, to candidates on both sides of the aisle, but their donation to Talarico’s race was one of their few efforts at backing a state legislative candidate. Over the course of his four terms in the Lege, LEE Texas PAC has remained one of his largest donors—giving a total of $77,000, mostly concentrated in his competitive 2018 and 2020 campaigns.

LEE Texas PAC’s largest total donor, at over $800,000, is billionaire Silicon Valley investor Arthur Rock, whose deep pockets have funded a host of educational causes nationwide for decades, promoting charter schools and the candidates who support them. He’s a TFA “lifetime director” after years of serving on their board.

Following the 2021 Texas legislative session, Talarico’s District 52 was gerrymandered from a three-point squeaker to a packed-and-cracked deep red seat, pushing him to run in the solid-blue District 50 in Austin, which he easily won in 2022 (and won again unopposed in 2024).

LEE and other networked PACs, including Legacy 44 and Charter Schools Now PAC, have since contributed heavily to Texas State Board of Education member Staci Childs in her campaign for a heavily Democratic open state House seat. Childs is a former TFA Houston corps member whose other campaign contributors include Talarico himself, who gave $2,000 in December.

During his tenure in the Legislature, he has voted in favor of some pro-charter school legislation while also supporting measures to increase transparency for charters. 

In recent years, Talarico has become something of a viral sensation in Texas and among many of my former students, with clips of his impressive dressing-down of opposition lawmakers generating tens of millions of views and reposts on TikTok and Instagram since 2023 when his social media presence skyrocketed. His liberal theology-forward approach has resonated with disaffected Christians who bristle at the rise of Christian nationalism, and his defense of public schools and social progressive causes has made him the latest Southern Democratic wunderkind, upon whom the hopes of interrupting decades of single-party rule rest.

He appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience in July 2025, with the host remarking that Talarico should run for president. Rogan would get closer to his wish two months later when Talarico hard-launched his campaign for U.S. Senate. With this rise in visibility and the prospect of a blue wave in November, Talarico’s opportunity for higher office has once again been buoyed by his TFA network.

We can see this with the pro-Talarico Super PAC Lone Star Rising PAC which raised over $6.5 million in the primary race alone. Lone Star Rising’s treasurer is Alexander Clark, who reportedly met Talarico through TFA in San Antonio. Lone Star Rising PAC has raised six-figure donations from Big Tech and finance figures including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. Notably, there was also a half-million-dollar donation from the aforementioned Stephen Mandel. (As a super PAC, Lone Star Rising cannot legally coordinate with the Talarico campaign, which has raised over $20 million on its own.) 

I don’t lay this out with the intent of proving some sinister ulterior motive—that Talarico is somehow insincere in his efforts to curtail corporate influence or deliver on a progressive platform. “I am in this broken system like everybody else is,” he has said, while promising not to “unilaterally disarm while Republicans play by their own rules.” The post-Citizens United reality is that super PACs are going to put their heavy thumbs on the scale as long as it is legal to do so. Any chance to undo this likely requires sympathetic politicians winning power using the very tools they inveigh against.

But it is worth exploring the networks of money and influence that have laid down the infrastructure to make his candidacy viable, and what favors they may expect should he fulfill his potential, despite his record in the Texas Legislature being far from the pro-charter, anti-teacher union archetype they may prefer.

In the meantime, veteran classroom teachers like me will watch this midterm clash with anticipation, as a former schoolteacher tries to do what hasn’t been done by a Texas Democrat since the era of a certain Lyndon Baines Johnson: go from the classroom to the U.S. Senate. 

In response to a request for comment, James Talarico’s campaign spokesperson JT Ennis issued the following statement: “The most common occupation among James’ over 500,000 grassroots contributors has been teachers. James is proud of his record fighting for public education, both during his time as a public school teacher and in the state legislature, where he passed legislation to raise teacher pay, made record investments in our public schools, and led the fight against the billionaire mega-donors who are defunding our public school classrooms with their private school voucher scam. He’ll continue this fight in the U.S. Senate.”

In a statement, Teach for America said it “is a nonpartisan organization and does not endorse or oppose candidates for public office. Teach For America does not recruit any of our alumni to run for office. … The 70,000 people who make up the TFA network pursue many different roles in their commitment to expanding educational opportunities and TFA does not have any policy requirements or expectations for our participants—their many different perspectives and leadership paths attest to this.” 

TFA added: “LEE is a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that is separate from Teach For America. Participation in LEE is optional for interested TFA corps members and alumni, as well as the participants from more than 25 other nonprofit partners.”

The post How Teach for America Helped Set Up James Talarico’s Political Rise  appeared first on The Texas Observer.