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TEXAS LEGISLATURE
School funding at risk Rural districts could lose money if bill is not passed By Julia Wallace LA R ED O MORNI NG T IME S
Zapata County ISD, Webb Consolidated ISD and other school districts in rural areas have a lot to lose if a bill is not passed by the Texas Legislature. A large portion of the operating budgets for both school
districts comes from a statute called Additional State Aid for Tax Reduction, or ASATR, which is set to expire Sept. 1. The legislative public education committee will discuss continuing this funding for four more years under House Bill 811. ZCISD would lose $8.4 million if this bill does not pass,
according to attorney Jaime Garcia, who works at Laredobased law firm J. Cruz & Associates, which represents ZCISD and WCISD. This is 25 percent of the district’s operating budget. Garcia calls this “an absurdly high loss to incur from one year to the next.” WCISD would lose $3.6 million, which makes up 40-45 percent of the district’s operating budget, according to its business office. The Texas School Coalition, an advocacy group for public school districts, has listed on
their website some objectives for the current legislative session, one of which is it to “keep the promise of ASATR.” ASATR began as a way for rural school districts to function after the Texas Legislature reduced the school property tax rate by one third in 2006. The statute was meant to supply more money to school districts to offset the loss of local revenue from these tax reductions, Garcia said. But this loss of funding was never properly replaced, and ASATR should not taper out
U.S./MEXICO BORDER WALL
PATH TO EXTINCTION
without a meaningful solution from the legislature, he said. “School districts did not decide to cut property taxes, the Legislature did. To punish school districts for the Legislature’s 2006 decision by killing ASATR would affect hundreds of thousands of students across the state,” Garcia said. WCISD Superintendent Beto Gonzalez reacted similarly. “To eliminate the additional money without a means for the school district to generate reFunding continues on A13
WEBB COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE
Cuate Santos / Laredo Morning Times
Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar, right, and Chief Deputy Federico "Fred" Garza addressed the media Monday at the Webb County Sheriff's Office.
A border wall alternative Callie Richmond / The Texas Tribune
Scott Nicol, co-chair of the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Campaign, stands in front of the border fence in Hidalgo in far South Texas. This section, which sits atop a levee, runs between a national wildlife refuge and a local nature center.
Wildlife habitat would be devastated by barrier
By César G. Rodriguez LAREDO MORNING TIME S
By Kiah Collier and Neena Satija TH E TEXAS T RI BUNE
H
IDALGO, Texas — Muddy handprints cover the rusty, iron posts on this section of border fence in far South Texas. The 18-foot-tall barrier, which runs between a national wildlife refuge and a local nature center, ends abruptly less than a mile down the road. Still, somebody clearly thought it was best to cross here. “This is probably one of the most visible places they could have climbed,” Scott Nicol, co-chair of the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Campaign, said before snapping photos of the handprints. “I don't know if they got caught or not, but they made it up and over for sure.” There’s been a lot of debate about how effective the Bush-era barrier has been at keeping out illegal crossers and drug smugglers. Some data indicates the barriers have encouraged people to cross in places where there isn’t one. But the handprints show that a determined person can still easily scale it. What the border fence has kept out instead, according to environmentalists, scientists and local officials, is wildlife. And the people who
Layers of security include marine units, sensors, cameras, command units, a chopper, drones and deputies.
Callie Richmond / The Texas Tribune
A small opening at the base of the border fence in Brownsville is meant to let small, endangered wild cats like the ocelot through. The “cat holes,” which are the size of a piece of printer paper, appear every 500 feet or so.
have spent decades acquiring and restoring border habitat say that if President Donald Trump makes good on his promise to turn the border fence into a continuous, 40-foot concrete wall, the situation for wildlife along the border — one of the most biodiverse areas in North America — will only get worse. Right now, a mix of vehicle barriers and pedestrian fencing covers only about one-third of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Even with all those gaps, experts say the barriers have made it harder for animals to find food, water and mates. Many of them, like jaguars, gray wolves and ocelots, are already endangered. Aaron Flesch, a biologist at the University of Arizona, said most border animals are already squeezed
into small, fragmented patches of habitat. “If you just go and you cut movements off,” he said, “you can potentially destabilize these entire networks of population.” Still, the impacts of the border fence on wildlife aren’t totally understood. That’s in large part because Congress let the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ignore all the environmental laws that would’ve required the agency to fully study how the barrier would affect wildlife. Flesch and other scientists say the federal government also has made almost no research money available to support independent studies. Most of the studies that have been done are limited in scope, but their findings are pretty clear: Impeding animal Path continues on A13
Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar said Monday he and his staff came back from a productive trip to Washington, D.C., where they discussed a border security initiative that, if funded, could be expanded to Zapata. Last week, Cuellar met with federal authorities and Republican and Democratic members of Congress, seeking funding for Operation Border SMART (Strategic Mobile And Response Team), a border security measure that could be an alternative to President Donald J. Trump’s proposal to build a “great wall,” according to the Webb County Sheriff’s Office. Operation Border SMART uses a combination of technology and boots on the ground to safeguard the border. “Our safety, your safety is our priority,” Cuellar said in a news conference. Layers of security include marine units, sensors, cameras, command units, a chopper, drones and deputies along the border, according to Assistant Chief Wayo Ruiz. “Nobody has an implemented plan like the sheriff has,” Ruiz said. Sheriff’s Office Chief Fred Garza said members of Congress were receptive to their program. “Everybody has a plan. We went beyond and created an operation,” Garza said. The Sheriff’s Office hopes to receive $90 million over a five-year period. For now, county authorities have a pilot camera watching over the World Trade Bridge. Maverick County Should the Sheriff’s Office receive funding, the program would expand to Val Verde, Kinney, Maverick, Dimmit, Zapata and Starr counties. That’s a combined 340 miles of border area. Webb continues on A13