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El Paso — Outfitted with his Canon camera and a telephoto lens, Austin Mayor Steve Adler got his first look at the burgeoning “tent city” of Tornillo on Wednesday evening. The brief glance came a day ahead of a scheduled protest at the Tornillo port of call along the Mexican border, where Adler, nearly the entire Austin City Council and mayors from across the nation will protest the practice of separating immigrant children from their family members who illegally cross the U.S. border. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end the separations — part of his...

Use of the MoPac toll lanes has been steadily growing in the seven months since the lanes opened throughout their entire 11-mile lengths, but it is falling slightly short of a first-year estimate made before construction began. Revenue from the added lanes on each side of North MoPac Boulevard, due to variable toll rates that on average have been higher than expected, has at least met expectations this spring and could exceed them when the agency begins in earnest to pursue unpaid tolls. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see the numbers bump up a bit” as collections efforts step up,...

The Austin City Council unanimously approved a pair of “Freedom City” resolutions on Thursday that target racial disparity in Austin police arrests and how officers interact with undocumented immigrants. The first resolution... police to end most discretionary arrests, which happen when an officer chooses to arrest someone for an offense that could result in either a trip to jail or a ticket... data from 2017 that he said showed Austin police arrested African-Americans at an officer’s discretion at more than double the rate of white and Latino residents, and that blacks were seven times more likely to be arrested for...

Austin tax dollars to city election campaign dollars has some concerned about the legality of so called "Democracy dollars" An Austin commission is kicking around the idea of giving taxpayer dollars to residents who would then donate the money to local political candidates. Fred Lewis of the Charter Commission calls it the democracy dollars program. The program was created in Seattle and is so far the only US city with such a program. The commission’s Fred Lewis explained its to combat major donors from dominating elections. Each voter could get 50 bucks for each city race they can vote in....

In May, Williamson County Engineer Terron Evertson said it will take at least 200 trucks of concrete to fill the cave. Tim Kelley, who lives near Cambira Cavern, told CBS Austin he is looking forward to the cave being filled in. His driveway access has been blocked for months, making mundane tasks like grocery shopping a hassle. Although the County says the caves do not pose a risk to homeowners nearby, Kelley said the unknown still makes him a bit uneasy. "Even if there is a 5% chance (the cave) goes under my house, that's still a big deal to...

As Amazon execs consider locations for HQ2, the Austin tech ecosystem has steadily been racking up major wins. Indeed announced today that it will be launching massive recruitment initiatives of its own, with plans to add 3,000 local employees over the next few years across all departments. That news follows last month’s announcement from The Home Depot of 1,000 new hires at its Austin tech center. “We are committed to growing in Austin, a city that is a proven tech hub with excellent access to talent and a community that encourages innovation,” said Indeed President Chris Hyams in a statement....

The Institute for Urban Policy Research Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin found dogs now outnumber children in east Austin nearly two to one, a statistic they say is a signifier that gentrification is alive and well there...The researchers noted that between 2000-2010, the neighborhood's black population decreased by 60 percent, its Latino population decreased by 33 percent and its white population increased by 442 percent.They reported that Austin was the only fast-growing major city in the U.S. to show a decline in African Americans between 2000 and 2010. The research, which was published this spring, documented a...

Debra Reiding was an 18-year-old newlywed when her husband discovered her remains in their South Austin home. An Austin man was indicted Thursday in the 1979 cold case murder of Debra Reiding, Austin police officials said. Michael Anthony Galvan, 64, faces one count each of capital murder and murder after investigators linked him to Reiding’s death through DNA evidence. He was arrested Thursday and was still in the Travis County Jail in lieu of bail set at $750,000 on Friday afternoon. Galvan has worked and lived in Austin since Reiding’s killing, police said. He was a suspect in 1979, but...

The oldest living World War II veteran and oldest living man in the U.S. turns 112 Friday, and his family and friends are celebrating by inviting everyone to stop by and see him. Richard Overton, born in 1906, still lives in east Austin in the house he built 72 years ago. Overton moved into the house, now on a street named after him, in 1946, and still spends his days on his front porch, smoking cigars and drinking whiskey. "I feel fine every day," Overton told a gaggle of reporters and photographers gathered outside his home on Thursday. "No pain...

Robert E. Lee Road and Jeff Davis Avenue are no more after the Austin City Council on Thursday voted to remove the names of the Confederate leaders from the two Austin streets that bear their names. ...most of the residents who responded to surveys from the city objected to the proposed name changes.... Instead the road that ambles along Barton Creek into the Zilker neighborhood will be named for Azie Taylor Morton, the country’s first and only black U.S. treasurer, who grew up and went to college in Austin. Its official designation will be Azie Morton Road. In the Brentwood...

Omar Austin had to do a double take when he spotted a sexually explicit question on his teenage daughter's homework assignment this week. "This needs to be seen. [What the hell] is going on in our schools???" the Florida father asked as he read the question aloud in a video posted to Facebook on Wednesday. The mulitple choice question reportedly read, "Ursula was devastated when her boyfriend broke up with her after having sex. To get revenge, she had sex with his best friend the next day. Ursula had a beautiful baby girl nine months later. Ursula has type O...

AUSTIN (KXAN) - Two Austin street names with Confederate ties will be renamed. The Austin City Council approved changing Robert E. Lee Road to Azie Morton Road and Jeff Davis Avenue to William Holland Avenue. The discussion to rename Robert E. Lee Road, which runs just south of Zilker Park, started last year. The street signs have been vandalized several times. The new street name honors former U.S. Treasurer Azie Taylor Morton. She was the first and only African-American to serve as the nation's treasurer. Morton was also known for swimming in protest at a once-segregated Barton Springs.

The political tide has turned against toll roads in Texas, imperiling a Tomball interchange project and hamstringing frustrated local officials, while setting an ominous tone for projects to come. For years, state officials relied on tolls to tackle some of TexasÂ’ biggest traffic messes as a way to build without adding taxes. Since 2016, however, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have taken hard-line stances against the mixing of Texas Department of Transportation money and toll revenues. Most Popular More men accuse former Texas judge, Baptist leader of sexual misconduct Breaking down 2018 Texas A&M football: Quarterback With...

When JoJo McKibben was the victim of a hit-and-run on April 3 as she biked to work, she wasn't all that surprised. She was hit while biking by a drunk driver last summer and has come to expect that cars won't realize she's riding on two wheels. McKibben's boyfriend Brendan Sharpe said he has also been seriously injured by cars while he's biked in Austin, once in 2009 and again in 2015... Katie Delleoz, the executive director of Bike Austin, said she personally has nearly been struck at the same intersection McKibben was hit at last week

"I think as a homeowner we would like the option to have them on and off of the house because we kind of treat it seasonal," he said. The city's Code Department is looking at homes and apartment complexes across the city. They're modeling the proposed ordinance on international standards they got from the 2015 International Property Maintenance Code after the city council adopted it last October. It states homes with air conditioning would not be required to have insect screens, but Isis Lopez with the Code Department says that could change. "It would depend on the feedback," she said....

The Texas Department of Transportation has a contractor lined up to add a lane to each side of Texas 130 through Pflugerville, a popular commuter route that often backs up during rush hour.But the $36.7 million contract with OHL Construction is now caught up in the freeze on toll road projects — even though the project would be an expansion of an existing toll road, funded with toll road revenue. It would not use money from the gas, sales and energy taxes that have been the target of grass-roots anti-toll groups.“The planning and (bidding) has been done. The contractor is ready...

All you toll road haters, limber up your fingers for the flaming responses to this column.Because the toll road story here in Central Texas that I’m about to tell you, based on usage and revenue, is a good news story. The simple fact is that the nine toll roads here, other than the privately run section of Texas 130 south of Mustang Ridge, are being heavily used and are financially healthy.This is certainly not the uniform case around the country, where a number of toll roads in the past decade have gone bankrupt. In Central Texas, well over 1 million TxTags...

A congressman says the suspected Austin bomber left a confession calling himself a "psychopath" and saying he felt no remorse for his actions... Investigators have declined to release the recording, saying they are still looking into Conditt's motive and whether anyone else was involved.

After listening to a recording bombing suspect Mark Conditt made a day before his death, Interim Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said he never mentioned anything about terrorism... Retired FBI agent Jim Ellis spoke to CBS Austin as to why investigators didn’t label Conditt’s violence as an act of terror. “When you use the word terrorism, it’s a shock word," he said. Ellis said law enforcement typically defines terrorism as the unlawful use of force or violence against people or places to intimidate a government or its citizens to further specific political or social objectives.

Along the south shore of Lady Bird Lake east of Interstate 35, Oracle has built a new campus that will eventually house 10,000 employees. At the end of 2015, one of the world's largest software companies announced it was expanding in Austin with the construction of a 565,000-square-foot campus located on South Lakeshore Boulevard just west of South Pleasant Valley Road, that sits on 40 acres of waterfront property. "We wanted to be in downtown Austin on the river and specifically I wanted to be in downtown Austin on the river because I thought it would be great to take...