Texas
More Texans would qualify for food stamps under a bill heading to Gov. Greg Abbott
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Low-income Texans could soon have an easier time qualifying for food stamps under a bill the state Legislature approved on Friday.
The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program offers food assistance to low-income residents. Eligibility for SNAP is based on income, household size and citizenship status. But in Texas, families can be disqualified based on how much their vehicles are worth.
Current Texas limits cap the maximum value of a vehicle at $15,000 for the first vehicle and $4,650 for any additional vehicles. The limits have not been updated since 2001 for the primary car and not since 1974 for additional cars. Advocates say current limits are forcing families to choose between a reliable vehicle and feeding their families.
House Bill 1287 would make a one-time inflationary update to the maximum value of a vehicle a household can own before they’re disqualified from receiving food stamps. If the bill became law, families could qualify if their first vehicle was valued at $22,500 and if any additional vehicles were valued at $8,700.
“I really view this as not a handout but a hand up. … What we want people to do is to grow out of dependence on the government. You have to have transportation to do that,” said state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, a Brenham Republican and the chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. “You have to have the ability to get to the job.”
Because SNAP is a federal program, the state will not incur additional costs with the implementation of the bill.
After the Senate approved the bill in a 27-4 vote on Wednesday, the House approved Senate changes to the bill on Friday. HB 1287 will now head to Gov. Greg Abbott. A gubernatorial spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether Abbott supports HB 1287.
HB 1287 cruised through the Legislature with bipartisan support, getting unanimous votes from House and Senate committees. The bill was authored by Republican state Rep. Ryan Guillen of Rio Grande City and sponsored by Democratic state Sen. César J. Blanco of El Paso. In the Senate, five Republicans signed on as co-sponsors to the bill.
More than 11,000 Texas households were denied SNAP because of the value of their vehicles in 2019, according to a Feeding Texas report. In 2022, 54,740 households were denied because of their vehicles, nearly five times as many denials despite little change in the total number of SNAP participants.
Inflation has driven up the price of food, utilities and vehicles. The price for a used vehicle jumped 28% from March 2021 to March 2022, according to Cox Automotive.
As a result of inflation driving up the value of their cars, thousands of families lost their SNAP benefits when they went to recertify, Celia Cole, CEO of Feeding Texas, told the Tribune.
“Inflation in the used car market was causing people with very limited income, who were struggling to put food on the table, to lose access to SNAP,” Cole said. “No family should lose their ability to put food on the table because of inflation and the car market.”
HB 1287 also impacts grandparents raising grandchildren who are struggling to make ends meet, but who also need a vehicle to get their grandchildren to school.
“This Texas rule … is increasingly preventing Texan families from being eligible for food benefits, straining the emergency food network and increasing hunger in all Texas counties,” Valerie Hawthorne, of the North Texas Food Bank, said during House committee testimony.
Disclosure: Feeding Texas has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Texas
IL Texas holds middle school improv night
COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – Who doesn’t need a good laugh at the end of the school year?
IL Texas College Station hosted its first ever middle school Improv Night: Staff vs. Students.
Twelve teachers and 16 students participated in the contest.
The prize was a mannequin head with a wig. We’re told it was a tie, and the teachers won the wig while the students took home the head!
Copyright 2024 KBTX. All rights reserved.
Texas
Water woes dry up sugarcane production in Texas – Texas Farm Bureau
By Julie Tomascik
Editor
The sweetest crop in Texas is no more.
Fields of green sugarcane now sit barren after the only sugar mill in Texas, the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, Inc., closed in February due to a lack of water.
It’s a difficult reality for farmers like Sam Sparks who have grown sugarcane for years.
“It’s really, really sad,” Sparks, who farms and ranches in Mercedes, said. “It’s strange to prepare a crop plan for the year and to not have sugarcane involved. It’s going to take a while to really settle in.”
Sparks’ family was instrumental in Texas sugarcane production and the mill from the beginning. His grandfather was one of the region’s first growers and a chairman of the mill’s board of directors.
Sparks continued the family legacy of growing cane and serving on the board.
But that’s come to an end and his fields of sugarcane have been plowed under as the decades-old industry is officially over in Texas. The water issues plaguing the crop and the region are driven by severe drought conditions, and reservoirs are also at an all-time low.
Much of the problem, however, centers along the neighboring country to the south. Mexico is significantly behind on the water it owes the U.S. under the 1944 Water Treaty, further exacerbating the water issue for Valley farmers.
Under the treaty, Mexico is required to deliver 1,750,000 acre-feet of water every five years, which is an average of 350,000 acre-feet annually. The current five-year cycle ends in October 2025, and Mexico is behind by more than 700,000 acre-feet.
“Over the years, they’ve built up multiple dams and have been collecting water and not giving the United States the water that is owed in the treaty,” he said. “If Mexico were to give the water that it owes the United States, the mill would still be in operation and there’d still be cane grown in the Rio Grande Valley.”
Mexican government officials cite the drought as the reason for the delay in water deliveries.
“Right now, we do have a delay in water deliveries. That’s the reality this current cycle, but our intention is to mitigate that deficit as much as possible,” Manuel Morales, secretario de la Sección Mexicana for CILA, told the Texas Tribune.
Citrus orchards, vegetables, other fruits and traditional row crops all require water—water that isn’t available. That could eventually mean the same fate as sugarcane—ceasing to exist in the Valley.
“Water issues that we have with Mexico affects all crops growing in the Rio Grande Valley that need irrigation water,” he said. “If we don’t have the irrigation water to supply those crops, we just can’t grow them. Then all the logistics, the infrastructure goes away, as well.”
Just because farmers have water rights doesn’t mean they’ll have water this year. Many districts in the region didn’t allocate irrigation water for farmers, and counties have issued disaster declarations and implemented water restrictions.
That means thousands of normally irrigated acres will go unplanted this year.
“It’s desperate times right now in the Rio Grande Valley,” Sparks said.
A report released this year by Texas A&M AgriLife Extension shows the Valley could lose over $495 million in total crop production.
Farmers are feeling the losses, and so are the rural communities where they live.
When farmers are planting fewer acres, they need fewer employees. And with the sugar mill closing, about 500 employees are now without a job.
“There’s a tremendous amount of families that this directly affects, and then all the other commerce that goes along with cane production,” Sparks said. “It’s a significant economic blow to the Rio Grande Valley.”
Enforcing the 1944 Water Treaty is a priority issue for Texas Farm Bureau (TFB).
The state organization has hosted meetings with lawmakers, government agencies and farmers and ranchers. Congress also passed a resolution, which TFB supported, that encouraged negotiations to guarantee more predictable and reliable water deliveries from Mexico to the U.S.
“Unless substantive actions are taken to force Mexico to comply with the treaty, this problem will continue to further impact agriculture, municipalities and other sectors of the region,” TFB President Russell Boening said. “TFB stands ready to continue working with state and federal officials to combat this issue and preserve the future of Rio Grande Valley agriculture.”
Right now, farmers and ranchers like Sparks are waiting on a hurricane to bring much-needed rainfall or for Mexico to deliver the water it owes.
Both are a gamble, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Watch a video from Sam Sparks’ farm in Mercedes.
Texas
Texas homeowner claims squatter who sold furniture in yard sale was repairman hired off TikTok as lawmakers blame police
The Texas woman whose home was turned into a squatter’s “drug den” and sold her furniture in a yard sale said she hired the man as a recommended repairman from TikTok.
Terri Boyette appeared in front of a Texas Senate committee on Wednesday to reveal the horrors she faced while trying to remove the vagrants from her home.
“This is burglary. This is breaking and entering,” said Texas State Senator Paul Bettencourt, the committee chairman, according to Fox 4 Dallas.
“He was selling your possessions on your front lawn. I am outraged. This should not happen in Texas, and it will never happen again after we get this bill passed.”
Boyette’s nightmare started when she fired the worker off the social media platmore last June to make repairs on her home while she cared for her elderly mother in Florida, according to WFAA.
While away, the repairman began squatting in Boyette’s Mesquite home, about 14 miles from Downtown Dallas, and allowed other strangers to do so with him.
A painter had broken in and wrecked the place, leaving crack pipes in her oven and needles in a drawer, Boyette told The Post in March.
For nearly a year, they turned her home into a biohazard zone, with police telling her they were unable to resolve the issue.
In December, a judge finally granted an eviction notice to remove the worker from the home, but with the holidays approaching, the judge extended the squatter’s appeal by 30 days.
“She didn’t want him to be homeless over the holidays, which left me homeless over the holidays,” Boyette told WFAA.
Once the suspected squatter knew he would be evicted from the home, he started selling off her washer, dryer, refrigerator and dining room table.
The alleged squatter was served with his final eviction notice on Feb. 6 and was formally evicted on March 20.
But as it nears a year since the repairman and others began living in the home, Boyette said she’s still been unable to move back in due to the havoc and disarray left behind by multiple vagrants
Boyette’s Mesquite home was one of 475 such squatter cases in the Dallas-Forth Worth area, according to Bettencourt.
But he and other lawmakers plan to put the issue to rest with new legislation.
Bettencourt found that Texas, like many other states, does not clearly define a squatter or what a homeowner can legally pursue to define a person as such in court.
He has since launched the committee to find an answer for the legal loopholes many vagrants use to shack up in homes they don’t pay rent on or illegally enter and claim to be tenants.
Sen. Royce West, one of the legislators who sits on the committee, asked Boyette why the Mesquite Police Department wasn’t able to remove the squatters.
Boyette detailed how police left her high and dry for months, and the issue was only resolved after months of back-and-forth in the courts.
“I called the police. They said, ‘How long has he been there?’ I said about two weeks. They said this is a civil matter,” she told the committee.
Boyette revealed the alleged squatter returned to the home in April, banging on the door and demanding to enter.
The man was later arrested on a criminal trespass complaint.
“It makes no sense. No sense at all. I am starting to get outrageous as well,” West proclaimed. “I want to know from Mesquite PD what they don’t understand about the statute.”
“They said because no one was living there,” Boyette told the senator.
“That’s a bunch of crap,” he replied about the ineptitude of law enforcement.
Legislators from both parties have demanded answers from the police.
Bettencourt has requested the Mesquite Police Department to attend their next meeting to explain why the man was not removed from the home.
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