The Fort Bend ISD School Board recently announced plans spend an appalling $18 million to give 2nd through 8th graders iPads in lieu of traditional textbooks. Do they expect taxpayers to ignore their role as lead plaintiff in one of the school finance lawsuits?
Bureaucrats at Denton ISD would have you believe that the district never had any budget issues, had superior instructional spending rates, and never even considered joining one of the state finance lawsuits, given the district just approved a new Mariachi program for middle and high-school students. But don’t strike up the band just yet.
Even at a time when a record number of school districts are challenging Texas’ school finance system, school districts are still finding ways to waste taxpayer money. New Braunfels ISD’s push to spend tax dollars on new iPads for students is just the latest example.
It was evident from the mass transit projects and plastic bag ban that the Austin City Council wants to make Austin look (and spend) like a West Coast utopia. Now they want to go one step further, imitating the City of Portland by paying city employees to take “alternate forms” of transportation to work.
Accuracy has never been a virtue of the Austin City Council. A new report finds that the City of Austin severely overestimated the amount of littered bags and possible savings used to justify their new ban on plastic and paper shopping bags.
San Antonio can’t seem to help itself. Every time the City of Austin comes up with a way to waste tax dollars, they have to have one too. This time, San Antonio wants to add more electric-car charging stations around the city… just like Austin did months ago.
There is no doubt Allen has experienced rampant population growth over the past few decades, so the school district is building a new bus barn. Rather than renovate the existing facility, bureaucrats naturally want to instead build a brand new $40 million structure.
Cap Metro is ready to spend federal stimulus money to expand the nanny-state governance encompassing the City of Austin. They now want to institute a smoking ban at all bus stops. The cost? $254,000. But that’s not the best part.