🟪 Austin ISD loses 3,000 students amid school closures and budget crisis (Austin Current)

🟪 Council disbands advisory board for development in Austin's South Central Waterfront (Community Impact)

🟪 ERCOT, developers detail plans to manage data center growth amid legislative scrutiny (Community Impact)

🟪 As first anniversary of Trump tariffs approaches, Texas small businesses say they’re suffering (Houston Public Media)

🟪 Hegseth asks the Army’s top uniformed officer to step down while US wages war against Iran (Associated Press)

🟪 Key justices appear skeptical of limiting birthright citizenship (New York Times)

READ ON!

✅ Austin ISD loses 3,000 students amid school closures and budget crisis (Austin Current)

The Austin school district lost more than 3,000 students this school year, marking its second-largest enrollment drop in the past decade, according to Texas Education Agency data analyzed by The Texas Tribune. The sharp decline is straining the district’s finances and accelerating difficult decisions about consolidations and cuts.

The drop reflects broader trends across Texas and the nation, where falling birth rates, expanding school choice , rising housing costs and immigration enforcement are reshaping public school enrollment. In Austin ISD, the unusually steep descent carries immediate consequences. Fewer students means far less funding, deepening a budget deficit by tens of millions of dollars. In response, Austin ISD leaders are closing schools, consideringland sales and searching for ways to retain current students and attract new ones.

The slowdown is not limited to Austin ISD. Once fast-growing districts on the outskirts of the city, including Leander and Pflugerville ISDs, as well as charter schools such as KIPP Public Schools, are also planning to shutter campuses as enrollment drops.

Austin ISD now serves just over 69,000, down more than 14,000 students from a decade ago. The greatest decline came between 2020 and 2021, the years marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, when enrollment fell by about 6,000 students. This year’s drop ranks the second largest, and district leaders say fears tied to immigration enforcement contributed significantly to the unexpected decline… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Council disbands advisory board for development in Austin's South Central Waterfront (Community Impact)

City Council voted to dissolve the South Central Waterfront Advisory Board, the body established almost a decade ago to help guide a wave of planned development south of downtown.

The board's deactivation came after it had struggled to meet on a regular basis since early 2025, and as a series of civic planning updates made its duties less critical.

“Certain things have happened over the past couple of years that created real difficulty in what was intended when this board was created. So this is not a reflection on the board or any of the people that have served on the board; it is the circumstances," Mayor Kirk Watson said in early March.

Officials unanimously moved to dissolve the advisory board March 26. It may continue to exist for about a month until it's formally disbanded… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Austin’s slowest city Department tries to pick up the pace (Austin Chronicle)

here’s a story Kirk Watson likes to tell to illustrate how he felt about the Austin Development Services Department as he ran for mayor in 2022. 

“When I was running, I emphasized that I wanted to do a performance review of Development Services, the site-planning process in particular,” Watson told the Chronicle. “And the joke – but it was only partly a joke – that I used to say was that not a single person came up to me during that race and said, ‘Watson, don’t touch that development review process. That stuff’s really working good.’ Nobody said that.”

In fact, as Watson was quite aware, few people had said anything complimentary about the Development Services Department (formerly known as Planning and Development Review) for many years, or maybe ever. As the entity responsible for issuing permits and inspecting construction in Austin, DSD is one of the most important departments in the city, but it has a reputation for having the slowest permit review process of the state’s large cities. Developers, affordable housing advocates, and even the city itself say the slow reviews raise the cost of housing. 

A series of audits stretching back to the 1980s have detailed DSD’s shortcomings. The 2015 Zucker Report described its permit review process as labyrinthine and fraught with miscommunication. It stated that the complaints researchers received from Austinites about the department were “the worst we have seen in our national studies.” City employees told the researchers that the rules governing permit approval were “so complex that it takes a year to understand or get proficient in the process.”  

The Zucker Report recommended 464 ways to improve DSD. Some were big-picture, like transforming the department’s culture to prioritize customer service. Some were specific, like requiring employees to return phone calls promptly… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ New developers want to remake former StoryBuilt site in East Austin (Austin Business Journal)

A dilapidated East Austin property has a second chance at redevelopment.

Years after StoryBuilt first pitched a mixed-use project at the centrally located 4.85-acre site, new developers are jumpstarting work on a 130-unit multifamily project.

Attorney Michael Whellan of Armbrust & Brown PLLC is acting as the authorized agent, according to city of Austin documents. In a letter submitted with a rezoning application, he said the current developers recently acquired the 755 Springdale Road property.

“The owner … has been working to restart this defunct project and turn the property into a community asset rather than an eyesore,” Whellan said, describing the 755 Springdale location as a currently “distressed construction site.”

The application lists the new owner as 755 Springdale, LP, which shares a listing address with Seco Ventures. Several local commercial and multifamily projects are on the Austin-based development and investment firm’s website. Those include the 266-unit Whitley complex downtown and the 216,521-square-foot Capital Ridge office building… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ ERCOT, developers detail plans to manage data center growth amid legislative scrutiny (Community Impact)

The Texas power grid is undergoing “generational” growth, experts said during the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ annual summit March 31 in Round Rock. Much of that growth is due to data centers—an industry under scrutiny from state lawmakers as some Texas communities push back against proposed data center developments.

Over 2,000 projects totaling 453,000 megawatts are currently looking to connect to the state grid, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas told legislators April 1. About 357,000 megawatts of those connection requests are potential data centers, ERCOT documents show.

One megawatt of electricity can serve about 250 residential customers, according to ERCOT. Demand on the grid reached a record 85,508 megawatts in August 2023, with the state agency estimating that demand could grow to about 145,000 megawatts by 2031.

“Data centers and data-driven demand are fundamentally reshaping how we think about planning, operations and infrastructure,” ERCOT Vice President Venkat Tirupati said during the March 31 summit. “The demand projections we are modeling today are not just incremental, they are generational, and Texas is right at the center of this transformation. At the same time, we are all challenged to deliver this transformation while maintaining affordability.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ As first anniversary of Trump tariffs approaches, Texas small businesses say they’re suffering (Houston Public Media)

Thursday marked one year since President Donald Trump proclaimed "Liberation Day," imposing tariffs by executive order on virtually all U.S. trading partners. While the Supreme Court has ruled those tariffs illegal, the administration has yet to refund them, and new tariffs are on the way.

Small businesses in Texas and beyond say they're feeling the pain. Over the 11-month period ending in January, Texas companies paid $13 billion in tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Even that understates the damage, according to the small business coalition We Pay the Tariffs.

The advocacy organization found Texas businesses paid a total of $26 billion in tariffs imposed directly by the White House without the approval of Congress between March 2025 and this January. New trade numbers, due out from the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday, are expected to drive that total still higher. "One year after Liberation Day, the damage to America’s small businesses goes far beyond what any tariff data can capture," said Dan Anthony, executive director of We Pay the Tariffs. "These businesses have spent the last 12 months not growing, not hiring, not innovating, but surviving. They’ve drained savings, taken on debt, laid off employees and cut product lines just to keep their doors open."

All of that is taking a toll on the Texas economy, according to a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas late last year. Houghton Horns, a musical instrument store in Keller, near Fort Worth, is one such small business. Kacie Wright, the store's business manager, said that even if the administration refunded the emergency tariffs today, it would not make up for the damage done. "Online sales are down about 40%. So, even if we get refunded, because we’ve had to raise our prices so high to cover these tariffs, that refund won’t cover the lost revenue," Wright said... 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Key justices appear skeptical of limiting birthright citizenship (New York Times)

A majority of the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of President Trump’s efforts to limit birthright citizenship during arguments on Wednesday. Key conservative justices raised doubts about the constitutionality of the president’s executive order that would end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign visitors.

When a lawyer for the Trump administration suggested that the realities of modern migration required a new assessment of whether the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is seen as a key vote, retorted: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Still, in an argument that lasted more than two hours, the chief justice and several other of the court’s conservatives also asked tough questions of a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the legal challenge, making the outcome of the legally complicated and hugely consequential case not fully clear. In an unprecedented move and a signal of the stakes of the landmark case, Mr. Trump attended the first part of the argument, watching from a public gallery as his solicitor general defended the policy.

During the A.C.L.U.’s argument, the president abruptly rose from his seat and left the courtroom. After returning to the White House, he posted on social media, falsely, that the United States is the “only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”

The case before the court has enormous stakes, potentially redefining what it means to be an American. A decision to limit birthright citizenship could also have sweeping practical consequences, stripping the promise of citizenship from the estimated 200,000 babies or more born in the United States each year to undocumented immigrants… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Pam Bondi wanted a graceful exit. But Trump wanted her gone. (New York Times)

Attorney General Pam Bondi had a pretty good idea her days were numbered.

President Trump had complained too freely, too frequently, to too many people about her inability to prosecute the people he hates. She was falling short of Mr. Trump’s unyielding, unrealistic demands for retribution against his enemies. She had made mistake upon mistake in her handling of the Epstein files. Her critics were in the president’s ear.

Last month, Ms. Bondi told a friend that Mr. Trump’s willingness to fire Kristi Noem from her post as homeland security secretary meant she might be in jeopardy too.

But Ms. Bondi had not expected Mr. Trump, the man responsible for elevating her to one of the most powerful positions in the country, to drop the curtain quite so soon, according to four people familiar with the situation.

On Wednesday, the 60-year-old Ms. Bondi, downcast but determined, joined Mr. Trump for a glum crosstown drive to the Supreme Court, where they watched arguments in the birthright citizenship case. In the car, Mr. Trump told her it was time for a change at the top of the Justice Department… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Hegseth asks the Army’s top uniformed officer to step down while US wages war against Iran (Associated Press)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ousted the Army’s top uniformed officer and two other generals, the Pentagon said Thursday without giving a reason for the departures while the United States is waging a war against Iran.

Gen. Randy George “will be retiring from his position as the 41st Chief of Staff of the Army effective immediately,” said Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman. George has held the post of Army chief of staff, which typically runs for four years, since August 2023 under the Biden administration.

The ouster, reported earlier by CBS News, is just the latest of more than a dozen firings of top generals and admirals by Hegseth since he took office last year. Like many of those other firings, Pentagon officials are not offering a reason for George’s departure, which comes nearly five weeks into U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and with no clear timeline from President Donald Trump on when the war may end.

Hegseth also has ousted Army Gen. David Hodne and Army Maj. Gen. William Green, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive leadership changes. A reason for their departures also was not given… 🟪 (READ MORE)