Austin, TX
Behind the Takeoff with Lyn Estabrook
After earning her degree in architecture, Lyn Estabrook began her professional journey at an architecture firm in Austin, where she played a role in designing government buildings, including the original airport concessions. Over the next decade, she honed her skills at various architecture firms before making a significant shift to the public sector.
In 2008, Lyn joined the City of Austin’s Building Services as a project manager. Her career continued to evolve as she transitioned to the Parks Department, managing capital improvement projects. Her commitment and hard work caught the attention of others, leading to a special assignment in the Office of Sustainability. “When you work hard and do good work, people notice,” Lyn says, emphasizing the importance of dedication in her field.
Most recently, she was promoted to Deputy Chief of Planning and Development in the Department of Aviation, showcasing her ambition and leadership. Lyn is not only passionate about architecture but also about helping her team grow. She finds joy in those “light bulb” moments when a team member discovers a new idea or solution. “I love being able to see a problem and help solve it,” she explains.
At first glance, airports may seem like public utilities, but many are structured to be financially self-sustaining. “We are a city-owned airport, but we make all of the money that we need on campus,” Lyn explains. This means that, unlike other city services, the airport doesn’t receive taxpayer funding. Instead, they rely on the revenue generated from the businesses operating within the airport—chief among them, the airlines.
Lyn’s role in airport planning is all about looking ahead—not just a year or two, but decades into the future. With passenger numbers and flight traffic growing rapidly, Lyn and her team must think in long-term horizons to ensure the airport can meet future demand. “The planning team does a lot of future thinking,” she explains. “They have to look at trends, they have to look at what other airports are doing, and they have to look historically backward to understand where we’ve been.”
One of the biggest adjustments Lyn has had to navigate is the growth in both the size of the planes and the number of flights. The terminal, originally designed for smaller planes, now hosts much larger aircraft flying at full capacity. “The original design was for planes that had 135 people on them, with only 60% of the seats filled,” Lyn says. “But now we’re pushing larger planes, and they’re coming in with 190 people and load factors as high as 100%.”
For Lyn, building an airport is not just about concrete, gates, and terminals. It’s about turning a long-term vision into a reality that will serve millions of passengers for generations to come. As someone who oversees the planning and development of a major airport, Lyn’s work revolves around balancing intricate details with the big picture. At the heart of it all is the master plan, a document that guides the airport’s future expansion.
“All airports have to do what’s called a master plan. It’s an FAA-required master plan,” Lyn explains. But unlike neighborhood planning, an airport master plan is a highly technical document that sets the framework for everything from taxiways to terminals. “It’s more like a use plan,” she adds. “It lays out a concept for what we could do, not exactly how we’ll do it.”
The master plan is a starting point—a vision for what the airport could become. However, translating that vision into a functional airport involves a complex evolution of design, engineering, and construction. “What we’re building today is an evolution from that,” Lyn says. Her team moves from the high-level concept of the master plan to detailed construction layouts that take into account building codes, geotechnical reports, and the latest FAA guidelines. “The reality takes the technical requirements and moves them into a design and engineering framework so you can exactly know where the building is going.”
Lyn’s work doesn’t stop at just envisioning the future; she leads her team through every phase of the project, from planning and design to the actual build. “You go through what we call 30, 60, 90,” she explains. At each design milestone—30%, 60%, 90%—the team reassesses the plans, refining them until they’re ready to be built. “At each stage, you review it and get closer to the final result.”
One of Lyn’s key strategies for keeping projects on track and on budget is alternative delivery, which brings contractors into the process early to collaborate with designers. “The contractor is on-site within 45 days of the designer,” she says. “They collaborate on how to build it, faster and more efficiently.” This method not only speeds up the process, but also ensures that quality and practicality are at the forefront.
Lyn’s career in airport planning and development has been a journey of balancing vision with practical execution, and nowhere is this balance more evident than in the intricate world of procurement. At the helm of projects that shape the future of the airport, Lyn plays a crucial role in ensuring that the right teams are selected to bring these massive undertakings to life.
For Lyn, procurement isn’t just about signing contracts; it’s a complex process that can take anywhere from six to nine months. “Procurement is the process of finding and selecting someone to do something,” she explains. “In our case, it’s a design team, a construction team, or both.”
What makes airport procurement unique is the collaboration with the city’s purchasing office. This department sets the standards and provides templates, ensuring that everything follows specific regulations. “You’ve got to say what you want, what kind of skills you want, and how you’re going to score it,” Lyn says. This meticulous attention to detail ensures that only the most qualified teams are considered.
Lyn likens the process to a job interview. The teams vying for a project submit extensive documents, sometimes over 100 pages long, detailing everything from organization charts to their approach to working with partners. Once these submissions are reviewed by a panel, which Lyn makes sure is diverse in expertise, background, and experience, the best teams are selected. “It’s a different panel every time,” she notes. “The project manager will be there through the process, but they don’t always score.”
Ultimately, once a team is chosen, it still takes months of negotiation before the final agreements are signed and work can begin. For Lyn, every decision, from selecting the design team to approving construction methods, is part of her long-term vision for the airport. Her leadership ensures that each project is not only well-executed but also reflects the future of the airport she’s helping to build.
“Airports are fun because they’re dynamic. If you’re okay with things changing and evolving, it’s fun because you never know in the day-to-day what you’re going to be doing,” Lyn says with enthusiasm. That energy and curiosity are what have kept her engaged throughout her career. Lyn loves how the aviation industry is its own little world, with its own set of challenges and innovations. “We’re like a little city,” she explains, “and we’re very self-sustaining.”
Today, she leads with the same vigor she had when she first started. Her message to new employees is simple: “You can do anything here. If you decide, ‘I’m tired of being an admin, I want to go be a finance person,’ go for it!” For Lyn, the aviation industry isn’t just a job—it’s a career full of opportunities to grow, evolve, and thrive.
After ranking as the third-best large U.S. city for starting a business last year, Austin took a surprising tumble into the 24th spot nationally for 2026.
WalletHub’s annual report, “Best Large Cities to Start a Business (2026)” compared 100 U.S. cities based on 19 relevant metrics across three key dimensions: business environment, access to resources, and costs. Factors that were analyzed include five-year business survival rates, job growth comparisons from 2020 and 2024, population growth of working-age individuals aged 16-64, office space affordability, and more.
Florida cities locked other states out of the top five best places in America for starting a new business: Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Hialeah, and St. Petersburg.
Austin’s business environment ranked 11th best in the country, and the city ranked ninth in the “access to resources” category. The city also tied with Boise, Idaho, and Fresno, California, for the highest average growth in the number of small businesses nationally.
Austin lagged behind in the “business costs” ranking, coming in at No. 80 overall. This category examined metrics such as the city’s working-age population growth, the share of college-educated individuals, financing accessibility, the prevalence of investors, venture investment amounts per capita, and more.
Earlier this year, WalletHub declared Texas the third-best state for starting a business in 2026, and several Houston-area cities have seen robust growth after being recognized among the best career hotspots in the U.S. WalletHub also ranked Austin on its top-10 list of the best U.S. cities to find a job. Entrepreneurial praise has also been extended to 15 Austin-based innovators that made Inc Magazine’s 2026 Female Founders 500 list.
Texas cities with strong environments for new businesses
Multiple cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex can claim bragging rights as the best Texas locales for starting a new business. Dallas ranked highest overall — appearing 11th nationally — and Irving landed a few spots behind in the 16th spot. Arlington (No. 23), Fort Worth (No. 30), Plano, (No. 35), and Garland (No. 65) followed behind.
Only six other Texas cities earned spots in the report: Houston (No. 26), Lubbock (No. 36), Corpus Christi (No. 39), San Antonio (No. 64), El Paso (No. 67), and Laredo (No. 76). Corpus Christi and Laredo also topped WalletHub’s list of the U.S. cities with the most accessible financing.
“From the Gold Rush and the Industrial Revolution to the Internet Age, periods of innovation have shaped our economy and driven major societal progress,” the report’s author wrote. “However, the past few years have been particularly challenging for business owners in the U.S., due to factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Great Resignation and high inflation.”
Austin, TX
‘I want to be louder’: Austin Drag King Bobby Pudrido refuses to be deterred by Texas ban
Jay Thomas grew up like any kid, laughing at silly things and making up funny names.
So in the ’90s, when Tejano superstar Bobby Pulido’s songs played on the radio, young Jay and his peers couldn’t help but rhyme his last name with the Spanish word pudrido (which means rotten in English).
“We grew up calling him that just because it was funny,” he told Austin Signal host Jerry Quijano.
When he was thinking of a name for his drag persona, Thomas created a list.
“I was thinking of some queer icons and some not queer icons,” he said. “This one just resonated because he is a Tejano star. And in the ’90s he was this really big heartthrob that everybody wanted to be or be with.”
And three years ago, Thomas became Drag King Bobby Pudrido.
He thought it would be fun to impersonate a masculine figure from the Latino community and perform for an audience attracted to that type of energy. He also wanted to bring his culture into his drag.
Pudrido’s name has new recognition these days: Tejano singer Pulido decided to retire from music and go into politics. He’s running for Congress in South Texas’ District 15 against incumbent Republican Monica De La Cruz.
Both in an out of drag, Pudrido is also politically vocal. He advocates for trans rights and against the drag ban that went into effect statewide in March. The law prohibits drag performances in public properties or in front of children. Venues that host these performances can be fined up to $10,000.
“As a drag artist, one of the things we need to do is get booked so we can pay our bills,” Pudrido said.
Even though it’s unclear whether the ban affects some venues, he said, he thinks certain business owners won’t book drag performers because of the risk of being fined.
But as a working-class artist, he doesn’t have the luxury to dwell on it.
“You have to go to work, because you need to pay your bills,” he said.
The law has taken an emotional toll on him, too.
“The way it chips away at a queer person to hear any type of anti-queer legislation pass is something that is really big for me,“ he said. “We are constantly — just as human beings — trying to maintain our mental health. “
But that doesn’t mean his love for performing has been diminished. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
“It has fueled me,” Pudrido said. “Right now I’m in the angry phase where I want to be louder.”
As a performer and producer, the drag king has put on shows in the Austin area and recently traveled back to his hometown in Laredo for a show.
“It’s hard for drag kings to get booked sometimes, so we are still far away from the perfect ideal world for [them],” he said. “But the fact that I have a platform at all is huge.”
Pudrido’s passion for performing comes from his drag ancestors, “who started the art form as a way of being political and of being against the systems that were oppressing queer people.”
Drag King Bobby Prudido is currently producing his second queer quinceañera, “Con Mucho Amor,” with an anticipated show date in the fall.
Austin, TX
Men wrongly accused of grisly yogurt shop murders in Texas reach $35 million settlement with city
The city of Austin will pay $35 million to three men and the family of a fourth who were wrongly accused of the 1991 rape and murder of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop, a case that initially sent one of the men to death row and another to life in prison, under a tentative settlement reached Tuesday.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and Maurice Pierce had all insisted they were innocent of one of the city’s most notorious crimes. They were finally declared innocent by a judge in February after investigators determined the crime was committed by a suspect who died in 1999.
The settlement must still be approved by the city council at a later date. Details of the payments to the men and their families were not released.
“This settlement closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history,” Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case and hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event.”
Scott and his attorney Tony Diaz said in a joint statement they are hopeful the settlement will help improve investigation practices and safeguards against wrongful convictions.
“Discussions and negotiations are ongoing regarding police reforms that would help ensure that nothing like what occurred in this case ever happens again,” they said.
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men, who were teenagers when the girls were killed, were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed. He died in 2010 in a confrontation with police after a traffic stop.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 and the previous trials revealed another male suspect.
Investigators determined in 2025 that new DNA science and reviews of old ballistics evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 killing.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
-
Louisiana14 seconds agoLouisiana National Guard troops return to Washington for Trump task force
-
Maine6 minutes agoA top issue in Maine and Oklahoma governors’ races? Tribal sovereignty. – ICT
-
Maryland12 minutes agoMaryland Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 results for May 13, 2026
-
Michigan18 minutes agoPuppies, prom and pancakes: What to do in West Michigan this weekend
-
Massachusetts24 minutes agoBattenfeld: Have Massachusetts voters finally had enough of soft on crime?
-
Minnesota30 minutes agoCaribou Coffee in Minnesota launches value menu
-
Mississippi36 minutes agoMississippi State, Ole Miss baseball hosting scenarios for NCAA Tournament bracket
-
Missouri42 minutes ago
Missouri Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 winning numbers for May 13, 2026