Biden s lifeline for red-state cities
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El Paso is being squeezed.
In 2019, the Texas state legislature passed SB2 which limits property tax increases to 3.5 percent per year. Meanwhile, most of the city s budget is based on largely unfunded state mandates. And where the state in 2008 funded 45 percent of local education costs, that s been reduced to just 39 percent today.
So even before the COVID-19 crisis hit, The wiggle room we have to spend on projects we think are important becomes smaller and smaller, observes El Paso County Commissioner, David Stout.
El Paso, a city similar in size to Boston and Washington, D.C., is politically a blue triangle at the far end of a sea of red in West Texas â and Stout thinks politics plays a big role in the increasing limits on local spending: The state legislature wants to stop local progressive policies from being put in place.
Mass vaccines helped slow San Antonio s 1970 deadly diptheria epidemic
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A Navy corpsman gets ready to innoculate a resident with diptheria vaccine on Sept. 22, 1970, at San Antonio Municipal Auditorium. The potentially fatal respiratory illness affected mostly children, but adults and children alike were vaccinated to help stop the spread of the disease.File /San Antonio Express-News
Wasn t there a time in the late 1960s where we had a diphtheria epidemic? I remember as a teen standing in line at what was then Municipal Auditorium to be inoculated. Liz Marshall
To many readers, diphtheria might sound like an antique disease, associated with the story of Balto, the husky hero of the eponymous 1995 animated movie about the leader of a sled-dog team that brought antitoxin serum from Anchorage to suffering children during a 1925 epidemic in Nome.