Midweek News Update

Happy Wednesday, and welcome to the ninth edition of Waco Can’t Wait, a progressive newsletter focusing on McLennan County, Texas, and Federal politics. My wife and I are in Las Vegas this week, so I will be keeping it simple by only providing some important news highlights from the last week.

I was planning on providing a review of the Texas Democratic Primary, but Harris County dropped the ball by not counting approximately 10,000 mail-in ballots (about 6,000 of them being Democratic ballots). This race has left the Democratic Primary Runoff for Attorney General hanging in the balance, with Joe Jaworski and Lee Merritt only separated by 1,418 votes. This will likely have to wait until next week as they finalize the counts.

Lastly, I am looking for some suggestions on things to write about in the future! If there is something y’all would like to hear more about that I am not covering, please consider filling out this Reader Survey. Now, let’s take a look at the news!

Week in review (a collection of news from Waco, Texas, and beyond)

Waco:

The March 1st primaries are over (mostly), and we now have a clear picture of who our general election candidates will be. I will be saying more once the results become clearer out of Harris County, but it appears that we will have an exciting slate of candidates this coming November.

Texas:

Greg Abbott has directed the Texas Education Agency to create a task force to address Texas’ teacher shortage. Seriously? This is coming from the same Governor who has been a cheerleader for book banning and restricting what teachers can say in their own classrooms. The current teacher turnover rate is about 14.3%, and a poll commissioned by the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers showed that 66% of respondents had considered leaving the profession in the last year. Any task force should have a seat at the table for our teacher organizations, and should focus on longstanding issues like pay, class size, and high-pressure organized testing.

The Office of Housing and Urban Development has found that the Texas General Land Office (GLO) discriminated against minorities when it denied flood aid to Houston and Harris County. This comes after the GLO initially denied Houston and Harris County more than $1 billion in federal relief funds for Hurricane Harvey relief. The GLO is led by ...