Any serious discussion of Texas local government must begin with a foundational constitutional fact:
In the United States, there are only two levels of sovereign government: the federal government and the states.
That is the full list.
Counties, cities, school districts, special districts, authorities, councils, boards, and commissions are not sovereign. They possess no inherent authority. They exist only because a state legislature has chosen to delegate specific powers to them, and those powers may be expanded, limited, preempted, reorganized, or withdrawn entirely.
Texas local government is therefore not a story of decentralization. It is a story of delegated administration, followed—inevitably—by state-directed coordination when delegation produced excessive fragmentation.
The State of Texas as Sovereign and System Designer
The State of Texas is sovereign within its constitutional sphere. That sovereignty includes the authority to:
Create local governments
Define and limit their powers
Redraw or freeze their boundaries
Preempt their ordinances
Reorganize or abolish them
Local governments are not junior partners in sovereignty. They are instruments through which the state governs a vast and diverse territory.
From the beginning, Texas made a defining structural choice: rather than consolidate government as complexity increased, it would delegate narrowly, preserve local identity, and retain sovereignty at the state level. That choice explains the layered system that followed.
Counties: The First Subdivision of State Power
Counties were Texas’s original subdivision of state authority, adopted after independence and statehood from Anglo-American legal traditions.
They were designed for a frontier world:
Sparse population
Horseback travel
Local courts
Recordkeeping
Elections
Law enforcement
During the 19th century, Texas rapidly carved itself into counties so residents could reach a county seat in roughly a day’s travel. By the early 20th century, the county map had largely frozen at 254 counties, a number that remains unchanged today.
Counties are constitutional entities, but they are governed strictly by Dillon’s Rule. They have no inherent powers, no residual authority, and little flexibility to adapt structurally. Once the county map was locked in place, counties became increasingly mismatched to Texas’s urbanizing reality—too small in some areas, too weak in others, and too rigid everywhere.
Rather than consolidate counties, Texas chose to work around them.
Dillon’s Rule: The Legal Engine of Delegation
The doctrine that made this system possible is Dillon’s Rule, named after John Forrest Dillon (1831–1914), Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court and later a professor at Columbia Law School. His 1872 treatise, Commentaries on the Law of Municipal Corporations, emerged during a period of explosive city growth and widespread municipal corruption.
Dillon rejected the notion that local governments possessed inherent authority. He articulated a rule designed to preserve state supremacy:
A local government may exercise only (1) powers expressly granted by the legislature, (2) powers necessarily implied from those grants, and (3) powers essential to its declared purpose—not merely convenient, but indispensable. Any reasonable doubt is resolved against the local government.
Texas did not merely adopt Dillon’s Rule; it embedded it structurally. Counties, special districts, ISDs, and authorities operate squarely under Dillon’s Rule. Even cities escape it only partially through home-rule charters, and only to the extent the Legislature allows.
Dillon’s Rule explains why Texas governance favors many narrow entities over few powerful ones.
Cities: Delegated Urban Management, Not Local Sovereignty
As towns grew denser, counties proved incapable of providing urban services. The state responded by authorizing cities to manage:
Police and fire protection
Streets and utilities
Zoning and land use
Local infrastructure
Cities are therefore delegated urban managers, not sovereign governments.
Texas later adopted home-rule charters to give larger cities greater flexibility, but home rule is widely misunderstood. It does not reverse Dillon’s Rule. It merely allows cities to act unless prohibited—while preserving the Legislature’s power to preempt, override, or limit local authority at any time.
Recent state preemption is not a breakdown of the system. It is the system operating as designed.
Independent School Districts: Function Over Geography
Education exposed the limits of place-based governance earlier than any other function.
Counties were too uneven. Cities were too political. Education required stability, long planning horizons, and uniform oversight.
Texas responded by removing education from both counties and cities and creating Independent School Districts.
ISDs are:
Single-purpose governments
Granted independent taxing authority
Authorized to issue bonds
Subject to state curriculum and accountability mandates
ISDs do not answer to cities or counties. They answer directly to the state. This was one of Texas’s earliest and clearest moves toward functional specialization over territorial governance.
Special Districts: Precision Instead of Consolidation
As Texas industrialized and urbanized in the 20th century, the Legislature faced increasingly specific problems:
Flood control
Water supply
Drainage
Fire protection
Hospitals
Ports and navigation
Rather than expand general-purpose governments, Texas created special districts—single-mission entities with narrow authority and dedicated funding streams.
Special districts are not accidental inefficiencies. They reflect a deliberate state preference:
Solve problems with precision, not with consolidation.
The result was effectiveness and speed, at the cost of growing fragmentation.
MUDs and Authorities: Growth and Risk as State Policy
Municipal Utility Districts and authorities are often mistaken for private or quasi-private entities. Legally, they are governments.
MUDs:
Are created under state law
Levy taxes
Issue bonds
Are governed by elected boards
Provide essential infrastructure
They allow the state to:
Enable development before cities arrive
Finance infrastructure without municipal debt
Shift costs to future residents
Avoid restructuring counties
Similarly, transit authorities, toll authorities, housing authorities, and local government corporations exist to isolate risk, bypass constitutional debt limits, and accelerate projects. These are not loopholes. They are state-designed instruments.
The Consequence: Functional Fragmentation
By the mid-20th century, Texas governance had become highly functional—and deeply fragmented:
Fixed counties
Expanding cities
Independent ISDs
Thousands of special districts
Authorities operating alongside cities
Infrastructure crossing every boundary
The system worked locally, but failed regionally.
No entity could plan coherently across jurisdictions. Funding decisions conflicted. Infrastructure systems overlapped. Federal requirements could not be met cleanly. At this point, Texas made another defining choice.
It did not consolidate governments. It pulled planning and coordination back upward, closer to the state.
Councils of Governments: State-Authorized Coordination
Beginning in the 1960s, Texas authorized Councils of Governments (COGs) to address fragmentation.
Today:
24 COGs cover the entire state
Each spans multiple counties
Membership includes cities, counties, ISDs, and districts
COGs:
Have no taxing authority
Have no regulatory power
Have no police power
They exist to coordinate, not to govern—to reconnect what delegation had scattered. Their weakness is intentional. They sit conceptually just beneath the state, not beneath local governments.
MPOs: Transportation Planning Pulled Upward
Transportation forced an even clearer pull-back.
Texas has 25 Metropolitan Planning Organizations, designated by the state to comply with federal law. MPOs plan, prioritize, and allocate federal transportation funding. They do not build roads, levy taxes, or override governments.
MPOs act as planning membranes between federal mandates and Texas’s fragmented local structure.
Water: Where Texas Explicitly Rejected Fragmentation
Water planning most clearly demonstrates the limits of local delegation.
Texas spans 15 major river basins, with annual rainfall ranging from under 10 inches in the west to over 50 inches in the east. Water ignores counties, cities, ISDs, and districts entirely.
Texas responded by creating:
Approximately 23 river authorities, organized by watershed
16 Regional Water Planning Areas, overseen by the Texas Water Development Board
A unified State Water Plan, adopted by the Legislature
Regional Water Planning Groups govern planning, not operations. Funding eligibility flows from compliance. This is state-directed regional planning with local execution.
Texas also created 95+ Groundwater Conservation Districts, organized by aquifer rather than politics—another instance of function overriding geography.
Public Health and Other Quiet Pull-Backs
Public health produced the same result. Disease ignores jurisdictional lines. Texas authorized county, city-county, and multi-county health districts to exercise delegated state police powers regionally.
The same pattern appears elsewhere:
Emergency management regions
Workforce development boards
Judicial administrative regions
20 Education Service Centers
Air-quality nonattainment regions
Each represents the same logic:
Delegation fragments
Fragmentation impairs system performance
The state restores coordination without transferring sovereignty
Final Synthesis
Texas local government did not evolve haphazardly. It followed a consistent philosophy:
Preserve sovereignty at the state level
Delegate functions narrowly
Avoid consolidation
Specialize relentlessly
Pull planning back upward when fragmentation becomes unmanageable
What appears complex or chaotic is actually layered intent.
Services are delegated downward. Planning is pulled back upward. Sovereignty never moves.
That tension—between delegation and coordination—is not a flaw in Texas government. It is its defining structural feature.
Public tragedies have a way of collapsing time. Old debates are reopened as if they were never had. Long-standing policies are treated as provisional. And political reflexes reassert themselves with a familiar urgency: something must be done, and whatever is done must be fast, visible, and legislative.
A recent Reuters report describing a mass shooting at a beachside gathering in Australia illustrates this pattern with uncomfortable clarity. The event itself was horrifying. The response was predictable. Within hours, political leaders were discussing emergency parliamentary sessions, tightening gun licensing laws, and revisiting a firearm regime that has been in place for nearly three decades.
What makes this episode especially instructive is not that it occurred in Australia, but that it occurred despite Australia’s reputation for having among the strictest gun control laws in the world. The country’s post-1996 framework—created in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre—has long been cited internationally as a model of decisive legislative action. Yet here, after decades of regulation, registration, licensing, and oversight, the instinctive answer remains the same: more law.
This essay treats the Australian response not as an anomaly, but as a continuation—and confirmation—of two arguments I have made previously: one concerning mass shootings as a systems failure rather than a purely legal failure, and another concerning what I have called “one-page laws”—the belief that complex social problems can be solved by concise statutes and urgent press conferences.
The Reuters Story, Paraphrased
According to Reuters, a deadly shooting at a public gathering in Bondi shocked Australians and immediately raised questions about whether the country’s long-standing firearms regime remains adequate. One of the suspects reportedly held a legal gun license and was authorized to own multiple firearms. In response, state and federal officials suggested that parliament might be recalled to consider reforms, including changes to license duration, suitability assessments, and firearm ownership limits.
The article notes that while Australia’s gun laws dramatically reduced firearm deaths after 1996, the number of legally owned guns has since risen to levels exceeding those prior to the reforms. Advocates argue that this growth, combined with modern risks, requires updated legislation. Political leaders signaled openness to acting quickly.
What the article does not do—and what most post-tragedy coverage does not do—is explain precisely how additional laws would have prevented this specific act, or how such laws would be meaningfully enforced without expanding surveillance, discretion, or intrusion into everyday life.
That omission is not accidental. It reflects a deeper habit in public governance.
The First Essay Revisited: Mass Shootings as Systems Failures
In my earlier essay on mass shootings, I argued that these events are rarely the result of a single legal gap. Instead, they emerge from systemic breakdowns: failures of detection, communication, intervention, and follow-through. Warning signs often exist. Signals are missed, dismissed, or siloed. Institutions act sequentially rather than collectively.
The presence or absence of one additional statute does little to alter those dynamics.
The Australian case reinforces this point. The suspect was not operating in a legal vacuum. The system already required licensing, registration, and approval. The breakdown did not occur because the law was silent; it occurred because law is only one input into a much larger human system.
When tragedy strikes, however, it is far easier to amend a statute than to admit that prevention depends on imperfect human judgment, social cohesion, mental health systems, community reporting, and inter-agency coordination. Laws are tangible. Systems are messy.
The Second Essay Revisited: The Illusion of One-Page Laws
My essay on one-page laws addressed a related but broader problem: the temptation to treat legislation as a substitute for governance.
One-page laws share several characteristics:
They are easy to describe.
They signal moral seriousness.
They create the appearance of action.
They externalize complexity.
The harder questions—Who enforces this? How often? With what discretion? At what cost? With what error rate?—are deferred or ignored.
The Australian response fits this pattern precisely. Proposals to shorten license durations or tighten suitability standards sound decisive, but they conceal the real burden: reviewing thousands of existing licenses, detecting future risk in people who have not yet exhibited it, and doing so without violating basic principles of fairness or due process.
The law can authorize action. It cannot supply foresight.
Where the Two Essays Converge
Taken together, these two arguments point to a shared conclusion: legislation is often mistaken for resolution.
Mass violence is not primarily a legislative failure; it is a detection and intervention failure. One-page laws feel comforting because they compress complexity into moral clarity. But compression is not the same as control.
Australia’s experience underscores a difficult truth: once a society has implemented baseline restrictions, further legislative tightening produces diminishing returns. The remaining risk lies not in legal gaps, but in human unpredictability. Eliminating that last fraction of risk would require levels of monitoring and preemption that most free societies rightly reject.
This is the trade-off no emergency session of parliament wants to articulate.
Why the Reflex Persists
The rush to legislate after tragedy is not irrational—it is political. Laws are visible acts of leadership. They reassure the public that order is being restored. Admitting that not every horror can be prevented without dismantling civil society is a harder message to deliver.
But honesty matters.
Governance is not the art of passing laws; it is the discipline of building systems that function under stress. When tragedy is followed immediately by legislative theater, it risks substituting symbolism for substance and urgency for effectiveness.
Conclusion
The Bondi shooting is not evidence that Australia’s gun laws have failed in some absolute sense. Nor is it proof that further legislation will succeed. What it is is a case study—one that reinforces two prior conclusions:
First, that mass violence persists even in highly regulated environments because it arises from human systems, not statutory voids.
Second, that one-page laws offer emotional relief but rarely operational solutions.
Serious problems deserve serious thinking. Not every response can be reduced to a bill number and a headline. And not every tragedy has a legislative cure.
The real challenge is resisting the comforting illusion that lawmaking alone is governance—and doing the slower, quieter, less visible work of strengthening the systems that stand between instability and catastrophe.
A technical framework for staffing, facilities, and cost projection
Abstract
In local government forecasting, population is the dominant driver of service demand, staffing requirements, facility needs, and operating costs. While no municipal system can be forecast with perfect precision, population-based models—when properly structured—produce estimates that are sufficiently accurate for planning, budgeting, and capital decision-making. Crucially, population growth in cities is not a sudden or unknowable event.
Through annexation, zoning, platting, infrastructure construction, utility connections, and certificates of occupancy, population arrival is observable months or years in advance. This paper presents population not merely as a driver, but as a leading indicator, and demonstrates how cities can convert development approvals into staged population forecasts that support rational staffing, facility sizing, capital investment, and operating cost projections.
1. Introduction: Why population sits at the center
Local governments exist to provide services to people. Police protection, fire response, streets, parks, water, sanitation, administration, and regulatory oversight are all mechanisms for supporting a resident population and the activity it generates. While policy choices and service standards influence how services are delivered, the volume of demand originates with population.
Practitioners often summarize this reality informally:
“Tell me the population, and I can tell you roughly how many police officers you need. If I know the staff, I can estimate the size of the building. If I know the size, I can estimate the construction cost. If I know the size, I can estimate the electricity bill.”
This paper formalizes that intuition into a defensible forecasting framework and addresses a critical objection: population is often treated as uncertain or unknowable. In practice, population growth in cities is neither sudden nor mysterious—it is permitted into existence through public processes that unfold over years.
2. Population as a base driver, not a single-variable shortcut
Population does not explain every budget line, but it explains most recurring demand when paired with a small number of modifiers.
At its core, many municipal services follow this structure:
While individual events vary, aggregate demand scales with population.
3.2 Capacity, not consumption, drives budgets
Municipal budgets fund capacity, not just usage:
Staff must be available before calls occur
Facilities must exist before staff are hired
Vehicles and equipment must be in place before service delivery
Capacity decisions are inherently population-driven.
4. Population growth is observable before it arrives
A defining feature of local government forecasting—often underappreciated—is that population growth is authorized through public approvals long before residents appear in census or utility data.
Population does not “arrive”; it progresses through a pipeline.
5. The development pipeline as a population forecasting timeline
5.1 Annexation: strategic intent (years out)
Annexation establishes:
Jurisdictional responsibility
Long-term service obligations
Future land-use authority
While annexation does not create immediate population, it signals where population will eventually be allowed.
Forecast role:
Long-range horizon marker
Infrastructure and service envelope planning
Typical lead time: 3–10 years
5.2 Zoning: maximum theoretical population
Zoning converts land into entitled density.
From zoning alone, cities can estimate:
Maximum dwelling units
Maximum population at buildout
Long-run service ceilings
Zoning defines upper bounds, even if timing is uncertain.
Forecast role:
Long-range capacity planning
Useful for master plans and utility sizing
Typical lead time: 3–7 years
5.3 Preliminary plat: credible development intent
Preliminary plat approval signals:
Developer capital commitment
Defined lot counts
Identified phasing
Population estimates become quantifiable, even if delivery timing varies.
Forecast role:
Medium-high certainty population
First stage for phased population modeling
Typical lead time: 1–3 years
5.4 Final plat: scheduled population
Final plat approval:
Legally creates lots
Locks in density and configuration
Triggers infrastructure construction
Impact Fees & other costs are committed
At this point, population arrival is no longer speculative.
Once streets, utilities, and drainage are built, population arrival becomes physically constrained by construction schedules.
Forecast role:
Narrow timing window
Supports staffing lead-time decisions
Typical lead time: 6–18 months
5.6 Water meter connections: imminent occupancy
Water meters are one of the most reliable near-term indicators:
Each residential meter ≈ one household
Installations closely precede vertical construction
Forecast role:
Quarterly or monthly population forecasting
Just-in-time operational scaling
Typical lead time: 1–6 months
5.7 Certificates of Occupancy: population realized
Certificates of occupancy convert permitted population into actual population.
At this point:
Service demand begins immediately
Utility consumption appears
Forecasts can be validated
Forecast role:
Confirmation and calibration
Not prediction
6. Population forecasting as a confidence ladder
Development Stage
Population Certainty
Timing Precision
Planning Use
Annexation
Low
Very low
Strategic
Zoning
Low–Medium
Low
Capacity envelopes
Preliminary Plat
Medium
Medium
Phased planning
Final Plat
High
Medium–High
Budget & staffing
Infrastructure Built
Very High
High
Operational prep
Water Meters
Extremely High
Very High
Near-term ops
COs
Certain
Exact
Validation
Population forecasting in cities is therefore graduated, not binary.
7. From population to staffing
Once population arrival is staged, staffing can be forecast using service-specific ratios and fixed minimums.
7.1 Police example (illustrative ranges)
Sworn officers per 1,000 residents commonly stabilize within broad bands depending on service level and demand, also tied to known local ratios:
Lower demand: ~1.2–1.8
Moderate demand: ~1.8–2.4
High demand: ~2.4–3.5+
Civilian support staff often scale as a fraction of sworn staffing.
The appropriate structure is:Officers=αpolice+βpolice⋅Population
Where α accounts for minimum 24/7 coverage and supervision.
7.2 General government staffing
Administrative staffing scales with:
Population
Number of employees
Asset inventory
Transaction volume
A fixed core plus incremental per-capita growth captures this reality more accurately than pure ratios.
8. From staffing to facilities
Facilities are a function of:
Headcount
Service configuration
Security and public access needs
A practical planning method:Facility Size=FTE⋅Gross SF per FTE
Typical blended civic office planning ranges usually fall within:
~175–300 gross SF per employee
Specialized spaces (dispatch, evidence, fleet, courts) are layered on separately.
9. From facilities to capital and operating costs
9.1 Capital costs
Capital expansion costs are typically modeled as:Capex=Added SF⋅Cost per SF⋅(1+Soft Costs)
Where soft costs include design, permitting, contingencies, and escalation.
9.2 Operating costs
Facility operating costs scale predictably with size:
Electricity: kWh per SF per year
Maintenance: % of replacement value or $/SF
Custodial: $/SF
Lifecycle renewals
Electricity alone can be reasonably estimated as:Annual Cost=SF⋅kWh/SF⋅$/kWh
This is rarely exact—but it is directionally reliable.
10. Key modifiers that refine population models
Population alone is powerful but incomplete. High-quality forecasts adjust for:
Density and land use
Daytime population and employment
Demographics
Service standards
Productivity and technology
Geographic scale (lane miles, acres)
These modifiers refine, but do not replace, population as the base driver.
11. Why growth surprises cities anyway
When cities claim growth was “unexpected,” the issue is rarely lack of information. More often:
Development signals were not integrated into finance models
Staffing and capital planning lagged approvals
Fixed minimums were ignored
Threshold effects (new stations, expansions) were deferred too long
Growth that appears sudden is usually forecastable growth that was not operationalized.
12. Conclusion
Population is the primary driver of local government demand, but more importantly, it is a predictable driver. Through annexation, zoning, platting, infrastructure construction, utility connections, and certificates of occupancy, cities possess a multi-year advance view of population arrival.
This makes it possible to:
Phase staffing rationally
Time facilities before overload
Align capital investment with demand
Improve credibility with councils, auditors, and rating agencies
In local government, population growth is not a surprise. It is a permitted, engineered, and scheduled outcome of public decisions. A forecasting system that treats population as both a driver and a leading indicator is not speculative—it is simply paying attention to the city’s own approvals.
Appendix A
Defensibility of Population-Driven Forecasting Models
A response framework for auditors, rating agencies, and governing bodies
Purpose of this appendix
This appendix addresses a common concern raised during budget reviews, audits, bond disclosures, and council deliberations:
“Population-based forecasts seem too simplistic or speculative.”
The purpose here is not to argue that population is the only factor affecting local government costs, but to demonstrate that population-driven forecasting—when anchored to development approvals and adjusted for service standards—is methodologically sound, observable, and conservative.
A.1 Population forecasting is not speculative in local government
A frequent misconception is that population forecasts rely on demographic projections or external estimates. In practice, this model relies primarily on the city’s own legally binding approvals.
Population growth enters the forecast only after it has passed through:
Annexation agreements
Zoning entitlements
Preliminary and final plats
Infrastructure construction
Utility connections
Certificates of occupancy
These are public, documented actions, not assumptions.
Key distinction for reviewers: This model does not ask “How fast might the city grow?” It asks “What growth has the city already approved, and when will it become occupied?”
A.2 Population is treated as a leading indicator, not a lagging one
Traditional population measures (census counts, ACS estimates) are lagging indicators. This model explicitly avoids relying on those for near-term forecasting.
Instead, it uses development milestones as leading indicators, each with increasing certainty and narrower timing windows.
For audit and disclosure purposes:
Early-stage entitlements affect only long-range capacity planning
Staffing and capital decisions are triggered only at later, high-certainty stages
Near-term operating impacts are tied to utility connections and COs
This layered approach prevents premature spending while avoiding reactive under-staffing.
A.3 Fixed minimums prevent over-projection in small or slow-growth cities
A common audit concern is that per-capita models overstate staffing needs.
This model explicitly separates:
Fixed baseline capacity (α)
Incremental population-driven capacity (β)
This structure:
Prevents unrealistic staffing increases in early growth stages
Operating costs scale predictably with assets and space.
The model is transparent, testable, and adjustable.
Therefore: A population-driven forecasting model of this type represents a prudent, defensible, and professionally reasonable approach to long-range municipal planning.
Appendix B
Consequences of Failing to Anticipate Population Growth
A diagnostic review of reactive municipal planning
Purpose of this appendix
This appendix describes common failure patterns observed in cities that do not systematically link development approvals to population, staffing, and facility planning. These outcomes are not the result of negligence or bad intent; they typically arise from fragmented information, short planning horizons, or the absence of an integrated forecasting framework.
The patterns described below are widely recognized in municipal practice and are offered to illustrate the practical risks of reactive planning.
B.1 “Surprise growth” that was not actually a surprise
A frequent narrative in reactive cities is that growth “arrived suddenly.” In most cases, the growth was visible years earlier through zoning approvals, plats, or utility extensions but was not translated into staffing or capital plans.
Common indicators:
Approved subdivisions not reflected in operating forecasts
Development tracked only by planning staff, not finance or operations
Population discussed only after occupancy
Consequences:
Budget shocks
Emergency staffing requests
Loss of credibility with governing bodies
B.2 Knee-jerk staffing reactions
When growth impacts become unavoidable, reactive cities often respond through hurried staffing actions.
Typical symptoms:
Mid-year supplemental staffing requests
Heavy reliance on overtime
Accelerated hiring without workforce planning
Training pipelines overwhelmed
Consequences:
Elevated labor costs
Increased burnout and turnover
Declining service quality during growth periods
Inefficient long-term staffing structures
B.3 Under-sizing followed by over-correction
Without forward planning, cities often alternate between two extremes:
Under-sizing due to conservative or delayed response
Over-sizing in reaction to service breakdowns
Examples:
Facilities built too small “to be safe”
Rapid expansions shortly after completion
Swing from staffing shortages to excess capacity
Consequences:
Higher lifecycle costs
Poor space utilization
Perception of waste or mismanagement
B.4 Obsolete facilities at the moment of completion
Facilities planned without reference to future population often open already constrained.
Common causes:
Planning based on current headcount only
Ignoring entitled but unoccupied development
Failure to include expansion capability
Consequences:
Expensive retrofits
Disrupted operations during expansion
Shortened facility useful life
This is one of the most costly errors because capital investments are long-lived and difficult to correct.
B.5 Deferred capital followed by crisis-driven spending
Reactive cities often delay capital investment until systems fail visibly.
Typical patterns:
Fire stations added only after response times degrade
Police facilities expanded only after overcrowding
Utilities upgraded only after service complaints
Consequences:
Emergency procurement
Higher construction costs
Increased debt stress
Lost opportunity for phased financing
B.6 Misalignment between departments
When population intelligence is not shared across departments:
Planning knows what is coming
Finance budgets based on current year
Operations discover impacts last
Consequences:
Conflicting narratives to council
Fragmented decision-making
Reduced trust between departments
Population-driven forecasting provides a common factual baseline.
B.7 Overreliance on lagging indicators
Reactive cities often rely heavily on:
Census updates
Utility consumption after occupancy
Service call increases
These indicators confirm growth after it has already strained capacity.
Consequences:
Persistent lag between demand and response
Structural understaffing
Continual “catch-up” budgeting
B.8 Political whiplash and credibility erosion
Unanticipated growth pressures often force councils into repeated difficult votes:
Emergency funding requests
Mid-year budget amendments
Rapid debt authorizations
Over time, this leads to:
Voter skepticism
Council fatigue
Reduced tolerance for legitimate future investments
Planning failures become governance failures.
B.9 Inefficient use of taxpayer dollars
Ironically, reactive planning often costs more, not less.
Cost drivers include:
Overtime premiums
Compressed construction schedules
Retrofit and rework costs
Higher borrowing costs due to rushed timing
Proactive planning spreads costs over time and reduces risk premiums.
B.10 Organizational stress and morale impacts
Staff experience growth pressures first.
Observed impacts:
Chronic overtime
Inadequate workspace
Equipment shortages
Frustration with leadership responsiveness
Over time, this contributes to:
Higher turnover
Loss of institutional knowledge
Reduced service consistency
B.11 Why these failures persist
These patterns are not caused by incompetence. They persist because:
Growth information is siloed
Forecasting is viewed as speculative
Political incentives favor short-term restraint
Capital planning horizons are too short
Absent a formal framework, cities default to reaction.
B.12 Summary for governing bodies
Cities that do not integrate development approvals into population-driven forecasting commonly experience:
Perceived “surprise” growth
Emergency staffing responses
Repeated under- and over-sizing
Facilities that age prematurely
Higher long-term costs
Organizational strain
Reduced public confidence
None of these outcomes are inevitable. They are symptoms of not using information the city already has.
B.13 Closing observation
The contrast between proactive and reactive cities is not one of optimism versus pessimism. It is a difference between:
Anticipation versus reaction
Sequencing versus scrambling
Planning versus explaining after the fact
Population-driven forecasting does not eliminate uncertainty. It replaces surprise with preparation.
Appendix C
Population Readiness & Forecasting Discipline Checklist
A self-assessment for proactive versus reactive cities
Purpose: This checklist allows a city to evaluate whether it is systematically anticipating population growth—or discovering it after impacts occur. It is designed for use by city management teams, finance directors, auditors, and governing bodies.
How to use: For each item, mark:
✅ Yes / In place
⚠️ Partially / Informal
❌ No / Not done
Patterns matter more than individual answers.
Section 1 — Visibility of Future Population
C-1 Do we maintain a consolidated list of annexed, zoned, and entitled land with estimated buildout population?
C-2 Are preliminary and final plats tracked in a format usable by finance and operations (not just planning)?
C-3 Do we estimate population by development phase, not just at full buildout?
C-4 Is there a documented method for converting lots or units into population (household size assumptions reviewed periodically)?
C-5 Do we distinguish between long-range potential growth and near-term probable growth?
Red flag: Population is discussed primarily in narrative terms (“fast growth,” “slowing growth”) rather than quantified and staged.
Section 2 — Timing and Lead Indicators
C-6 Do we identify which development milestone triggers planning action (e.g., preliminary plat vs final plat)?
C-7 Are infrastructure completion schedules incorporated into population timing assumptions?
C-8 Are water meter installations or equivalent utility connections tracked and forecasted?
C-9 Do we use certificates of occupancy to validate and recalibrate population forecasts annually?
C-10 Is population forecasting treated as a rolling forecast, not a once-per-year estimate?
Red flag: Population is updated only when census or ACS data is released.
Section 3 — Staffing Linkage
C-11 Does each major department have an identified population or workload driver?
C-12 Are fixed minimum staffing levels explicitly separated from growth-driven staffing?
C-13 Are staffing increases tied to forecasted population arrival, not service breakdowns?
C-14 Do hiring plans account for lead times (recruitment, academies, training)?
C-15 Can we explain recent staffing increases as either:
population growth, or
explicit policy/service-level changes?
Red flag: Staffing requests frequently cite “we are behind” without reference to forecasted growth.
Section 4 — Facilities and Capital Planning
C-16 Are facility size requirements derived from staffing projections, not current headcount?
C-17 Do capital plans include expansion thresholds (e.g., headcount or service load triggers)?
C-18 Are new facilities designed with future expansion capability?
C-19 Are entitled-but-unoccupied developments considered when evaluating future facility adequacy?
C-20 Do we avoid building facilities that are at or near capacity on opening day?
Red flag: Facilities require major expansion within a few years of completion.
Section 5 — Operating Cost Awareness
C-21 Are operating costs (utilities, maintenance, custodial) modeled as a function of facility size and assets?
C-22 Are utility cost impacts of expansion estimated before facilities are approved?
C-23 Do we understand how population growth affects indirect departments (HR, IT, finance)?
C-24 Are lifecycle replacement costs considered when adding capacity?
Red flag: Operating cost increases appear as “unavoidable surprises” after facilities open.
Section 6 — Cross-Department Integration
C-25 Do planning, finance, and operations use the same population assumptions?
C-26 Is growth discussed in joint meetings, not only within planning?
C-27 Does finance receive regular updates on development pipeline status?
C-28 Are growth assumptions documented and shared, not implicit or informal?
Red flag: Different departments give different growth narratives to council.
Section 7 — Governance and Transparency
C-29 Can we clearly explain to council why staffing or capital is needed before service failure occurs?
C-30 Are population-driven assumptions documented in budget books or CIP narratives?
C-31 Do we distinguish between:
growth-driven needs, and
discretionary service enhancements?
C-32 Can auditors or rating agencies trace growth-related decisions back to documented approvals?
Red flag: Growth explanations rely on urgency rather than evidence.
Section 8 — Validation and Learning
C-33 Do we compare forecasted population arrival to actual COs annually?
C-34 Are forecasting errors analyzed and corrected rather than ignored?
C-35 Do we adjust household size, absorption rates, or timing assumptions over time?
Red flag: Forecasts remain unchanged year after year despite clear deviations.
Scoring Interpretation (Optional)
Mostly ✅ → Proactive, anticipatory city
Mix of ✅ and ⚠️ → Partially planned, risk of reactive behavior
Many ❌ → Reactive city; growth will feel like a surprise
A city does not need perfect scores. The presence of structure, documentation, and sequencing is what matters.
Closing Note for Leadership
If a city can answer most of these questions affirmatively, it is not guessing about growth—it is managing it. If many answers are negative, the city is likely reacting to outcomes it had the power to anticipate.
Population growth does not cause planning problems. Ignoring known growth signals does.
Appendix D
Population-Driven Planning Maturity Model
A framework for assessing and improving municipal forecasting discipline
Purpose of this appendix
This maturity model describes how cities evolve in their ability to anticipate population growth and translate it into staffing, facility, and financial planning. It recognizes that most cities are not “good” or “bad” planners; they are simply at different stages of organizational maturity.
Each level builds logically on the prior one. Advancement does not require perfection—only structure, integration, and discipline.
Level 1 — Reactive City
“We didn’t see this coming.”
Characteristics
Population discussed only after impacts are felt
Reliance on census or anecdotal indicators
Growth described qualitatively (“exploding,” “slowing”)
Staffing added only after service failure
Capital projects triggered by visible overcrowding
Frequent mid-year budget amendments
Typical behaviors
Emergency staffing requests
Heavy overtime usage
Facilities opened already constrained
Surprise operating cost increases
Organizational mindset
Growth is treated as external and unpredictable.
Risks
Highest long-term cost
Lowest credibility with councils and rating agencies
Chronic organizational stress
Level 2 — Aware but Unintegrated City
“Planning knows growth is coming, but others don’t act on it.”
Characteristics
Development pipeline tracked by planning
Finance and operations not fully engaged
Growth acknowledged but not quantified in budgets
Capital planning still reactive
Limited documentation of assumptions
Typical behaviors
Late staffing responses despite known development
Facilities planned using current headcount
Disconnect between planning reports and budget narratives
Organizational mindset
Growth is known, but not operationalized.
Risks
Continued surprises
Internal frustration
Mixed messages to council
Level 3 — Structured Forecasting City
“We model growth, but execution lags.”
Characteristics
Population forecasts tied to development approvals
Preliminary staffing models exist
Fixed minimums recognized
Capital needs identified in advance
Forecasts updated annually
Typical behaviors
Better budget explanations
Improved CIP alignment
Still some late responses due to execution gaps
Organizational mindset
Growth is forecastable, but timing discipline is still developing.
Strengths
Credible analysis
Reduced emergencies
Clearer governance conversations
Level 4 — Integrated Planning City
“Approvals, staffing, and capital move together.”
Characteristics
Development pipeline drives population timing
Staffing plans phased to population arrival
Facility sizing based on projected headcount
Operating costs modeled from assets
Cross-department coordination is routine
Typical behaviors
Hiring planned ahead of demand
Facilities open with expansion capacity
Capital timed to avoid crisis spending
Clear audit trail from approvals to costs
Organizational mindset
Growth is managed, not reacted to.
Benefits
Stable service delivery during growth
Higher workforce morale
Strong credibility with governing bodies
Level 5 — Adaptive, Data-Driven City
“We learn, recalibrate, and optimize continuously.”
Characteristics
Rolling population forecasts
Development milestones tracked in near-real time
Annual validation against COs and utility data
Forecast errors analyzed and corrected
Scenario modeling for alternative growth paths
Typical behaviors
Minimal surprises
High confidence in long-range plans
Early identification of inflection points
Proactive communication with councils and investors
Organizational mindset
Growth is a controllable system, not a threat.
Benefits
Lowest lifecycle cost
Highest service reliability
Institutional resilience
Summary Table
Level
Description
Core Risk
1
Reactive
Crisis-driven decisions
2
Aware, unintegrated
Late responses
3
Structured
Execution lag
4
Integrated
Few surprises
5
Adaptive
Minimal risk
Key Insight
Most cities are not failing—they are stuck between Levels 2 and 3. The largest gains come not from sophisticated analytics, but from integration and timing discipline.
Progression does not require:
Perfect forecasts
Advanced software
Large consulting engagements
It requires:
Using approvals the city already grants
Sharing population assumptions across departments
Sequencing decisions intentionally
Closing Observation
Cities do not choose whether they grow. They choose whether growth feels like a surprise or a scheduled event.
For more than fifty years, Texas has been at the center of American redistricting law. Few states have produced as many major Supreme Court decisions shaping the meaning of the Voting Rights Act, the boundaries of racial gerrymandering doctrine, and—perhaps most significantly—the Court’s modern unwillingness to police partisan gerrymandering.
Two cases define the modern era for Texas: LULAC v. Perry (2006) and Abbott v. Perez (2018). Together, they reveal how the Court analyzes racial vote dilution, when partisan motives are permissible, how intent is inferred or rejected, and what evidentiary burdens challengers must meet.
At the heart of the Court’s reasoning is a recurring tension:
the Constitution forbids racial discrimination in redistricting,
the Voting Rights Act prohibits plans that diminish minority voting strength,
but the Court has repeatedly held that partisan advantage, even aggressive partisan advantage, is not generally unconstitutional.
Texas’s maps have allowed the Court to articulate, refine, and—many argue—narrow these doctrines.
I. LULAC v. Perry (2006): Partisan Motives Allowed, But Minority Vote Dilution Not
Background
In 2003, after winning unified control of state government, Texas Republicans enacted a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan replacing the court-drawn map used in 2002. It was an openly partisan effort to convert a congressional delegation that had favored Democrats into a Republican-leaning one.
Challengers argued:
The mid-decade redistricting itself was unconstitutional.
The legislature’s partisan intent violated the Equal Protection Clause.
The plan diluted Latino voting strength in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, particularly in old District 23.
Several districts were racial gerrymanders, subordinating race to politics.
Arguments Before the Court
Challengers:
Texas had engaged in unprecedented partisan manipulation lacking a legitimate state purpose.
The dismantling of Latino opportunity districts—especially District 23—reduced the community’s ability to elect its preferred candidate.
Race was used as a tool to achieve partisan ends, in violation of Shaw v. Reno-line racial gerrymandering rules.
Texas:
Nothing in the Constitution forbids mid-decade redistricting.
Political gerrymandering, even when aggressive and obvious, was allowed under Davis v. Bandemer (1986).
Latino voters in District 23 were not “cohesive” enough to qualify for Section 2 protection.
District configurations reflected permissible political considerations.
The Court’s Decision
The Court’s ruling was a fractured opinion, but several clear conclusions emerged.
1. Mid-Decade Redistricting Is Constitutional
The Court held that states are not restricted to once-a-decade redistricting. Nothing in the Constitution or federal statute bars legislatures from replacing a map mid-cycle. This effectively legitimized Texas’s overtly partisan decision to redraw the map simply because political control had shifted.
The Court again declined to articulate a manageable standard for judging partisan gerrymandering. Justice Kennedy, writing for the controlling plurality, expressed concern about severe partisan abuses but concluded that no judicially administrable rule existed.
Key takeaway: Texas’s partisan motivation, even if blatant, was not itself unconstitutional.
3. Section 2 Violation in District 23: Latino Voting Strength Was Illegally Diluted
This was the major substantive ruling.
The Court found that Texas dismantled an existing Latino opportunity district (CD-23) precisely because Latino voters were on the verge of electing their preferred candidate. The legislature:
removed tens of thousands of cohesive Latino voters from the district,
replaced them with low-turnout Latino populations less likely to vote against the incumbent,
and justified the move under the guise of creating a new Latino-majority district elsewhere.
This manipulation, the Court held, denied Latino voters an equal opportunity to elect their candidate of choice, violating Section 2.
4. Racial Gerrymandering Claims Mostly Fail
The Court rejected most Shaw-type racial gerrymandering claims because plaintiffs failed to prove that race, rather than politics, predominated. This reflects a theme that becomes even stronger in later cases: when race and politics correlate—as they often do in Texas—challengers must provide powerful evidence that race, not party, drove the lines.
II. Abbott v. Perez (2018): A High Bar for Proving Discriminatory Intent
Background
After the 2010 census, Texas enacted new maps. A federal district court found that several districts were intentionally discriminatory and ordered Texas to adopt interim maps. In 2013, Texas then enacted maps that were largely identical to the court’s own interim maps.
Challengers argued that:
The original 2011 maps were passed with discriminatory intent.
The 2013 maps, though based on the court’s design, continued to embody the taint of 2011.
Multiple districts across Texas diluted minority voting strength or were racial gerrymanders.
Texas argued that:
The 2013 maps were valid because they were largely adopted from a court-approved version.
Any discriminatory intent from 2011 could not be imputed to the 2013 legislature.
Plaintiffs bore the burden of proving intentional discrimination district by district.
The Court’s Decision
In a 5–4 ruling, the Supreme Court reversed almost all findings of discriminatory intent against Texas.
1. Burden of Proof Is on Challengers, Not the State
The Court rejected the lower court’s presumption that Texas acted with discriminatory intent in 2013 merely because the 2011 legislature had been found to do so.
Key Holding: A finding of discriminatory intent in a prior map does not shift the burden; challengers must prove new intent for each new plan.
This significantly tightened the evidentiary bar.
2. Presumption of Legislative Good Faith
Chief Justice Roberts emphasized a longstanding principle:
Legislatures are entitled to a presumption of good faith unless challengers provide direct and persuasive evidence otherwise.
This presumption made it much harder to prove racial discrimination unless emails, testimony, or map-drawing files showed explicit racial motives.
Challengers failed to show that minority voters were both cohesive and systematically defeated by white bloc voting in many districts. The Court stressed the need for:
clear demographic evidence,
consistent voting patterns,
and demonstration of feasible alternative districts.
4. Only One District Violated the Constitution
The Court affirmed discrimination in Texas House District 90, where the legislature had intentionally moved Latino voters to achieve a specific racial composition.
But the Court rejected violations in every other challenged district.
5. Practical Effect: Courts Must Defer Unless Evidence Is Unusually Strong
Abbott v. Perez is widely viewed as one of the strongest modern statements of judicial deference to legislatures in redistricting—even when past discrimination has been found.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent called the majority opinion “astonishing in its blindness.”
III. What These Cases Together Mean: Why the Court Upheld Texas’s Maps
Across both LULAC (2006) and Abbott (2018), a coherent theme emerges in the Supreme Court’s reasoning:
1. Partisan Gerrymandering Is Not the Court’s Job to Police
Unless partisan advantage clearly crosses into racial targeting, the Court will not strike it down. Texas repeatedly argued political motives, and the Court repeatedly accepted them as legitimate.
2. Racial Discrimination Must Be Proven With Specific, District-Level Evidence
Plaintiffs must demonstrate that race—not politics—predominated.
Correlation between race and partisanship is not enough.
Evidence must address each district individually.
3. Legislatures Receive a Strong Presumption of Good Faith
Abbott v. Perez reaffirmed that courts should not infer intent from
LULAC (2006) found a violation only because evidence clearly showed cohesive Latino voters whose electoral progress was intentionally undermined.
5. Courts Avoid Intruding into “Political Questions”
The Court has repeatedly signaled reluctance to take over the political process. This culminated in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), where the Court held partisan gerrymandering claims categorically non-justiciable—a rule entirely consistent with how Texas cases were decided.
Conclusion: Why Texas Keeps Winning
Texas’s redistricting cases illustrate how the Supreme Court draws a sharp—and highly consequential—line:
Racial discrimination is unconstitutional, but must be proven with very specific evidence.
Partisan manipulation, even extreme manipulation, is permissible.
Courts defer heavily to state legislatures unless plaintiffs can clearly show that lawmakers used race as a tool, not merely politics.
In LULAC, challengers succeeded only where the evidence of racial vote dilution was unmistakable. In Abbott v. Perez, they failed everywhere except one district because intent was not proven with the level of granularity the Court demanded.
The result is that Texas has repeatedly prevailed in redistricting litigation—not necessarily because its maps are racially neutral, but because the Court has set an unusually high bar for proving racial motive and has washed its hands of partisan claims altogether.
A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI (4 of 4 in a Series)
If literature teaches us how to think, and history teaches us where we came from, and economics teaches us how choices shape the world,
then civics and government teach us how to live together in a free society.
When I was young, civics felt like a recitation of facts — three branches, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. But I didn’t understand the deeper purpose or the tremendous responsibility that citizenship carries. I didn’t see that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires informed people, disciplined judgment, and a shared understanding of how government actually works.
Years later, I came to realize that civics is not a list of facts to memorize — it is the operating manual for freedom.
This essay explores the essential civic knowledge students should learn, why it matters, and why it may be the single most endangered — and most important — subject today.
1. Understanding the Constitution — The Blueprint of American Government
Every student should know what the Constitution actually does.
At a minimum, students should understand:
Separation of powers
Checks and balances
Federalism (power divided between federal and state governments)
Individual rights
Limited government
Due process and equal protection
These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re the safeguards that prevent:
tyranny
abuse of power
unequal treatment
political retaliation
the erosion of liberty
Students should know why the Founders feared concentrated power. They should understand the debates between Hamilton and Jefferson, the compromises that made the system possible, and the principles that still hold it together.
A civically educated student knows what the government can do, what it cannot do, and what it should never be allowed to do.
2. How Laws Are Made — And Why It’s Supposed to Be Hard
A free people should know how laws move from idea to reality:
committee
debate
amendments
compromise
bicameral approval
executive signature
judicial review
Students should understand why the system has friction. The Founders designed lawmaking to be deliberate, slow, and thoughtful — not impulsive. This protects the nation from sudden swings of emotion, political fads, or the passions of the moment.
When students understand the process, they also understand:
why gridlock happens
why compromise is necessary
why no single branch can act alone
why courts exist as an independent check
This is how civics grounds expectations and tempers frustration.
3. Rights and Responsibilities — The Moral Core of Citizenship
Civics is not only about rights; it is also about responsibilities.
Students should understand:
free speech
free press
freedom of religion
right to vote
right to assemble
right to due process
But they should also learn:
the responsibility to vote
the responsibility to stay informed
the responsibility to obey just laws
the responsibility to serve on juries
the responsibility to hold leaders accountable
the responsibility to treat fellow citizens with dignity
A functioning democracy depends as much on personal virtue as it does on institutional design.
4. Local Government — The Level Students Understand the Least
Ironically, the level of government that affects daily life the most is the one students know the least about.
Students should understand:
cities, counties, school districts
zoning
local taxes
police and fire services
transportation systems
water and utility infrastructure
public debt and bond elections
local boards and commissions
how a city manager system works
how budgets are created and balanced
Local government is where the real work happens:
roads repaired
streets policed
water delivered
development approved
transit planned
emergency services coordinated
property taxes assessed
A civically educated adult understands where decisions are made — and how to influence them.
5. How Elections Work — Beyond the Headlines and Sound Bites
Every student should understand:
how voter registration works
how primaries differ from general elections
how the Electoral College works
how districts are drawn
what gerrymandering is
how campaign finance operates
the difference between federal, state, and local elections
They should learn how to evaluate:
candidates
platforms
ballot propositions
constitutional amendments
city bond proposals
school board decisions
Without civic education, elections become personality contests instead of informed deliberations.
6. The Balance Between Freedom and Order
Civics teaches students that government constantly manages tensions:
liberty vs. security
freedom vs. responsibility
majority rule vs. minority rights
government power vs. individual autonomy
These are not easy questions. There are no perfect answers. But a well-educated citizen understands the tradeoffs.
For example:
How far should free speech extend?
What powers should police have?
When should the state intervene in personal choices?
When does regulation protect people, and when does it stifle them?
Civics teaches students how to think through these issues, not what to believe.
7. Why Civics Matters Even More in the Age of AI
Artificial intelligence has changed the public square. It has amplified the need for civic understanding.
AI magnifies misinformation.
A civically uneducated population is easy to manipulate.
AI can imitate authority.
Only an informed citizen knows how to verify sources and test claims.
AI accelerates public emotion.
Civic education slows people down — it teaches them to evaluate before reacting.
AI makes propaganda more sophisticated.
Civics teaches how institutions work, which protects against deception.
Democracy cannot survive without an educated citizenry.
AI is powerful, but it is not responsible. Humans must be.
This is why civics — real civics — is urgently needed.
Conclusion: The Education of a Self-Governing People
History shows that democracies do not fall because enemies defeat them. They fall because citizens forget how to govern themselves.
Civics teaches:
how power is structured
how laws are made
how rights are protected
how communities are built
how leaders should be chosen
how governments should behave
how citizens must participate
If literature strengthens the mind, and history strengthens judgment, and economics strengthens decision-making,
then civics strengthens the nation itself.
A free society is not sustained by wishes or by luck. It is sustained by people who understand the system, value the responsibilities of citizenship, and guard the principles that keep liberty alive.
That is what civics is meant to teach — and why it must remain at the heart of a complete education.
A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI (3 of 4 in a Series)
If I struggled with literature when I was young, and if I misunderstood the purpose of history, then economics was the third great gap in my early education. I went through high school without any real understanding of how money works, how governments raise and spend it, how markets respond to incentives, or how personal financial decisions compound over time. I did not grasp the forces shaping wages, prices, interest rates, trade, taxation, inflation, or debt. I did get a good dose in college.
Looking back, I can see clearly: Economics is the core life subject that students most need — and most rarely receive in a meaningful way.
What educators should want every student to know from required economics courses is nothing less than the mental framework necessary to navigate adulthood, evaluate public policy, make financial decisions, and understand why nations prosper or struggle. Economics is not simply business; it is the study of how people, families, governments, and societies make choices. A few years ago, I attended a multi-day course for high school teachers hosted by the Dallas Federal Reserve. It was an outstanding experience. Resources are there today, thank goodness!
This essay explores the essential economic understanding every student deserves — and why it matters now more than ever.
1. Scarcity, Choice, and Opportunity Cost: The Law That Governs Everything
The first truth of economics is painfully simple: We cannot have everything we want.
Every choice is a tradeoff. Students should walk away understanding that:
Choosing to spend money here means not spending it there.
Choosing one policy means giving up another.
Choosing time for one activity means sacrificing time for something else.
Economics calls this opportunity cost — the value of the next best alternative you give up.
Once a student grasps this, the world becomes clearer:
Why governments cannot fund unlimited programs.
Why cities must prioritize.
Why individuals must budget.
Why nations cannot tax, borrow, or spend without consequences.
This one idea alone can save people from poor decisions, unrealistic expectations, and political manipulation.
2. How Markets Work — And What Happens When They Don’t
Every student should understand the basics of markets:
Supply and demand
Prices as signals
Competition as a force for innovation
Incentives as drivers of behavior
These are not theories — they are observable realities.
Examples:
When the price of lumber rises, construction slows.
When wages rise in one industry, workers shift into it.
When a product becomes scarce, people value it more.
Students should also learn about market failures, when markets do not work well:
Externalities (pollution)
Monopolies (lack of competition)
Public goods (national defense)
Information asymmetry (the mechanic knows more than the customer)
A well-educated adult should understand why some things are best left to markets, and others require collective action.
3. Money, Inflation, and the Hidden Forces That Shape Daily Life
Economics teaches students what money actually is — a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account. It teaches why inflation happens, how interest rates work, and why credit matters.
This is the knowledge people most need to avoid lifelong mistakes:
High-interest debt
Payday loans
Adjustable-rate surprises
Over-borrowing
Misunderstanding mortgages
Under-saving for retirement
Falling for financial scams
Inflation, especially, is a quiet teacher. Students should know:
Why prices rise
How purchasing power erodes
Why governments sometimes overspend
How central banks attempt to stabilize the economy
Without this understanding, adults become vulnerable to false promises, political slogans, and emotional decisions disguised as economic policy.
4. Government, Taxes, Debt, and the Economics of Public Choices
Students should understand how governments fund themselves:
income taxes
sales taxes
property taxes
corporate taxes
tariffs
fees and permits
They should know the difference between:
deficits and debt
mandatory vs. discretionary spending
expansionary vs. contractionary policy
And they should understand the consequences of borrowing:
interest costs
crowding out
inflationary risks
intergenerational burdens
A citizen who understands these concepts is harder to fool with slogans like:
“Free college for everyone!”
“We can tax the rich for everything!”
“Deficits don’t matter!”
“We can cut taxes without cutting services!”
Economics teaches that every promise has a cost — and someone must pay it.
5. Personal Finance: The Economics of Everyday Life
If there is one area where economics should be utterly practical, it is here. Every student needs to understand:
budgeting
saving
compound interest
emergency funds
insurance
investing basics
retirement accounts
debt management
risk vs. reward
Without this, students walk into adulthood with no map — and they learn lessons the hard way.
One simple example: $200 saved per month from age 22 to 65 at 7% grows to roughly $500,000. The same $200 saved starting at age 35 grows to only ~$200,000.
Time matters. Compounding matters. Knowing this early changes lives.
6. Global Economics: Trade, Jobs, and National Strength
Students should understand why countries trade:
comparative advantage
specialization
global supply chains
exchange rates
They should understand what drives:
tariffs
sanctions
trade deficits
manufacturing shifts
labor markets
This is the foundation for understanding why:
some industries move overseas
some cities decline while others rise
automation replaces certain jobs
immigration affects labor supply
global shocks (like pandemics or wars) reshape economies
A student with global economic literacy is less fearful and more informed — and can better adapt to economic change.
7. Economics and Human Behavior
Economics is not just numbers — it is a window into human nature.
Students should learn:
why incentives matter
why people respond predictably to policy changes
why scarcity shapes decisions
why risk and reward are universal
why unintended consequences are common
For example:
Overly generous unemployment benefits can reduce the incentive to return to work.
Rent control can reduce housing supply, raising prices long-term.
Strict zoning can artificially inflate housing costs.
Tax breaks can shift business decisions but may not produce promised jobs.
Economics helps students see beyond intentions to outcomes.
8. Why Economics Matters Even More in the Age of AI
AI has changed everything — except human nature and economic reality.
AI can process data, but it cannot interpret incentives.
Only a human mind can understand why people behave as they do.
AI can forecast trends, but it cannot grasp consequences.
Consequences require judgment shaped by real-world understanding.
AI can make decisions quickly, but it cannot weigh tradeoffs ethically.
Economics teaches students how those tradeoffs work.
AI makes bad decisions faster when guided by people who don’t understand economics.
A poorly trained human with a powerful tool is dangerous. A well-trained human with the same tool is wise.
Economics is the steadying force that helps society use AI responsibly.
Conclusion: The Blueprint for a Competent Adult
What educators want students to gain from economics is not technical jargon or narrow theories. It is an understanding of how the world works.
Economics teaches:
how choices shape outcomes
how incentives drive behavior
how money, markets, and governments interact
why prosperity is fragile and must be understood
how individuals, families, and nations manage limited resources
how to avoid financial mistakes and public illusions
If literature strengthens the mind and imagination, and history strengthens judgment and citizenship, economics strengthens decision-making — the backbone of adult life.
Together, they form the education every young person deserves before entering the real world. And the most important thing I hope you take away from this essay and my experience: college in general and high school in particular is where you launch into a lifetime of learning (and re-learning). Anything you see in this series that you judge you missed, go back and learn! LFM
Hard Lessons, Real Stories, and the Ground-Level Solutions Law Enforcement Says Actually Work
Mass shootings in America have become a recurring national nightmare: predictable yet unpredictable, familiar yet devastating, common yet individually shattering. The politics surrounding them often emphasize blame, ideology, or emotion. What receives far less attention is the actual investigative DNA of these attacks — the timelines, the warnings, the coordination failures, and the moments when someone did intervene and stopped a massacre before it began.
To understand what truly works, we must look at the cases, not the slogans. The lives lost — and the lives saved — tell us more than any press conference or political tweet.
This essay explores the problem the way police, detectives, and federal threat-assessment specialists see it: case by case, pattern by pattern, weakness by weakness, and success by success.
I. What Mass Shootings Look Like Through Law Enforcement Eyes
Ask any detective with experience in threat assessment, and they will tell you a truth that ordinary Americans rarely hear:
“We almost always know who’s spiraling long before the shooting happens. The problem is — nobody acts fast enough, firmly enough, or in sync.”
The datasets from the FBI, Secret Service, ATF, and state fusion centers show several common threads:
Shooters leak intent.
They study previous attacks.
They experience years of decline — socially, mentally, financially, emotionally.
They accumulate grievances.
Someone always notices something.
Law enforcement doesn’t describe these as “senseless crimes.” They describe them as interceptable crises.
II. Real Cases That Reveal How Systems Fail — and Could Have Succeeded
These examples are not chosen to support any ideology. They are simply the clearest windows into reality.
**1. SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, TX (2017)
A tragedy by bureaucracy — 26 killed, 22 injured**
Shooter convicted of domestic violence in the Air Force
Legally prohibited from firearm ownership
Air Force never uploaded the conviction into NICS
He passed background checks he should have failed
A church full of families was devastated because a clerk in a military office did not submit a form.
Law enforcement conclusion: “Fix the reporting system and this shooter never gets a gun.”
**2. UVALDE, TX (2022)
Dozens of warnings — none acted on in time**
Multiple students reported terrifying social media posts
The shooter had photos of weapons, threats, violent messages
Friends said he was “spiraling”
A near-complete mental health collapse went unaddressed
The tragedy in Uvalde was compounded by a catastrophic police response — but the earlier failures are equally important: warning signs ignored, red flags dismissed, no early intervention team engaged.
Law enforcement conclusion: “If someone had been empowered to intervene early, this kid never reaches that school door.”
**3. MIDLAND–ODESSA, TX (2019)
He failed a background check — then bought a weapon privately**
Shooter tried to buy a gun from a licensed dealer
He FAILED the background check
He then purchased a rifle through a private sale with no check
He spiraled, snapped during a traffic stop, and killed 7 people
Texas DPS and FBI called this case the “perfect storm of loopholes.”
Law enforcement conclusion: “A failed background check should trigger a welfare follow-up. Nobody checked on him.”
**4. FORT HOOD, TX (2009)
A shooter telegraphed his radicalization — nothing done**
Major Nidal Hasan repeatedly communicated extremist ideology
Colleagues reported him
Concerns were dismissed to avoid accusations of bias
This case shows what law enforcement calls “hesitation risk” — institutions afraid to act decisively.
**5. LAS VEGAS, NV (2017)
The outlier — almost no warning signs**
This shooter is the exception that proves the rule. Law enforcement found:
no threats,
no manifesto,
no social media trail,
no extremist network.
He was wealthy, isolated, and meticulous.
Conclusion: A tiny percentage of cases will bypass all prevention systems. Most will not.
III. The Cases Where Mass Shootings Were Prevented — Proof That Prevention Works
These are not theories. These are real, documented saves.
1. Richmond, VA (2022) — A July 4th massacre stopped cold
A man overheard a conversation about an attack planned on a holiday celebration. He reported it. Police uncovered weapons, plans, and a manifesto.
Lives saved: potentially hundreds.
2. Lubbock, TX (2021) — A 13-year-old stopped before carrying out school attack
The student had:
a detailed map
a written kill list
weapons ready
a manifesto
His grandmother found the notebook and reported him immediately.
Law enforcement conclusion: “Family vigilance prevented mass casualties.”
3. Daytona Beach, FL (2019) — Threat assessment works
A student posted online: “I’m going to shoot up the school.”
A classmate reported it. Within hours:
police arrived
family cooperated
weapons were secured
boy received psychiatric evaluation
A textbook intervention.
4. Washington State (2015) — School attack prevented by a friend’s courage
A 15-year-old planned a Columbine-style attack. He shared part of his plan with a friend. The friend reported it, despite fear of social backlash.
Police discovered:
an AK-47
detailed plans
written threats
Friendship and courage saved a school.
5. Plano, TX Workplace Attack Prevented (2016)
A disgruntled employee expressed violent intent toward coworkers. HR flagged it. The company called police. He was interviewed, weapons removed, and evaluated.
No attack occurred.
IV. What Law Enforcement Says Actually Works (Not Ideology — Evidence)
After decades of analysis, police agencies, FBI profilers, Secret Service behavioral specialists, and state threat-assessment units consistently identify five high-impact, realistic solutions.
Not bans. Not fantasies. Not slogans.
Real solutions grounded in actual casework.
1. Fix the Data — The Fastest Way to Save Lives
Cases like Sutherland Springs and Midland–Odessa show the role of:
missing convictions
unfiled restraining orders
unreported mental-health rulings
incorrect identifiers
Law enforcement calls this:
“The invisible failure that kills.”
The fix: mandatory reporting audits and penalties for noncompliance.
2. County-Wide Threat Assessment Teams (The Best Tool We Have)
Teams combining:
sheriff’s office
schools
mental health
prosecutors
social workers
These teams already exist in:
Virginia (after Virginia Tech)
Florida (after Parkland)
Utah (statewide)
North Texas school districts
And they work.
They have stopped dozens of planned attacks by:
interviewing individuals
securing weapons temporarily
offering services
coordinating follow-up
de-escalating crises
This is the single most successful prevention method America has.
3. Mandatory Follow-Up on Credible Threat Reports
This is not punitive. It is welfare-based intervention, used worldwide.
Every credible threat triggers:
a home visit
mental-health assessment
background check review
firearm-safety conversation (or temporary transfer if warranted)
follow-up plan
This would have intervened in:
Parkland
Uvalde
Santa Fe
Highland Park
El Paso
Dayton
Law enforcement overwhelmingly supports this.
4. Hardening Soft Targets — Without Militarizing Them
Realistic, non-intrusive upgrades:
shatter-resistant glass
classroom doors that lock from inside
unified communications (so responders hear the same thing)
real-time law enforcement access to building layouts
festival/event perimeter redesigns
These upgrades prevented casualties in:
West Freeway Church of Christ, White Settlement, TX (armed volunteer stopped shooter in seconds, 2019)
Arvada, CO store attack (2021)
multiple school attacks where locked classrooms saved children
5. Breaking Adult Isolation — The Hidden Variable
Law enforcement notes a growing pattern: older, isolated, grievance-driven adults.
Examples:
Half Moon Bay (2023)
Buffalo supermarket shooter lived in complete isolation for years
Dayton shooter with obsessive ideation
Midland–Odessa shooter living alone in a squalid shack
Effective interventions:
workplace threat reporting
veteran wellness checks
aging men’s mental health programs
community navigator teams
training employers to recognize decompensation
These are low-cost and high-impact.
V. The Most Underreported Factor: Courage of Bystanders
Again and again, the preventions happened because someone —
a coworker
a teacher
a classmate
a grandmother
a friend
a roommate
— chose to speak up.
Law enforcement calls this:
“The single most important variable in preventing mass violence.”
Bystanders save more lives than laws.
VI. The Moral Imperative: Replace Hopelessness With Method
Mass shootings aren’t random. They aren’t unpredictable. And they aren’t unsolvable.
What we need isn’t a perfect solution — it’s a functional system.
Competent reporting
Seamless coordination
Early intervention
Community eyes
Physical barriers that buy seconds
Adults who refuse to look away
These are the realistic, proven, workable solutions that law enforcement supports because they have watched them succeed in the field.
Conclusion: A Country That Can Change — If It Wants To
America doesn’t have to choose between freedom and safety. It must choose between chaos and coordination.
The truth is painful but hopeful:
Most mass shootings are preventable. Not with bans. Not with magic. But with systems that work and communities that care.
This is not a political argument. It is a practical one — written in blood and proven by the cases where tragedy was avoided.
The question now is whether the country is willing to move beyond slogans and toward the solutions that actually save lives.
**APPENDIX
Texas Mass Violence Prevention Framework (2025 Edition)** A State-Specific Policy, Law-Enforcement, and Case-Based Reference
I. Texas Case Studies (Successes and Failures)
Texas provides a uniquely large dataset for examining mass shootings: rural, suburban, urban, along the border, in oilfield regions, in major metros. These cases reveal consistent system gaps.
A. When the System Failed
1. Sutherland Springs (2017) — Data Failure
Domestic violence conviction not reported by the Air Force
Shooter passed background checks he should have failed
26 dead, 22 wounded
Gap identified: Failure to report disqualifying convictions to NICS. Texas impact: Dozens of counties still fail to upload mental-health adjudications consistently.
2. Santa Fe High School (2018) — No Warning System
10 killed, 13 injured
Shooter had written violent fantasies, wore trench coat daily, showed disturbing art
None of it triggered intervention under existing school policies
Gap identified: Lack of integrated school threat-assessment teams pre-Parkland-style reforms.
3. El Paso Walmart Attack (2019) — Ideology, Isolation, and Online Radicalization
Shooter posted manifesto 20 minutes before attack
Family saw increasing withdrawal but did not see a way to intervene legally
23 killed, 22 injured
Gap identified: No statewide reporting mechanism for family concern + lack of early intervention infrastructure.
4. Midland–Odessa (2019) — Failed Check + No Follow-Up
Shooter failed a background check
Still obtained rifle via private sale
Escaped all follow-up and monitoring
7 killed, 25 injured
Gap identified: Texas has no “background check failure follow-up” protocol for welfare checks.
5. Uvalde (2022) — Warnings but No Coordinated Response
No confiscation required. No criminal charge required.
Simply breaking the isolation saves lives.
4. Realistic Target Hardening for Schools, Churches & Events
Low-cost priorities:
shatter-resistant entry glass
interior locking mechanisms
campus-wide communication systems
unified law enforcement radio channels
updated maps accessible digitally to responders
controlled-access vestibules
volunteer security programs
These already saved lives at:
White Settlement church
West Texas schools where locked classrooms stopped entry
multiple thwarted school plots
5. Community Navigator Teams for Isolated Adults
Texas sheriffs strongly endorse pilot programs in:
rural counties
oilfield regions
borderside colonias
veteran-dense areas
Navigators perform:
wellness checks
reconnecting individuals to family, church, social services
employment referrals
mental health connection
regular follow-up
This is cheap and effective.
6. Employer Training Statewide (especially in high-stress industries)
Texas mass violence often emerges from:
trucking
energy sector
distribution warehouses
food processing plants
call centers
Employers need:
threat-recognition training
HR escalation pathways
connections to sheriff’s offices
This prevented the Plano case.
IV. “What Good Intervention Looks Like” — Texas Examples
Case A: North Texas High School Plot Stopped (2023)
Student posted detailed shooting threat
Classmates reported immediately
Threat team met same day
Parents cooperated
Police conducted home visit
Weapons removed temporarily
Student entered crisis counseling
No criminal record created
Outcome: No violence. Family relieved. School safe. Child receives long-term care.
Case B: Rural West Texas Veteran (2020)
Veteran in crisis making alarming comments
Neighbor reported
Sheriff’s deputy and veteran liaison responded
Weapons temporarily transferred to brother
Veteran placed in VA crisis stabilization program
Follow-up by navigator team
Outcome: Incident avoided. Veteran stabilized. No arrests. Family grateful.
Case C: Dallas-Area Workplace (2022)
Worker said he wanted to “take out” supervisors
HR trained under Texas Workplace Safety Pilot Program
HR called police
PD interviewed, implemented voluntary safety plan
Mental health assistance provided
Employer changed his job assignment
Outcome: No violence. Employee recovered, remained employed.
V. Statewide Recommended Implementation Plan
Year 1 (Fast Wins)
NICS reporting audits
Texas Adult Threat Assessment Teams (pilot in 8 major counties)
DCFS and mental health reporting refreshers
Standardized threat reporting hotline
Year 2 (Scalable Programs)
statewide employer training
community navigator expansion
school physical-security retrofits
integrated law enforcement communications
Year 3 (Long-Term Infrastructure)
full digital courthouse → DPS transmission
unified statewide threat-assessment database
mental-health telecrisis network across rural counties
VI. “Texas Principles” for Mass Violence Prevention
Law enforcement leaders often summarize what works into three Texas-style principles:
**1. “If it’s predictable, it’s preventable.”
Almost every attacker reveals intent.
**2. “You can’t fix what you don’t see.”
Isolation breeds violence — intervention disrupts it.
**3. “Don’t wait for perfect. Act when something seems wrong.”
Prevention happens early or not at all.
VII. Conclusion of Appendix
Texas is poised to lead the nation with non-ideological, realistic, enforceable policies that:
honor the Second Amendment
respect local control
prioritize law enforcement input
rely on early intervention, not confiscation
strengthen communities, not weaken them
save lives without dividing the country
Mass violence is not an unsolved mystery. It is a coordination problem, a communication problem, and at its core, a human connection problem.
Texas can fix these. Texas has the tools. Texas has the cases. And now, Texas has the blueprint.
**APPENDIX B
“What I’ve Learned After 20 Years Responding to Mass Violence” A Law Enforcement Perspective
I’ve worn a badge in Texas for more than two decades. I’ve seen quiet towns shaken by unspeakable violence, and I’ve seen ordinary citizens step up to prevent tragedies the public will never hear about. I’ve walked through crime scenes that will stay with me until the day I retire, and I’ve sat at kitchen tables with parents who have no words left except, “Why?”
After all this time, I’ve learned that nearly everything the public argues about is only a sliver of the truth. Mass violence doesn’t happen because one law wasn’t passed or because one political side is right and the other is wrong. It happens because systems fail, people look away, warnings go unreported, and institutions are afraid to act when someone is spiraling.
This is what it looks like from where I stand.
I. “We Almost Always Know”
The hardest truth is this:
In most cases, the shooter was on someone’s radar long before they opened fire.
I’m not talking about clairvoyance. I’m talking about patterns.
In case after case, we’ve seen:
threats posted online
violent fantasies shared with friends
domestic disturbances
histories of grievance and obsession
escalating isolation
coworker concerns
school warnings
welfare checks that never happened
mental health breaks that went untreated
We call these “pre-incident indicators.” They’re real. They’re measurable. And they’re almost always present.
The tragedy is not that we don’t know — it’s that we don’t act fast enough or in sync enough.
II. “It’s Not the Gun — It’s the Spiral”
I’ve taken more guns off the street than I can remember. Hunting rifles. Handguns. A few illegally modified weapons. And yes, rifles with large magazines.
But here’s the truth you learn after 20 years:
It’s never the gun in isolation. It’s the downward slide no one interrupts.
Shooters are rarely “snapped” individuals. They are individuals who decline over months or years.
We see:
isolation
job loss
family collapse
grievance accumulation
untreated depression
anger fixation
obsession with previous shooters
social withdrawal
personality change
By the time they act violently, they’ve been at the bottom of a well for a long time—and no one lowered a rope.
If you want to know what law enforcement believes will make the biggest difference, it’s this:
Catch the spiral before the crash.
III. “Families Know First”
I wish the public understood how many times a parent, sibling, spouse, or grandparent has quietly whispered to me:
“I’m scared of what he might do.” “He’s not the same person anymore.” “He talks about violence.”
But they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t want their family member arrested. They didn’t want to “ruin his life.” They didn’t know if it was serious. Sometimes they were embarrassed.
Here’s what I want every Texan to know:
Calling us doesn’t automatically mean a criminal charge. Most of the time, early intervention means:
mental-health evaluation
voluntary firearm transfer
crisis services
counseling
follow-ups
family coordination
The public imagines a SWAT raid. What usually happens is a conversation at the kitchen table.
IV. “Threat Assessment Teams Work — Better Than Anything Else We’ve Tried”
The best tool we have isn’t complicated:
Get the right people around the same table before someone gets hurt.
A threat assessment team — the way we run them in parts of Texas — includes:
detectives
school representatives
mental-health clinicians
prosecutors
social service partners
sometimes clergy or veterans’ liaisons
When these teams function, they catch things that no single agency would ever catch alone.
I’ve seen teams:
talk a teenager out of a violent plan
get an unstable adult into treatment
mediate workplace grievances
defuse domestic crises
remove firearms voluntarily
help families reconnect
stop ideologically motivated plots
And the public never knows because nothing bad happened.
I can tell you without hesitation:
Threat assessment has prevented more mass shootings than any law ever passed.
V. “Follow-Up Saves Lives”
One of the biggest failures in this country is the belief that if someone doesn’t break the law, there’s nothing we can do.
That’s false.
We can:
check on them
talk to them
bring mental-health professionals
involve the family
secure weapons voluntarily
create a safety plan
follow up again and again
The cases that haunt me are the ones where the warning signs were clear, someone called, and then the file sat on a desk — or was never shared with the people who could act.
The most effective thing we can do is simple:
If a credible threat comes in, someone must check on that person within 24 hours.
Not to arrest. To assess. To intervene early.
VI. “You Don’t Need to Militarize a School to Make It Safe”
I’ve been inside dozens of Texas schools. Some built in the 1960s with glass doors that could be breached by a lawn chair. Some built after 2018 with lockdown doors, radio repeaters, and secure vestibules.
You know what helps?
classroom doors that lock from the inside
shatter-resistant glass
clear communication systems
unified law enforcement radio channels
controlled access
trained school staff who know what to do
You know what doesn’t help?
finger-pointing
slogans
political theater
Small, inexpensive improvements save more lives than any sweeping overhaul.
VII. “We Need Community, Not Just Cops”
People assume mass violence is a police problem. It isn’t.
It’s a community problem.
The most important actors in prevention are:
families
coworkers
HR officers
school counselors
pastors
friends
neighbors
You see the cracks before we do. You see the shift in behavior. You hear the disturbing comment. You watch the decline.
And when you call us, you give us a chance to help before the damage is done.
VIII. “The Truth No One Wants to Admit”
I’ve seen evil. I’ve seen pain. I’ve seen things I won’t describe in a public essay.
But I’ve also seen:
a grandmother save a school
a coworker prevent a workplace massacre
a pastor de-escalate a veteran in crisis
a teacher stop a tragedy with one phone call
a church security volunteer act in six seconds to end a deadly attack
The truth is this:
Mass shootings are not unstoppable. They are unaddressed. There’s a difference.
We can fix this. We know how. We have the tools. We just have to use them consistently.
IX. My Message to Texans
If you want to save lives, don’t start with Congress. Start with:
local coordination
early intervention
better reporting
stronger families
human connection
courage when something feels wrong
Texas has already stopped attacks because the right person spoke up. And Texas has suffered attacks because the right person stayed silent.
We can change that.
X. Final Word
I’ve carried children out of classrooms. I’ve stepped over shell casings in churches. I’ve held the hands of grieving parents. I’ve watched communities heal with patience, courage, and love.
I don’t want to see another town go through this. And we don’t have to.
Not if we act early. Not if we act together. Not if we see the warning signs and refuse to ignore them.
Most shooters are preventable long before a trigger is ever pulled. Our job is to step in before someone reaches the point of no return.
And that is something Texas can lead the nation in doing — not through division, but through determination.
Based on the National League of Cities Report (2025) (Source: “City Fiscal Conditions 2025” PDF) 2025-City-Fiscal-Conditions-Rep…
Introduction
The City Fiscal Conditions 2025 report arrives at a moment when American cities are quietly but decisively transitioning into a new era of fiscal discipline. For several years after the pandemic, local governments benefited from an unusual combination of strong economic conditions and extraordinary federal aid. Revenue surged as consumers spent aggressively, home values climbed, and the job market reached historic strength. Cities responded by expanding public services, restoring depleted reserves, and tackling long-delayed projects.
But this report makes it clear that the “recovery period” is over. Growth has cooled, inflation remains persistent, and the federal support that once acted as a financial stabilizer is now winding down. The challenge for cities today is not collapse or crisis—it is how to regain balance in a world that feels more constrained, more expensive, and more uncertain than the one they just emerged from.
Texas cities illustrate these national trends with particular force. Their rapid population growth, heavy reliance on sales tax, and strict state revenue limitations make them a lens through which the pressures of this new era can be seen even more sharply.
I. From Rebound to Restraint: A New Phase of Municipal Budgeting
During FY2024, municipal general fund spending rose sharply—up 7.5 percent when adjusted for inflation. This increase was partly the result of postponed investments from the COVID years, when many cities limited expenditures and built reserves. It was also fueled by federal recovery programs such as the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), both of which infused substantial resources into local budgets.
By contrast, FY2025 reflects a deliberate slowing. Spending is still rising, but only by 0.7 percent, suggesting that cities are tightening operations and reassessing priorities. Revenue projections tell the same story: after a healthy 3.9 percent increase in FY2024, cities now expect a 1.9 percent decline for FY2025. This decline is driven largely by the tapering of federal relief funds and the normalization of consumer behavior after several years of unusually high spending.
Texas Context: Revenue Limits Under Rapid Growth
Texas cities feel this shift even more acutely. Most Texas municipalities rely heavily on sales tax revenues, which surged during the post-pandemic boom but have since flattened. When sales activity cools, city budgets weaken immediately because there is no corresponding income tax or other broad-based revenue source to cushion the decline. At the same time, the Texas 3.5 percent State Property Tax Revenue Cap prevents cities from increasing property tax collections to keep pace with population growth, even when new residents significantly increase service demand.
The combination of high growth and tight limits creates a unique challenge. Texas cities are being asked to do more—with policing, fire protection, streets, parks, utilities, and emergency services—while having less flexibility to raise the revenues needed to deliver these services. The national report identifies a slowdown; Texas turns that slowdown into a structural strain.
II. Public Safety: The Dominant and Growing Budget Pressure
Public safety remains the largest and most rapidly expanding area of municipal spending nationwide. In the average U.S. city, it now accounts for over 60 percent of the general fund, up from 54 percent just two years earlier. This includes police, fire, and emergency medical services, all of which have seen rising personnel costs, higher call volumes, increased equipment prices, and greater public expectations.
Other services—such as recreation, parks, culture, libraries, and general government—occupy a much smaller share of the municipal budget. Cities often want to invest in these quality-of-life functions, but the dominant weight of public safety makes this increasingly difficult.
Texas Context: A Perfect Storm of Public Safety Costs
Texas amplifies this national trend. Major Texas cities such as Dallas, Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, and San Antonio routinely spend 60 to 70 percent of their general funds on public safety. Several factors drive this. First, rapid population growth leads to higher 911 call volumes and more complex service demands. Second, Texas has faced serious police recruitment challenges since 2020, prompting cities to increase wages, offer signing bonuses, and add incentives to remain competitive with suburban agencies. Third, hospitals in many Texas metro areas struggle with capacity issues, causing local Fire/EMS departments to handle more medical emergency calls—including mental health-related incidents—which increases staffing and overtime costs.
Taken together, public safety becomes both essential and unavoidable. But it also pushes cities into a corner, leaving less room for parks, street maintenance, libraries, community programs, and long-term capital upkeep. The national report identifies public safety as the dominant expense; in Texas, it is the defining budget reality.
III. Fiscal Confidence Declines
Municipal finance officers across the country report declining confidence. In the survey, 52 percent say they feel better able to meet FY2025 needs than in the prior year—a noticeable drop from previous surveys. Looking ahead to FY2026, only 45 percent express optimism, down sharply from the 64 percent optimism reported a year earlier. 2025-City-Fiscal-Conditions-Rep…
Cities cite inflation, workforce costs, capital needs, and public safety demands as the primary drivers of this sentiment. Inflation has raised the price of everything from asphalt to ambulances. Recruiting employees—particularly equipment operators, utility technicians, IT personnel, police officers, and firefighters—requires higher wages. And a backlog of infrastructure projects, many delayed during the pandemic, continues to grow in scope and cost.
Texas Context: Growth Without Elasticity
Texas cities experience each of these pressures but with added difficulty because their revenue systems are less flexible. A city such as Frisco, McKinney, or Leander may grow by 5–10 percent annually, bringing thousands of new residents who need water, police protection, parks, and roads. Yet the property tax cap prevents revenue from rising at the same pace unless voters approve a tax increase—a difficult political hurdle. Meanwhile, sales taxes can fluctuate unpredictably depending on regional retail activity.
The result is a mismatch: demand expands rapidly, but revenue cannot. The national report describes growing financial caution; Texas cities describe a tightening vise.
Texas Case Studies: How National Trends Become Texas Realities
These case studies are woven here to illustrate the national themes and show how Texas cities embody them with exceptional clarity and scale.
Case Study 1: Dallas
Dallas faces the full spectrum of pressures described in the report. Its infrastructure backlog—including streets, drainage systems, and public facilities—has grown as construction costs rise due to inflation and tariffs. Public safety spending consumes over 60 percent of the general fund, leaving limited room for parks, libraries, and cultural services. In addition, the city’s relationship with Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) has placed new focus on cost allocation practices, as suburban cities question their share of contributions relative to the services they receive.
Taken together, Dallas demonstrates how the national transition from recovery to restraint becomes a difficult balancing act: maintaining essential services, planning long-term capital investments, and managing regional partnerships with limited financial headroom.
Case Study 2: Houston
Houston’s fiscal challenges reveal how structural issues magnify national trends. The city continues to manage large pension obligations for police, fire, and municipal employees—obligations that constrain budget flexibility. At the same time, Houston’s commercial tax base is unusually sensitive to office valuation cycles. Post-pandemic work changes have depressed office demand nationwide, and Houston, with one of the largest office markets in the country, is particularly vulnerable. Sales tax revenues also depend heavily on energy-sector cycles; when oil prices soften, household spending often does as well.
Houston illustrates the report’s warning that cities tied to volatile economic sectors face heightened revenue uncertainty during national fiscal cooling.
Case Study 3: Austin
Austin is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. Population growth brings economic strength, but it also drives up demand for water, roads, transit, and public safety faster than revenue can legally expand under Texas law. The city’s ambitious capital plans—including the long-term Project Connect transit system—are deeply affected by construction cost inflation and tariff-driven price increases. Meanwhile, Austin’s hiring environment requires competitive wages to attract talent in a city with a high cost of living.
Austin underscores one of the report’s central themes: rapid growth does not guarantee fiscal ease. In fact, growth can intensify financial pressure when infrastructure needs escalate faster than revenue authority.
Case Study 4: San Antonio
San Antonio has historically maintained one of the most stable fiscal profiles in Texas, but even its disciplined budget faces rising strain. Public safety consumes nearly two-thirds of the general fund, mirroring the national trend. Tourism-driven sales tax revenues softened as consumer habits returned to pre-pandemic patterns. As one of the most military- and federal-contract-dependent cities in the state, San Antonio must continuously monitor federal procurement and tax policy—including potential changes to the municipal bond tax exemption.
San Antonio demonstrates the report’s finding that even stable cities are preparing for leaner years ahead.
Case Study 5: Fort Worth
Fort Worth is the fastest-growing large city in America, and its infrastructure needs are enormous. New neighborhoods require water lines, fire stations, streets, schools, and parks. Inflation and tariffs have raised the cost of steel, heavy equipment, and construction services, making public works significantly more expensive. At the same time, the revenue cap restricts how quickly Fort Worth can scale up funding to match new demand. With sales taxes now flattening, a key engine of local revenue has slowed at exactly the moment the city needs it most.
Fort Worth illustrates the report’s broad conclusion: even cities with extraordinary growth cannot outpace the pressures of rising costs and declining federal support.
IV. Tariffs and Municipal Bond Policy: Watching for External Shocks
Nationally, cities report that tariffs are complicating procurement. Nearly half say tariffs have affected their ability to secure materials or equipment, and some describe major project delays. Tariffs raise the cost of steel, vehicles, water infrastructure components, public safety equipment, and construction materials. When these costs rise, cities often must delay projects, revise budgets, or seek alternative suppliers.
Cities are also closely watching federal discussions about the municipal bond tax exemption. Should the exemption be weakened, the cost of borrowing would rise sharply. Because cities rely heavily on debt to build long-lived infrastructure—roads, water systems, drainage, bridges—the financial impact would be significant. 2025-City-Fiscal-Conditions-Rep…
Texas Context: Higher Exposure
Texas cities—especially large, fast-growing metro areas—would be among the hardest hit by these changes. Their capital programs are enormous, covering everything from freeway interchanges and transit expansions to water treatment plants and flood control systems. If borrowing costs rise, Texas cities would be forced to trim projects, delay improvements, or seek new revenue sources in a system already marked by tight constraints.
V. Tax Sources and a Shifting Economic Base
The report highlights that property taxes are projected to grow modestly while sales taxes level off. Income taxes—where they exist—are expected to decline. Since property taxes lag real-time economic changes by one to three years, cities often experience fiscal conditions later than the private sector. 2025-City-Fiscal-Conditions-Rep…
Texas Context: High Volatility in a Sales-Heavy System
Texas cities, with no income tax option, are uniquely exposed to consumer spending shifts. When retail slows, so do city revenues. This exposure becomes even more pronounced when combined with declining commercial property valuations, which are emerging in major Texas metros as the office market softens. The state’s combination of cyclical industries, rapid development patterns, and legally restricted revenue capacity creates both opportunities and vulnerabilities that align closely with the national findings.
VI. The Broader Narrative: Resilience Through Adaptation
Across the nation, the report shows cities taking proactive steps to manage uncertainty. They are adjusting their budgets, building reserves, planning capital projects more cautiously, and monitoring federal policy developments. Many are exploring domestic supply alternatives, streamlining operations, and prioritizing essential services. The tone is neither pessimistic nor alarmist—it is grounded, realistic, and strategic.
Texas Context: Innovation as Necessity
Texas cities have long relied on creative financial tools to navigate their constrained revenue environment. These include Public Improvement Districts (PID), Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones (TIRZ), Municipal Management Districts (MMD), and Economic Development Corporations (EDC). These tools allow cities to capture value from growth and reinvest it into infrastructure, parks, roads, drainage, and redevelopment projects. Texas cities also maintain some of the strongest financial ratings in the nation due to disciplined reserve policies and long-term planning.
In other words, the very constraints that challenge Texas cities also push them to become some of the most innovative financial stewards in America.
VII. Conclusion: A New Era of Municipal Pragmatism
The City Fiscal Conditions 2025 report captures a decisive moment. Cities across the nation are transitioning from recovery to resilience—from a period defined by federal lifelines to one marked by local decision-making, capital discipline, and an unflinching look at long-term responsibilities. The post-pandemic boom has given way to a quieter, more demanding phase of municipal governance.
Texas cities exemplify this shift even more vividly. They face explosive growth, aging infrastructure, strict revenue constraints, and heavy public safety demands. Yet they continue to innovate and adapt, often serving as national models for fiscal management in high-growth environments.
As the report concludes, cities are not facing an imminent crisis—they are facing a long horizon of disciplined planning. The margin for error may be narrower than before, but the commitment to resilience, adaptability, and pragmatic leadership remains strong. Texas cities, with all their complexity and dynamism, reflect that spirit—and in many ways, illuminate the path forward for the rest of the country.
A Guide to How Schools Are Paid For, Why It Never Feels Like Enough, and the Big Debate Now at Texas’ Doorstep
Public education in Texas is both enormous and intimate. It is a system of more than 1,200 school districts serving nearly 5.5 million children. It is funded by formulas that even experienced administrators struggle to explain, yet it is felt every time a homeowner opens a property tax bill or a teacher receives a paycheck. It is rich in promise, strained by costs, and increasingly defined by political crosscurrents. Texas prides itself on flexibility, local control, and low taxes — but those values continually collide with the financial realities of running schools in a fast-growing, geographically massive state.
This essay maps the entire landscape of school funding in Texas: where the money comes from, how it is distributed, what the Legislature has changed in recent years, how vouchers and property-tax relief affect the system, and why Governor Greg Abbott has embraced the bold and controversial idea of eventually eliminating school property taxes altogether. Whether this vision becomes reality — and what shape the public-school system will take in the next decade — depends on understanding the architecture beneath it.
One truth stands out: Texas cannot fix teacher pay, student achievement, enrollment pressure, recapture, or facilities needs until it confronts the underlying structure of its finance system.
I. Constitutional Foundation: What Texas Promised
All school-funding debates begin with the Texas Constitution, Article VII, which requires the Legislature to establish and maintain an “efficient system of public free schools.” The courts have consistently interpreted “efficient” to mean:
equitable across districts
fundamentally adequate
not dependent on extreme disparities in local wealth
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Edgewood v. Kirby decisions transformed Texas school finance. The Texas Supreme Court ruled that wide disparities between wealthy and poor districts violated the Constitution. To remedy this, the Legislature created recapture, often called “Robin Hood,” a system requiring wealthy districts to send excess local revenue back to the state.
This constitutional framework — equity, adequacy, and local autonomy — continues to shape every reform today.
II. The Three Revenue Streams: Local, State, Federal
Texas school districts rely on three primary revenue sources, but they play very different roles.
1. Local Property Taxes
These are the backbone of school funding. Districts levy:
Maintenance & Operations (M&O) tax rates for salaries and day-to-day operations
Interest & Sinking (I&S) tax rates for debt on buildings
Local revenue varies dramatically depending on the strength of the tax base.
2. State Funding
State dollars are distributed through the Foundation School Program (FSP). The system uses:
a Basic Allotment (BA)
adjustments for special-population students via Weighted Average Daily Attendance (WADA)
transportation allotments, small district adjustments, and more
If a district cannot raise enough locally to meet its entitlement, the state fills the gap.
3. Federal Funds
These make up roughly 10 percent of district revenue, supporting:
Title I
IDEA special education
school nutrition programs
and other targeted mandates
These funds help but are not the backbone of Texas school finance.
III. How Texas Calculates Funding: Tier I and Tier II
Texas uses a tiered structure.
Tier I — The Foundation Program
This ensures a minimum educational program for every student through:
Basic Allotment × WADA
special-population weights
transportation
small/midsize adjustments
Tier II — Local Enrichment
Districts can raise additional M&O pennies called golden pennies and copper pennies.
Golden pennies: high yield, not subject to recapture
Most enrichment beyond the compressed rate requires voter approval through a VATRE.
IV. Recapture: The Equalizer Few Love but Courts Demand
Recapture exists because property values vary wildly across Texas. Districts with high property wealth per WADA (often due to mineral values or commercial tax bases) generate far more revenue per penny than property-poor districts.
The formula is simple:
When local wealth per WADA exceeds the Equalized Wealth Level, the surplus must be recaptured.
It is politically controversial but constitutionally necessary.
Districts like Austin ISD — wealthy tax bases but high needs — often pay recapture amounts far larger than their own programmatic flexibility would prefer. Meanwhile, rural or urban property-poor districts rely heavily on these equalized dollars.
V. Texas in the National Landscape
Texas educates one of the largest student bodies in the nation yet consistently ranks in the lower third for per-pupil spending. Factors include:
rapid population growth
inflation decreasing the value of the Basic Allotment
aging facilities in older districts
special-education obligations that exceed state reimbursement
The teacher-retention crisis reflects these funding pressures directly.
VI. Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts (ESAs)
The introduction of ESAs in 2025 marked a structural shift. These accounts divert state dollars to private education options. Crucially:
ESA dollars are removed before school-finance formulas operate
which reduces the total funding pool for public education
and increases the state’s long-term cost obligations
Supporters emphasize choice; critics highlight the impact on district resources.
VII. Tax Compression and Homestead Exemptions
Texas has repeatedly compressed school M&O tax rates — most dramatically in 2006 and again in 2019 under HB 3. Recent constitutional amendments increased homestead exemptions and compressed rates further.
This means:
homeowners feel relief
but the state must backfill more revenue
and state obligations grow exponentially over time
If the economy slows, the state may struggle to maintain these commitments.
VIII. Governor Abbott’s Proposal: Eliminate School Property Taxes
Governor Abbott has stated he wants Texas to eliminate school property taxes completely. This would shift the largest funding mechanism for public schools to:
sales taxes
consumption-based alternatives
growth revenue
or new statewide tax instruments
This raises critical questions:
How do we preserve local control?
How do we ensure equity across 1,200+ districts?
What happens in recessions?
How do ESAs interact with a fully state-funded system?
It is the most ambitious tax proposal in modern Texas history.
IX. Where Funding Pressures Are Felt Most
Teacher Pay
Texas trails the national average, especially in large urban districts.
Special Education
State funding does not cover true required costs; districts subsidize heavily.
Facilities
Older urban districts face major reinvestment needs, while fast-growth suburban districts must build rapidly.
Operational Costs
Inflation affects utilities, transportation, insurance, and program expenses.
Across Texas, educational needs are rising faster than revenue.
X. Adequacy and Equity in a Changing State
Texas is now more:
urban
suburban
economically diverse
demographically complex
than at any point in its history.
Equity concerns involve not just property wealth but:
disability status
rural decline
special-population needs
enrollment patterns
Ensuring adequacy will require updating the Basic Allotment and adjusting cost structures to reflect modern realities.
XI. What a Stable System Would Require
A modern, stable school finance system would include:
indexing the Basic Allotment to true local inflation (can be much higher than the national headline inflation!)
meaningful local discretion without destabilizing equity
predictable state funding even in downturns
sustainable integration of ESA costs
adequate support for special-population students
transparent outcomes and accountability
Without long-term structural reforms, Texas will continue to struggle with volatility.
XII. The Elephant in the Room
Every major issue — teacher pay, property taxes, recapture, ESAs, special education, enrollment shifts — all trace back to one fundamental question:
How does Texas choose to fund its schools?
Until the state updates this architecture for a 21st-century population, every subsequent debate will remain a patch on an aging foundation.
APPENDIX A — Key Definitions and Formula Explanations
Basic Allotment (BA): foundational per-student funding. Weighted Average Daily Attendance (WADA): adjusts attendance for special-population weights. M&O Tax Rate: used for daily operations. I&S Tax Rate: used for bond repayment and facilities. Tier I: baseline program funded by state and local revenue. Tier II: enrichment funding through local discretion (golden and copper pennies). Golden Pennies: high-yield pennies, free from recapture. Copper Pennies: enrichment pennies subject to recapture. Foundation School Program (FSP): state’s primary funding system. Equalized Wealth Level (EWL): recapture threshold. Recapture: excess local property wealth reclaimed by the state. ESA: Education Savings Account for private schooling. Tax Compression: state-mandated lowering of local M&O rates.
APPENDIX B — Major Historical Milestones in Texas School Finance
Late 1800s–1950s: Foundation of statewide public education; wide funding disparities. 1989–1995 (Edgewood era): Courts declare system unconstitutional; recapture created. 2006: HB 1 compresses tax rates after West Orange-Cove. 2019 (HB 3): Major reform expanding Tier II, adjusting weights, compressing M&O rates. 2023–2025: Homestead-tax changes; continued compression; ESAs approved; funding obligations expand.
APPENDIX C — Data Landscape & Current Funding Realities
Texas spends below the national average per pupil. Recapture exceeds $3 billion yearly. Districts across Texas experience:
fast-growth facility pressures
rural staffing shortages
urban aging infrastructure
special education obligations beyond state reimbursement
recapture obligations that limit program flexibility
Teacher turnover is high, especially in high-need districts.
Despite GDP strength, education funding levels struggle to keep pace with demographic realities.
APPENDIX D — Policy Options, Trade-Offs, and Pathways Forward
1. Index the Basic Allotment to inflation
Maintains purchasing power and stabilizes district operations.
2. Reform recapture but preserve equity
Consider raising EWL thresholds or adjusting guaranteed yields while still ensuring a constitutionally “efficient” system.
3. Provide recession-proof state support
Create rainy-day triggers that stabilize district budgets during economic downturns.
4. Integrate ESAs into long-term fiscal planning
Ensure private-education subsidies do not undermine district stability or local control.
5. Support special-population students adequately
Reevaluate weights for bilingual, special education, and compensatory education.
6. Rebalance state–local responsibility
Clarify long-term commitments given rapid local tax-base shifts.
7. Increase transparency and public accountability
Build trust in allocation decisions and avoid opaque formula adjustments.
APPENDIX E — Top 100 Districts Paying Recapture Amounts.
Why States Can Absorb More—and Why the Federal Government Should Become a True Backstop
A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI
Introduction
For decades, disaster relief in America has operated under a familiar assumption: states cannot reliably handle the financial shock of natural disasters, so the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) must stand ready as the first and primary payer whenever storms, fires, floods, or earthquakes strike. This model dates back to 1979, when President Jimmy Carter created FEMA to consolidate civil defense and disaster-response functions into a single federal agency. After the attacks of September 11th, FEMA was folded into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, broadening its responsibilities and cementing its role as the nation’s manager of both large and routine emergencies.
Yet the fiscal and operational landscape has changed sharply since those foundational decisions. States today maintain much stronger budgets, far deeper rainy-day reserves, more diversified revenue sources, and more mature emergency-management agencies than they had in the late twentieth century. Meanwhile, FEMA itself has grown increasingly bureaucratic, with administrative costs rising from around 9 percent of disaster spending in the early 1990s to roughly 18 percent between 1989 and 2011, and often exceeding its own internal cost targets. The agency has become indispensable in catastrophic cases but inefficient and slow in everyday ones.
This white paper examines whether FEMA must continue to function as a first-dollar payer, or whether a more modern system would assign routine responsibilities to states and reserve federal involvement for extreme, budget-threatening disasters. What emerges is a surprising conclusion backed by hard data: most states can, in fact, absorb the disaster costs FEMA typically covers, which ranged from 0.41 percent to 5.58 percent of state spending in the 2022–2024 period, with a national average of 1.19 percent. At the same time, states have median rainy-day reserves equal to 13–14 percent of their general-fund spending, and many maintain reserves far larger than that.
The implication is profound. FEMA is essential for rare catastrophic events—but its role as the payer of routine disaster bills imposes high overhead and creates slow, inefficient recovery cycles. This paper lays out a new model in which states pay their own ordinary disaster costs up to a clear percentage of their budgets, and the federal government becomes a streamlined, formula-driven backstop above that threshold. The goal is to reduce federal bureaucracy, preserve national capacity for massive events, and match responsibilities to the actual fiscal capabilities of states today.
I. FEMA’s Role and the Growth of Federal Disaster Spending
When FEMA was created in 1979, the federal government consolidated more than 100 disparate disaster- and civil-defense programs. Its newer home in the Department of Homeland Security expanded its remit, placing it at the center of national preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. Through its Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), FEMA has spent approximately $347 billion (in 2022 dollars) over the past three decades, with more than half of that total coming after 2005 as disasters increased in frequency and severity.
Despite the DRF’s historic role in major recovery efforts—Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and Maria being among the most notable—the agency has become known for slow reimbursements, multi-year project closeouts, and a documentation system so complex that many counties wait months or even years to recover funds already expended. A single North Carolina county spent more on debris removal after Hurricane Helene than its entire annual budget and waited over a year without full reimbursement, a pattern familiar to many local governments.
Yet reliance on FEMA is not uniform across the country. Some states receive enormous federal aid in catastrophic years; others receive relatively little even across multiple years. It is only by understanding this distribution that a reformed model can be imagined.
II. How Dependent Are States on FEMA? Quantifying the Financial Exposure
The best picture of ongoing reliance comes from the 2022–2024 FEMA obligations dataset, which compared how much FEMA spent in each state to that state’s total expenditures. The findings provide a clear map of how deeply—or how little—states depend on the agency in routine years.
A. National Average
Across all fifty states, FEMA obligations equaled only 1.19 percent of total state spending. This means that for the average state, FEMA’s typical-year disaster role is fiscally small—a burden that could, in principle, be absorbed using normal budget tools without major restructuring.
B. Most FEMA-dependent states (recent years)
Though the national average is small, some states exhibit higher FEMA reliance:
Louisiana: 5.58% of total state spending
Florida: 4.39%
Montana: 3.91%
New York: 2.44%
Vermont: 2.14%
Virginia: 1.72%
Alaska: 1.71%
Rhode Island: 1.70%
Hawaii: 1.60%
Colorado: 1.58%
Importantly, even in these “higher exposure” states, the FEMA share of total expenditures remains well below the rainy-day reserves most states currently hold.
C. Least FEMA-dependent states
At the other end:
Nevada: 0.41% of state spending
Wyoming: 0.48%
Oklahoma: 0.58%
For these states, FEMA’s role is nearly negligible as a share of governmental revenue.
D. The catastrophic-year exception
These routine-year percentages mask an important truth: when disasters like Katrina or major multi-storm years hit, federal aid can reach staggering proportions. Pew’s long-term analysis showed that Louisiana’s federal disaster aid approached 19 percent of its general-fund spending in one extreme year. Such rare events are the moments where federal backstop capacity is crucial.
The real message in the data is this: states can handle the predictable; they cannot self-insure the catastrophic.
III. States’ Rainy-Day Funds: A Strong Foundation for a New Model
As federal disaster costs have grown, so too has state fiscal strength. Over the last decade, state rainy-day funds—formally called Budget Stabilization Funds—have reached historic highs.
Total U.S. state rainy-day funds (FY 2024): $158 billion
Total general-fund spending (FY 2024): $1.29 trillion
Median rainy-day balance: ~13–14 percent of general-fund expenditures
Some states far exceed that median:
Texas holds reserves equal to ~18 percent of annual general-fund spending.
Wyoming holds reserves equal to nearly 70 percent.
California’s reserve system in 2022 accounted for nearly half of all rainy-day dollars nationwide.
These figures dwarf the routine-year FEMA exposure numbers. For example, Florida’s FEMA dependence at 4.39 percent of spending is overshadowed by its double-digit rainy-day reserves. Montana’s 3.91 percent figure fits comfortably against the national 13–14 percent median. Even Louisiana, at 5.58 percent, can theoretically cover such costs with existing reserves in a typical year.
This means that the primary fiscal justification for FEMA as a first-dollar payer has largely evaporated; states now have mature financial defenses that simply did not exist decades ago.
IV. FEMA’s Bureaucracy Cost: The Inefficient Load-Bearing Wall
The financial problem with FEMA is not simply the cost of disaster payments—it is the cost of administering them. GAO’s multi-decade analyses show a clear historical trend:
In the early 1990s, FEMA’s administrative costs averaged about 9 percent of disaster spending.
From 1989 to 2011, the average nearly doubled to around 18 percent.
Many small- and medium-scale disasters exceeded FEMA’s own internal administrative-cost targets—which ranged from 8 percent to 20 percent depending on disaster size.
These numbers mean that for every $1 billion in disaster assistance, taxpayers may be funding $120 million to $180 million in federal overhead.
This inefficiency is not due solely to waste; it is structural. The current FEMA reimbursement system:
requires extensive documentation for thousands of separate projects;
demands eligibility reviews, re-reviews, appeals, closeouts, and audits;
relies on multi-year case management;
burdens counties that must front millions of dollars;
often requires several rounds of resubmission for small technical errors.
The system is built for granular reimbursement, not for speed, clarity, or administrative efficiency.
Any serious reform must begin with this reality: FEMA’s overhead is too high for routine work but entirely justified for rare catastrophic events.
V. A New Structure: State-First Responsibility with a Federal Safety Net Above a Threshold
The empirical question—whether states can absorb FEMA’s typical yearly costs—has been answered by the data: yes, they can. What states cannot absorb are the extreme, once-in-a-generation events that create fiscal shocks exceeding 10–20 percent of a budget year.
A modernized system should reflect this difference.
A. States handle their own disaster costs up to a fixed percentage of their budget
A clear and uniform rule could be adopted nationwide:
A state must cover disaster-related costs up to 3 percent of its prior-year general-fund expenditures before federal aid begins.
This threshold is intentionally set:
above the national FEMA-reliance average (1.19%);
above most moderate-exposure states’ reliance;
below the high-exposure states’ routine-year experience (3.91–5.58%);
and well within median rainy-day capacity.
This requirement is neither punitive nor unrealistic. It simply aligns responsibility with the fiscal strength states have already built.
B. States rely on rainy-day reserves and disaster accounts first
States already use a mix of rainy-day funds, disaster funds, supplemental appropriations, and budget flexibility to manage emergencies. In a reformed model, these existing tools would be applied in a structured, predictable sequence—not in political improvisation after the fact.
C. The federal government acts only as a high-threshold backstop
Once a state’s disaster costs exceed the 3 percent trigger, the federal government intervenes. For truly catastrophic years—costs exceeding 10 or 15 percent of state general-fund spending—the federal share could increase to 90 or even 95 percent.
This preserves national solidarity for the events no state can manage alone, while eliminating unnecessary federal entanglement in predictable, lower-level disasters.
D. Federal overhead is reduced dramatically
Under the backstop model, the federal government would only process a small number of large, formula-based payments rather than tens of thousands of reimbursement claims. This change alone could reduce federal overhead from the current 13–18 percent range to 3–5 percent, freeing substantial tax dollars for actual recovery work.
VI. Why a State-First, Federal-Backstop Model Is the Right Path Forward
A system in which states handle ordinary disasters and the federal government protects against the extraordinary aligns perfectly with the fiscal and operational realities of the 2020s.
For states, this model restores autonomy and incentivizes better land-use planning, improved mitigation, and more responsible financial preparation. It also removes the long bureaucratic delays associated with FEMA reimbursements, which often burden local governments more than the disasters themselves.
For the federal government, the model offers clarity and efficiency. Instead of struggling to administer thousands of granular projects—including small-dollar repairs that should never have been federalized—the national government can focus its resources on high-impact events, surge capacity, interstate coordination, and macro-level resilience.
For taxpayers, the new model promises a better mix of value and protection. Money that once funded administrative overhead can instead flow to recovery. At the same time, Americans maintain confidence that when the unimaginable occurs—a Katrina, a California megaquake, a Category 5 storm impacting two states simultaneously—the nation remains ready.
Conclusion
The debate around eliminating FEMA has often been framed as a choice between total federal withdrawal and the continuation of an increasingly bureaucratic status quo. The data, however, points to a more balanced and responsible path. Most states rely on FEMA for only 1 to 2 percent of their total spending in typical disaster years. Even the states with higher exposure—Louisiana at 5.58 percent, Florida at 4.39 percent, and Montana at 3.91 percent—retain rainy-day reserves far larger than these amounts. With median rainy-day balances now reaching 13 to 14 percent of general-fund spending, the financial capacity to absorb routine disaster costs already exists at the state level.
At the same time, the extreme years—the years where total federal disaster aid climbs into double digits as a share of a state’s budget—prove unequivocally that a national safety net remains essential. No state can self-fund a shock approaching one-fifth of its general fund, as Louisiana once experienced. In those moments, the federal government must still be the guardian of last resort.
The most effective reform lies in between: eliminate FEMA’s role as the payer of first resort and reshape the federal role into a streamlined backstop triggered only when a state’s disaster costs exceed a fixed percentage of its budget—3 percent being the most logical threshold. This shift would dramatically reduce federal overhead, accelerate recovery timelines, clarify responsibilities, reward mitigation, and ensure that the nation’s full strength remains available when true catastrophe strikes.
In short, the future of American disaster management should not be FEMA everywhere or FEMA nowhere. It should be FEMA where it matters most, and a state-first model where it does not. This approach honors both fiscal responsibility and national solidarity, and it reflects the actual capabilities of states today—capabilities strong enough to shoulder their own burdens, and a nation still strong enough to stand with them when those burdens become too great.
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