The USDA now confirms 20 cases of the New World screwworm in Texas, with the most recent reported outside Medina County, and four more cases reported Tuesday in Terrell County. Officials are releasing millions of sterile flies to slow the parasite’s spread.

The NHL took the first step toward expansion in Texas earlier this week, agreeing to terms with billionaire Dan Friedkin and his family to explore the feasibility of putting a franchise in Houston or Austin.

Far enough from the Dallas Stars, who relocated from Minnesota in 1993, a new team would not interfere with their territorial rights. And the league has shown no fear of adding one team at a time, so No. 33 does not have to come with No. 34.

“Symmetry I don’t think should necessarily govern expansion,” Commissioner Gary Bettman said Tuesday. “You expand if you think it makes sense and enhances what the league has.”

What is behind the NHL’s interest in Texas

Money is the obvious answer. Bettman said the total investment of the project would be some $3.5 billion, which would include expansion fees paid to established owners along with the cost of building a new arena.

The Houston Rockets’ arena downtown is publicly owned but controlled by team owner Tilman Fertitta’s Clutch City Sports and Entertainment group. The home of the American Hockey League’s Texas Stars, in the Austin suburb of Cedar Park, has a capacity of 8,000 that is a little over half the size of the NHL’s smallest current rink (Winnipeg).

“I would be surprised if the NHL would be OK with an expansion team that does not have a new arena,” said Brian Mills, an associate professor at the University of Texas who teaches courses on sports economics and strategy. “The revenue potential with the luxury boxes and the way that they set those up and the money that they like to extract from the local cities is way too large to pass up.”

They are also huge markets. Houston at nearly 2.4 million is the fourth-most-populated U.S. city; Austin at just over 1 million is in the top 12.

“Obviously it makes sense if you’re a sports league to have a franchise in the nation’s fifth-largest metro area and one that is growing rapidly,” said Holy Cross professor Victor Matheson, an expert in sports economics. “Houston obviously makes sense in general as a destination for any league.”

Austin is smaller but has doubled its population since the mid-1990s and has seen an infusion of people over the past five years. Only eight of the NHL’s existing markets are bigger.

“It’s becoming more and more of a tech city, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more hockey fans here than there used to be,” Mills said. “I would imagine there’s some market for the NHL here in Austin, particularly more than when it was a sleepy, small town capital of Texas 30 years ago.”

History of hockey in Houston and Austin

When hockey was picking up in popularity in the 1960s and ‘70s and the NHL went from six teams to 18, the rival World Hockey Association was founded and Houston got a franchise when the one in Dayton, Ohio, failed to get off the ground.

The Aeros’ inaugural season was in 1972-78, and they were best known for “Mr. Hockey” Gordie Howe playing for them along with sons Mark and Marty. They won four Avco World Trophies as WHA champions before folding.

An AHL team using the same name existed in Houston from 1994-2013. The Texas Stars have played in Austin since ’09.

“There’s some interest of hockey,” University of Houston economics professor Steven G. Craig said. “Houston is full of immigrants from around the country and around the world. And Austin is sort of similar in the sense of a pretty heterogeneous population.”

Pros and cons of a Houston or Austin NHL franchise

Growing the sport in another so-called non-traditional spot is a big benefit. Smashing successes in places like Las Vegas and Tampa, Florida, show what hockey can do across the Sun Belt when strong ownership is involved.

“Southern cities have been doing pretty well now these days in the NHL: the Lightning and the Panthers,” Mills said of the two teams in Florida. “You’ve got some pretty good hockey teams after some pretty miserable failures with some earlier expansion to the South.”

Abandoning the second try in Atlanta (the Thrashers from 2000-11) was more a failure of ownership than the market. The same could be said in Arizona, where a revolving door of owners led to arena miscues and eventually the Coyotes being sold and moved to Salt Lake City in 2024 to become the Utah Mammoth.

A 33rd team also means 20-23 more NHL players and hopefuls in the minors. The changing landscape of hockey development at the junior and college levels has the potential to churn more talent through the pipeline in North America than ever before, along with players coming from Europe.

“You do have a pretty big pool of players,” Matheson said. “I’m not particularly worried about diluting the talent there because I think there’s a lot of skill.”

What’s next and where the 34th team may be

After this six-month exploratory phase is complete, recent history suggests a season-ticket drive would be one of the subsequent steps. Ticket drives validated interest that led to the Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken.

The Board of Governors would need to approve moving forward in the process. No vote has yet been held, though the executive committee supported exploring Houston and Austin.

And while the NHL is comfortable with unbalanced Eastern and Western conferences, getting to 34 teams seems inevitable if it goes to 33. Bettman said the board on Tuesday was updated on situations in Atlanta and Arizona, and it would be no surprise if one of those places got another crack at it.

ere’s everything you need to know about one of the most recognizable trophies in North American sports — The Stanley Cup.

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Texas lawmakers on Tuesday asked the Texas Secretary of State’s Office for assurances that issues with the state’s voter registration and election management system would be fixed before the November midterm election.

“Those fixes have to be done, because if we go into a November election and we don’t, we can’t claim that we have integrity in the voter roll,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Harris County, during a Senate State Affairs Committee hearing that addressed voter registration and voter list maintenance issues.

Bettencourt said he’s heard complaints about the system, known as TEAM, from election officials in Travis, Austin, and Jackson counties, among others.

Christina Adkins, the elections division director at the secretary of state’s office, said the agency is “dedicating every possible resource that we have within our office to resolving these issues.”

“There is nothing more important in our office than this project,” Adkins said.

TEAM was redesigned and redeveloped by the state and relaunched last summer. Election officials say they have struggled with it since then, and though some functionality issues have been resolved, others continue to come up.

For example, election officials have reported that processes such as voter registration status lookups and precinct assignments frequently don’t work properly. In addition, the system often malfunctions when attempting to produce reports of registered voters and voters who have requested a mail ballot, forcing some election officials to produce their own spreadsheets to keep track.

The problems, election officials say, have added financial and staffing strains on counties already strapped for resources.

The system was developed by Civix, a Louisiana-based vendor. The majority of the state’s 254 counties rely on TEAM to plan elections and maintain their voter rolls. Even counties that instead use software from a state-approved private vendor to manage their voter rolls are required by state law to sync their data with TEAM daily, and are required to use TEAM to verify a voter’s identity and their eligibility to cast a ballot.

Groups representing election officials across Texas have asked the agency to halt the TEAM update rollout and address issues that they said “directly impact key parts of the election and jury process.” The groups first outlined their complaints in a letter to Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson in October, and sent another one in February.

Earlier this month, Nelson announced she’d be stepping down as of July 17. Gov. Greg Abbott has yet to appoint her successor.

Secretary of state, vendor working together on fixes

According to public records, the state’s contract with Civix is for $17 million. The secretary of state’s office told Votebeat last year that the money for it came from a mix of state dollars and federal funds allocated under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, earmarked for improving election administration.

Bettencourt raised questions about Civix’s work during the hearing. “When I get half a dozen counties with their hair on fire, and some counties are small, and some of them are big, that means that the vendor is behind on actually delivering fixes to the system,” Bettencourt said.

He directly asked Adkins whether Civix was up for the task. “Yes, sir,” she responded, adding her office is working with the vendor on fixes. Civix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Civix, Adkins said, also manages voter registration systems for other states, including Louisiana and Iowa, but Texas is the vendor’s biggest election management and voter registration software customer.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office has said it anticipated technical issues with this “once-in-a-decade upgrade,” though it pointed to some unexpected challenges that have exacerbated the issues.

The agency specified that it didn’t anticipate the updated system having to handle significant amounts of data from large counties that abruptly stopped using a vendor that had financial problems. It also noted that redrawn boundaries following last year’s unexpected midcycle redistricting created additional complications that prevented counties from mailing out voter registration certificates on time.

Disclosure: Texas Secretary of State 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.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.