Texas
Should States Like Texas Be Allowed to Grade Their Own Highway Homework? — Streetsblog USA
In late October, protestors in Houston watched as officials wheeled a trough out into the middle of St. Emanuel Street and each scooped out a ceremonial shovelful of sand.
The officials were ostensibly there for a symbolic groundbreaking for the North Houston Highway Improvement Project, which will widen or rebuild around 25 miles of Interstate 45 in the heart of Texas’s largest city. For the protesters, though, the bulldozers that loomed in the background of that photo-op were a very real threat of the harm soon to come to St. Emanuel Street, and the estimated 1,079 homes, 344 businesses, five places of worship and two schools that will be razed to make way for the highway.
“Half of that street is going to be gone,” added Erin Eriksen, an organizer with Stop TxDOT I-45. “Half of those businesses are going to be torn down. And TxDOT was basically thumbing its nose at these places that were going to be destroyed because of this project.”
According to official analyses, though, the destruction of St. Emanuel Street and so many like it isn’t enough of an “environmental impact” to justify canceling the I-45 project, even though it will dramatically exacerbate pollution, flooding, and inequality in the disproportionately low income communities of color through which the expansion will largely run.
And that’s probably because the Texas Department of Transportation wrote those official analyses itself.
‘A fox guarding a hen house”
Thanks to a little-known loophole in federal law known as the “NEPA assignment” program, DOTs from Texas and six other states — Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Ohio, and Utah — are temporarily “assigned” the responsibility of conducting what are normally federally overseen environmental assessments (the states must reapply every five years when their authority expires. Texas’s authority expires this year, and members of the Texas Streets Coalition are urging advocates to comment on whether it should be rescinded before Dec. 9.)
In theory, NEPA assignment is supposed to help responsible state DOTs build projects quickly, without having to wait on a single understaffed federal agency to work through a backlog of proposals from across the country before giving the green light on simple repaving or repair. Some argue that it also gives environmentally progressive states an opportunity to conduct an even more thorough analysis than the feds would do on their own.
In car-dominated Texas, though, NEPA assignment is essentially a “fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation” — and its consequences shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, argues Heyden Black Walker of Reconnect Austin.
In Walker’s native Austin, for instance, advocates say that Texas DOT misleadingly “segmented” the expansion of a single intestate known as I-35 into three smaller projects along the exactly same road, hiding the staggering impacts the expansion would have for the region on the whole — and, advocates say, violating federal law. Walker says the “9,000 pages” of official documents about the project also didn’t adequately consider the highway’s impacts on air pollution, and failed to study whether railway investments could address the same problems the expansion was meant to solve.
That the I-35 expansion received even that degree of scrutiny, though, is something of an outlier.
Texas activists found that between 2015 and 2022, only six TxDOT projects receive a full-blown “environmental impact statement,” an exhaustive process that details exactly how the agency will mitigate the harm it will cause. A staggering 130 projects, by comparison, only received a far-simpler “environmental assessment,” all of which resulted in a “finding of no significant impact,” or FONSI, which is pronounced like the shark-jumping character on “Happy Days.”
Cumulatively, though, those “insignificant” projects displaced a stunning total of 477 homes and 376 businesses, and consumed $24 billion. And advocates say that lack of oversight is particularly damning for a state that would rank eighth in the world for carbon dioxide emissions if it were a country, and that polluted nearly twice as much as second-ranked California in 2019.
“The things that NEPA was intended to protect us from — from inordinate displacement, from worse air quality — Texas is failing on all of those metrics,” said Peter Eccles, director of policy and planning at LINK Houston, a transportation advocacy group. “Since TxDOT entered NEPA assignment in 2014, displacements have skyrocketed across Texas, dwarfing the national average in terms of how many households are displaced for freeway projects, as well as the number of counties that are no longer in attainment for criteria pollutants. … It’s not working as intended.”
If the federal government was conducting the NEPA process, advocates argue that Texas might face stricter parameters for what constitutes a “significant” impact of a highway project, rather than letting the state write off families losing their homes and residents getting sick as unfortunate but necessary evils. And maybe, bad projects might even be stopped before they start.
“TxDOT is setting up its own environmental reviews, setting its own parameters, and then self-grading its own performance by the parameters that it sets,” said Bobby Levinski, an attorney with the Save Our Springs Alliance. “And we don’t have that federal oversight that used to exist where, if you did have a disagreement over what the current state of the science is, [you might have] a technical expert at the federal level who could say, ‘No, you didn’t quite do a good enough job looking at, say, this air quality aspect.’
“That check no longer exists,” he continued. “And at the end of the day, they’re going to give themselves an ‘A.’”
NEPA Assignment Under Trump
Levinski and the rest of the coalition acknowledge that some might be wary of handing environmental power back to the federal government — especially with Trump returning to the White House.
Project 2025, which many believe will serve as the incoming president’s playbook, promises to restore regulations limiting environmental review that Trump put in place the last time he was in office, as well as “frame the new regulations to limit the scope for judicial review of agency NEPA analysis and judicial remedies.”
Advocates in Texas, though, say they’re already living in a world where NEPA has been badly watered down — and because of their state’s special authority, Washington was powerless to intervene. Restoring federal oversight, they argue, is a critical first step to making things right, followed by voting in a presidential administration that takes NEPA seriously.
“Here in Texas, we’ve been facing basically a mini-Trump administration, anyway, with our governor,” said Katy Atkiss, facilitator for the Texas Streets Coalition, referring to Gov. Greg Abbott. “He appoints the Texas Transportation Commission, which is basically five old white men — none with transportation experience. So I feel like we’ve been working in a similar environment anyway. We’ve had several conversations with DOT and other federal representatives throughout the course of of the year, and while they are extremely sympathetic, basically, they said, ‘We believe you, but there’s nothing we can do.’”
Until Texas’s NEPA assignment is revoked, all advocates can do is sue to stop bad projects — though with the president picking many of the judges, that’s an increasingly bleak prospect, too.
“With Trump being in office, the courts aren’t getting easier either,” added Levinski. “[And] making the public be the enforcer of NEPA, I think, puts a big onus on the residents of Texas to go up against the giant Goliath that is TxDOT on every single case. … We need some sort of measure of oversight. You can’t just write off the entire state of Texas.”
The members of the Texas Streets coalition acknowledge that getting their state’s NEPA assignment revoked won’t be easy — and if it can’t be done, they hope USDOT will at least make some common-sense changes.
The state might still be allowed do its own environmental assessments, but not on massive highway projects that displace hundreds of residents. The feds also might force the DOT to wait at least 30 days to collect public comment after they make changes to their plans, or submit to “an annual NEPA compliance audit” to ensure they’re not flouting federal laws. At a minimum, they could acknowledge that granting states like Texas the ability to do their own environmental review even as they’re suing to hide their greenhouse gas emissions from the public seems like a pretty obvious flaw in the system.
At the end of the day, though, advocates say we need to address the shortcomings of NEPA itself, which still doesn’t factor in the power of induced demand — and still offers all states too many opportunities to build destructive highways, even when the federal government is grading their projects.
“I think that NEPA assignment and its abuses by TxDOT are a symptom of the larger failings of NEPA as a whole,” added Eccles. “NEPA was very well intentioned at the time [it was written], but certain states like TxDOT have gotten very good at gaming it to rubber stamp projects that they want to do regardless. Contrast that with the NEPA burden that the Federal Transit Administration puts on transit projects; it’s much more rigorous, and it ends up slowing down those projects significantly. We need to have a clearer picture of what projects benefit the environment and which projects harm it.”
HIDALGO — During a visit to the border Friday, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said changes in immigration laws should wait until the border is completely secure, a contrast from Republican lawmakers who are willing to explore legal status for immigrant workers to address labor shortages prompted by enforcement efforts at work sites.
Cornyn was part of a group of Republican U.S. senators and Senate hopefuls who flocked to the Rio Grande Valley to praise President Donald Trump’s border policies as they attempt to promote their achievements and shape political narratives ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Aggressive enforcement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has prompted some unauthorized workers to stay clear of job sites, leading to labor shortages in construction and restaurants. The Valley has been among the areas hardest hit by the worker shortage, prompting a group of local builders to call for solutions to economic struggles in their industry.
U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, an Edinburg Republican, met with the group and expressed support for a visa program for construction workers, akin to the H-2A visa program that allows foreign nationals to work in the agriculture sector.
Cornyn, though, said it was too early to consider such an option.
“The first thing we need to do is secure the border,” Coryn said during a news conference along the border in the city of Hidalgo. “There is no way that the American people, and certainly my constituents in Texas, would allow us to take another stab at reforming our immigration laws until we’ve got the border secure.”
After securing the border, he said, the next step would be to remove people who “never should have been here in the first place.” Only after that had been accomplished, Cornyn said, should lawmakers delve into changing immigration laws.
Much of Trump’s border policy has been set by executive action. The Republican Congress passed $170 billion in funding for immigration and border enforcement through 2029, making ICE the best-funded law enforcement agency in the country and giving the agency unprecedented recruitment, enforcement, deportation and detention powers. But the effort did not codify many of Trump’s changes to border practices.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who stood beside Cornyn during Friday’s news conference, said he was open to legislation that would address the need for qualified workers but also said the first priority was to secure the border.
“I think we can work in a constructive way on how we come up with a mechanism whereby people who come to this country legally can contribute and be members of our work force,” said Thune, R-South Dakota.
ICE activity at construction sites has intimidated workers — those unauthorized to live in the U.S. and those with legal authorization — from accepting work, builders say. This labor shortage has prompted construction delays that economists suggest will drive up housing costs.
Absent a change in immigration laws, Cornyn suggested job sectors would benefit from cuts to assistance like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, saying it would encourage people to work.
“If you are an able-bodied young adult, you can’t qualify for food stamps, you can’t qualify for welfare benefits like Medicaid and the like, in order to encourage more people to get off the couch,” Cornyn said. “That’s good for them, good for their families, good for their communities.”
For Cornyn, who is locked in an expensive primary race with Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston, the news conference was also an opportunity to tout a major provision from Republicans’ 2025 mega-bill — reimbursement for Operation Lone Star.
Cornyn publicly stated during spring negotiations that his vote in support of the package was contingent on reimbursing Texas for Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative. Ultimately, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July with support from nearly all Republicans and no Democrats, included $13.5 billion in two funds to reimburse states for border security spending.
Abbott had requested $11.1 billion, and the vast majority of the bill’s money is expected to go to Texas. But six months after the bill’s passage, the Trump administration has yet to allocate funding. State Republicans, led by Cornyn, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. August Pfluger, sent a December letter asking the departments of Homeland Security and Justice to prioritize Texas in the disbursement.
“That money will now soon be flowing into the coffers of the state of Texas, to the tune of roughly $11 billion, to do justice — which is to reimburse Texas taxpayers for stepping up and filling the gap when the federal government simply refused to do so,” Cornyn said Friday. “That would not have happened without the leadership of the majority leader and the whip and the direction of the president of the United States, to whom I am very grateful.”
The Cornyn campaign and allied groups have spent more than $40 million in advertising, helping to close Paxton’s initial polling lead. Polls have shown no candidate close to the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff in the March 3 primary.
Cornyn has the backing of Thune and OneNation, a group aligned with the Senate Republican leader that organized Friday’s border trip after spending millions in pro-Cornyn advertising.
Thune on Friday praised Cornyn, whom he beat out to become majority leader in 2024.
“He has been such an advocate through the years on the issue of border security — foremost expert on it,” Thune said. “Most of us, what we know about the border, we know from him.”
Part of Cornyn’s campaign strategy has been to emphasize his support for Trump in ads and on social media. Thune, Cornyn, other Republican senators and Senate hopeful Michael Whatley, former chair of the Republican National Committee from North Carolina, praised Trump’s border actions, with Cornyn expressing his gratitude for Trump’s leadership in getting the One Big Beautiful Bill passed and for his Border Patrol leadership appointments.
The president’s endorsement — or lack of, thus far — has factored heavily into the state’s Senate primary. It is one of a handful of Republican contests for Senate where Trump has yet to put his thumb on the scale, and the president has said that he likes both Cornyn and Paxton.
Cornyn and Thune have appealed to Trump for his endorsement.
The border trip was also an opportunity for Cornyn’s opponents to press their cases.
Paxton preemptively criticized Cornyn’s visit in a Thursday statement that noted the senator said a border wall “makes no sense” in a February 2017 speech in Weslaco, among other instances of wall skepticism in early 2017. At the time, Cornyn said technology and personnel are more effective than physical barriers in some areas. On Friday, Cornyn praised the border wall and its outfitting with cameras, sensors and other technology.
“His 40-plus year career has been spent fighting for amnesty for illegals, cutting deals with Democrats, trying to stop President Trump, and standing in the way of building the wall,” Paxton said in the statement. “Texans aren’t going to forget how Cornyn’s betrayed our country, and no last minute trip to the border to try and act tough is going to change that.”
Hunt posted an ad on X criticizing Cornyn’s previous apprehension for a border wall.
“Now that Trump’s secured our border, John Cornyn wants to take the credit for the wall he tried to block,” the ad said.
Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.
Disclosure: Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc. 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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One of the biggest questions facing Rhett Lashlee and his SMU football program this offseason is how the Mustangs will replenish the tight end position.
Not only did SMU’s tight ends coach leave, but the Mustangs are losing their top four tight ends from the 2025 roster. RJ Maryland, Matthew Hibner and Stone Eby all graduated and redshirt sophomore Adam Moore entered the transfer portal.
SMU began its rebuild of the tight ends room with a commitment from Texas A&M transfer Theo Melin Öhrström.
Melin Öhrström entered the portal on Dec. 26 after four years with the Aggies. The Stockholm, Sweden native appeared in 40 games for Texas A&M, catching 29 balls for 352 yards and three touchdowns. In 2025, the 6-foot-6, 257-pound tight end made four starts and caught 19 passes for 168 yards and a touchdown.
Melin Öhrström redshirted in 2022, so he has one year of eligibility remaining and will have a chance to secure a bigger role during his final collegiate season. He chose the Mustangs over Houston, Kansas State and Auburn
Find more college sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.
Find more SMU coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.
Recruiting a running back out of the NCAA transfer portal wasn’t clean and simple after the winter window opened last week, but the Texas Longhorns were able to land a huge commitment from Arizona State transfer Raleek Brown on Thursday.
The 5’9, 196-pounder has one season of eligibility remaining.
Texas offered Brown out of Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana (Calif.) when he was a top-100 prospect in the 2022 recruiting class. A consensus four-star prospect ranked as the No. 3 running back nationally in the 247Sports Composite rankings, Brown committed to home-state USC without taking any other official visits.
Brown’s career with the Trojans didn’t go as planned, however — after flashing as a freshman with 227 yards on 42 carries (5.4 avg) with three touchdowns and 16 receptions for 175 yards (10.97 avg) and three touchdowns, Brown moved to wide receiver as a sophomore and only appeared in two games, recording three catches for 16 yards and a touchdown.
Wanting to play running back again, Brown transferred to Arizona State in 2024, but was limited by a hamstring injury to 48 yards of total offense.
In 2025, though, Brown finally had his breakout season with 186 carries for 1,141 yards and four touchdowns, adding 34 receptions for 239 yards and two touchdowns. Brown forced 53 missed tackles last season, 67 percent of the total missed tackles forced by Texas running backs, and more than half of his rushing yardage came after contact.
Brown ran a sub 4.5 40-yard dash and sub-11 100-meter dash in high school and flashed that explosiveness with runs of 75 yards and 88 yards in 2025, so Brown brings the speed that the Longhorns need with 31 yards over 10 yards, as well as proven route-running and pass-catching ability.
At Arizona State, the scheme leaned towards gap runs, but Brown has the skill set to be an excellent outsize zone back if Texas head coach Steve Sarksian decides that he wants to major in that scheme once again.
With one running back secured from the portal, the question becomes whether Sarkisian and new running backs coach Jabbar Juluke want to add a big-bodied back to the roster or are comfortable with rising redshirt sophomore Christian Clark and incoming freshman Derrek Cooper handling that role.
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