🟪 Austin City Council outlines process to rename Cesar Chavez Street (KVUE)

🟪 NTSB investigating another incident of Waymo passing Austin ISD school bus (KVUE)

🟪 Why was Williamson County's March 3 primary so chaotic? (KUT)

🟪 Texas to launch a statewide food truck permit on July 1 (Texas Tribune)

🟪 The plan to move millions of people around Dallas-Fort Worth during the World Cup (Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

🟪 Trump weighs more Cabinet changes, but wants to avoid ‘massive shake-up’ (Washington Post)

READ ON!

✅ Austin City Council outlines process to rename Cesar Chavez Street (KVUE)

Four Austin City Council members want community input on whether to rename Cesar Chavez Street, following allegations of abuse against the late labor activist that surfaced last month.

The allegations came to light after labor rights activist Dolores Huerta revealed that she was among the women and girls who say they were sexually abused by Chavez, who died in 1993.

A memo signed by council members José Velásquez (District 3), Vanessa Fuentes District 2), Mayor Pro Tem José “Chito” Vela (District 4) and Zohaib “Zo” Qadri (District 9) calls for listening sessions, public surveys and a cost assessment for residents and business that reside along the street.

Several names have already been floated as possible replacements, such as returning the street to its original name First Street; honoring fallen Austin police officer Jorge Pastore, who was killed in the line of duty in 2023; or renaming it after Huerta.

Council members are seeking an outreach plan and timeline ready before a scheduled work session on May 26.

The full council memo can be read here… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ NTSB investigating another incident of Waymo passing Austin ISD school bus (KVUE)

Federal regulators are investigating another instance of a driverless car passing a stopped Austin ISD school bus.

On Friday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that it launched an investigation into an incident that occurred on March 25. The agency said that it was contacted by Austin ISD, who reported that a Waymo vehicle had passed a bus that was stopped to load and unload students. It is currently unclear where the incident happened.

In Texas, all cars must stop until the lights stop flashing and the arm is retracted, even if the car is on the other side of the road, if there is not a physical lane divider. In December, KVUE first reported that several cars in the company's fleet were shown on camera illegally passing Austin ISD school buses. In each scenario, the buses were stopped with their red lights flashing and stop arms extended.

The NTSB launched a safety investigation into Waymo in January, following reports that the company's autonomous vehicles had passed stopped Austin ISD school buses while students are loading and unloading.

The NTSB investigation cited an incident that occurred on Jan. 12, when a bus was stopping to pick up students on Oltorf Street near Interstate 35 in South Austin… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Why was Williamson County's March 3 primary so chaotic? (KUT)

Williamson County is trying to avoid a repeat of its tumultuous March primary, when voters experienced long wait times and confusion about polling locations. Election officials have agreed to offer countywide voting for the May runoffs.

Bridgette Escobedo, the county's elections administrator, called last month's primary "less secure" than any other election she'd seen in her career and emphasized that it "cannot be repeated," during a recent special County Commissioners Court meeting.

The March primary saw countywide polling places replaced by assigned, precinct-based locations in Williamson County for the first time in more than a decade.

More than a dozen people testified at the meeting that the change led to widespread confusion.

"I had a site in Liberty Hill ... with not a lot of waiting, but the horror stories started coming in from the voters that they had already waited in another line before coming to see us,” said Clark Meyer, who served as an election judge on primary Election Day. "About 50% of the folks that came in mentioned that they had already been to another place. Some of them had been to two other places, and — bless their heart — one person had been to four places."

The switch to precinct-based voting came at the request of the county's Republican Party. Under state law, the county's Democratic Party had no choice but to follow the GOP lead, despite its opposition to the change… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ This state agency was created to investigate Texas universities. How that works is a mystery. (Texas Tribune)

A new state office with the power to investigate whether public universities in Texas are violating laws on diversity, curriculum and campus decision-making has no written policies explaining how those investigations work, even after accepting complaints for nearly three months.

The Office of the Ombudsman, housed within the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and led by a gubernatorial appointee, was created last year to address GOP concerns that universities had become too focused on promoting liberal viewpoints instead of preparing students for the workforce.

The ombudsman accepts complaints from students, faculty and staff alleging violations of two state laws… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Texas to launch a statewide food truck permit on July 1 (Texas Tribune)

Eloisa Schessler and her husband started Eloisa’s Kitchen Food Truck in Dallas to help their daughter. Their daughter had suffered a head injury, and had become a shell of her former self. They worked diligently to create a small business where their daughter not only serves as the sous chef, but she also is responsible for the entire creative design of the truck. Slowly, they started to see their daughter revert back to her former self.

But government red-tape is preventing her food truck and others from growing. The family wants to travel to other cities to serve their food, but each city requires them to apply for a permit, which is not only very costly, but requires the family to take the day off of work to do another city’s inspection.

“It’s a hassle to take time off to go and do that where we have to stop what we’re doing and lose money that day,” Schessler said.

But House Bill 2844, which passed last year and goes into effect July 1, could relieve the Schessler family and the statewide food truck industry from some of the financial pressure.

The new state law outlines that the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) will create a statewide operating permit that will apply to any food truck in Texas. Currently, food truck owners must pay each city’s permitting fees to operate there, which can cost several hundreds of dollars per jurisdiction, even though inspection requirements are largely the same across cities and counties. Consequently, food truck owners have said they feel discouraged from traveling to other places to sell their food, suppressing their business growth… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ The plan to move millions of people around Dallas-Fort Worth during the World Cup (Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

Expect traffic around AT&T Stadium to be a nightmare during the World Cup, but there’s a plan to help alleviate some of the stress hundreds of thousands of soccer fans will put on our transportation system this summer.

The North Texas FIFA World Cup Organizing Committee and the North Central Texas Council of Governments presented Thursday their mobility playbook, which focuses heavily on rail and bus service to move fans to and from Arlington on match days. Michael Morris, director of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, said it’s likely a million additional people will use local roads and public transportation systems over the 31 days the World Cup is in town, during which time nine matches will be played at AT&T Stadium (which will temporarily be renamed Dallas Stadium for the tournament).

Each of those games will be the equivalent of a Super Bowl, officials have said, with upward of 100,000 people descending upon Dallas-Fort Worth. The Trinity Railway Express, with service from downtown Fort Worth, will operate four-car trains instead of the standard three-car trains, and they’re adding two additional train sets with a locomotive and four cars each.

On match days, TRE trains from Fort Worth and Dallas will carry fans to the CentrePort/DFW Airport near State Highway 360 and Trinity Boulevard in Fort Worth, and shuttle buses will transport people to a bus hub closer to the stadium. TRE tickets are available via the GoPass app. Additionally, there will be 125 regional charter buses to carry passengers who can’t fit on the trains. These buses can carry 50 passengers each and will operate with priority on Interstate 30 using specially managed lanes. Transportation officials will be able to change the directional flow of traffic on these lanes depending on the need… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Trump weighs more Cabinet changes, but wants to avoid ‘massive shake-up’ (Washington Post)

After ousting two of his highest-profile Cabinet members from their posts, President Donald Trump is considering making more changes to his administration’s top leadership, according to advisers — a decision that would accelerate the once-slow pace of his second-term staff departures. But Trump, who sought to avoid high-profile departures during the first year back in the White House — often publicly standing by Cabinet members even as they faced scrutiny — is also reluctant to engage in a large-scale shake-up of his Cabinet, and in some cases has pushed to counter reporting that he has soured on certain officials.

On the heels of news of the firing Thursday of his attorney general, Pam Bondi, Trump wanted to make a “very strong” statement reaffirming his support for another official rumored to be on the chopping block, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

As a result, his rapid-response account on X posted a statement from Trump’s communications director saying that the president “has total confidence” in Gabbard, “and any insinuation otherwise is totally fake news.” Gabbard, who has a long history of criticizing U.S. involvement in Middle East conflicts — specifically the notion of a war with Iran — has continued to brief the president on intelligence, even as Trump earlier this week told reporters that Gabbard was “a little bit different in her thought process than me” on Iran. Gabbard is “safe” in her role for the time being, the White House official said. Two others in his Cabinet may be less secure.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have both been under Trump’s scrutiny for a possible exit,according to the same official and a second White House official. Chavez-DeRemer, who is facing misconduct allegations that include an alleged affair with a staffer and drinking in her office, has so far remained in her role despite top officials in her agency resigning amid the scandal.

And Lutnick’s style of freelancing policy ideas and deals without prior approval has long prompted eye rolls from aides and others in the White House, according to people close to Trump, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Stephen Miller is still pursuing his immigration agenda, but more quietly (New York Times)

It was May 2025, a few months into the second Trump administration, and Stephen Miller, the right-wing populist powering the White House crackdown on immigration, was clearly frustrated. President Trump had talked about arresting “the worst of the worst” of undocumented immigrants — the rapists, killers and other criminals he had emphasized during the previous year’s campaign.

Mr. Miller, however, had long pushed for removing anyone who had entered the country illegally. So when Mr. Miller arrived one day last spring at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for an update from agency leaders, an official raised a question on many agents’ minds: Who exactly should they be going after? Mr. Miller was unequivocal, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting. Agents should not limit themselves to dangerous criminals.

Instead, they should stop people with the lowest level of reasonable suspicion, and detain anyone in the country illegally, with warrantless arrests. His message was clear: Push the limits. Eight months later, Mr. Miller did something startling — he backpedaled. His demands had helped set in motion militarized operations on the streets of Democratic-run cities, intensified by immigration agents killing two U.S. citizens protesting in Minneapolis. After initially denouncing one of the slain protesters, an intensive care nurse, as a would-be assassin, Mr. Miller offered a rare concession that immigration authorities might have made a mistake.

Now, Mr. Miller, 40, one of the most influential presidential advisers in recent memory and an unabashed champion of Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigrant crackdown, is at a crossroads. He faces questions about how aggressively he can continue to drive the deportation campaign, and how much appetite his party and the country have for tactics that proved successful in helping to boost arrests of immigrants but reignited a polarizing debate over what it means to be American.

The administration has toned down its immigration strategy. Federal agents have drawn down from the streets of major cities, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary who had become the face of the policy, is out. Mr. Miller even pulled back his public appearances for a time… 🟪 (READ MORE)