Texans support $2 billion in water infrastructure financing by a better than 2-to-1 margin, but nearly a quarter haven't decided how they will vote on the issue this November, according to a new University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll. The respondents favored the measure, known as Proposition 6, 52 percent to 19 percent. A quarter said they had not decided how they would vote. The poll found Texans put a high priority on public education, water, and roads and highways. Asked to rank those things, 73 percent said they consider addressing public education needs to be very important, 65 percent said the same about water, and 55 percent gave that highest importance to roads and highways. And the respondents agree with the Legislature about who ought to be deciding the water issue: 75 percent said “it’s best to let the voters decide” big issues, while 16 percent said “we vote legislators into office to make big decisions.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Texas' challenge of federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources like power plants and factories. But it declined to hear the state's appeals of two other decisions, effectively upholding rules that limit such emissions from vehicles and maintaining the Environmental Protection Agency's assertion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. At issue is whether the EPA can use the Clean Air Act, which gives it the authority to regulate emissions of toxic air pollutants and to limit emissions of greenhouse gases as well. 

Texas has the greatest number of poor, uninsured adults who will fall in a "coverage gap" created by states that chose not to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. One million of the 5.2 million Americans who won't have health insurance options available under the new law reside in Texas, according to the report. The state has the highest rate of uninsured in the nation. More than 6 million people — nearly a quarter of the population — lack health insurance, according to census data. And Texas only allows poor parents whose incomes are at 19 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $3,737 a year for a family of three, to enroll in Medicaid.

Fifty-nine percent of front-line fast-food workers in Texas rely on public assistance programs such as food stamps and Medicaid to support their families, according to a report released this week. Nationally, more than half – 52 percent – of the families of front-line fast-food workers use at least one public assistance program, compared with a quarter of the total workforce, according to the report. The research was sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Urban & Regional Planning. Texas had the seventh-largest percentage of front-line fast-food workers on public assistance among the 24 states included in the report. Louisiana had the highest, 73 percent. The researchers omitted states for which there were too few fast-food workers in the census data sample.

With $27 million in unpaid tolls, the Texas Department of Transportation has taken advantage of new state legislation that allows it to publicly release the names of toll violators, posting the names of the top 25 toll scofflaws on its website. Among the top 25 toll offenders, amounts owed range from $236,026.32 to $82,297.26, and the number of unpaid tolls varied from 14,358 to 3,604. A 50-cent toll can jump to $448.50 if it is unpaid for 202 days, over which time the toll violator would receive at least two bills and a violation notice. If the toll remains unpaid, the case would be submitted to collections and the court system during that period.