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Activists are demanding that Travis County District Attorney José Garza prosecute three Austin police officers who fatally shot a 17-year-old last week. We’ll have more on that.
Midland ISD in West Texas announced it would be suing the state over the recapture school finance system also known as Robin Hood. Will Austin ISD follow?
Plus, data centers are popping up everywhere — including right here in Texas. But what is a data center? We’ve got the start to a special series on data centers on today’s show.
It’s been 60 years since the tower shooting at the University of Texas at Austin. The Texas Standard takes a look at how events unfolded in their documentary “Out of The Blue.”
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The full transcript of this episode of Austin Signal is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
Miles Bloxson [00:00:08] Activists are demanding that Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza prosecute three Austin police officers who fatally shot a 17-year-old last week. We’ll have more on that. Midland ISD in West Texas announced it would be suing the state over the recapture school finance system, also known as Robin Hood. Will Austin ISD follow? Plus data centers are popping up everywhere, including right here in Texas. But what actually is a data center? We’ve got the start to a special series on data centers coming up on today’s show.
KUT Announcer: Laurie Gallardo [00:00:41] The Austin Signal is a production of KUT News, hosted by Miles Bloxson.
Miles Bloxson [00:00:47] And it’s been 60 years since the tower shooting at UT at Austin, and Texas Standard takes a look at how events unfolded in their documentary, Out of the Blue. That’s all coming up on Austin Signal. It’s Wednesday, July 29, 2026, and I’m your host Myles Bloxson, and this is Austin Signal. Thanks for joining us today. Activists are demanding that Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza prosecute three Austin police officers who fatally shot a 17-year-old last week. As KUT’s Andrew Weber reports, a protest yesterday started with chants and speeches and escalated into clashes with law enforcement in Garza’s office.
Protestors [00:01:36] No justice. No peace. No justice! No peace!
Andrew Weber [00:01:40] More than two dozen protesters were out at Woolridge Park Tuesday afternoon seeking shade under an unforgiving sun. They were demanding accountability for the fatal shooting of Anthony Williams II, a 17-year-old who police said last week called 911 on himself. Police said Williams told 911 operators there was someone with a gun.
911 call [00:02:03] Is he, like, brandishing it or does he just happen to have it? Brandishing it, I’d say, uh… I’d said brandishing. Towards someone or is he just by himself?
Andrew Weber [00:02:17] Three officers arrived, grainy body cam footage shows what appears to be Williams reaching for his waistband. Police fired more than two dozen shots at Williams. They continued to shoot him after he hit the mulch on the playground of his apartment complex. He was unarmed, carrying a water bottle.
Protestors [00:02:34] No peace! No justice! No peace!! No justice!!
Andrew Weber [00:02:38] At the protest Tuesday, Williams’ friend, 16-year-old Amir Alagali, said police didn’t have to shoot him so many times.
Amir Alagali [00:02:45] There’s so many families that are suffering now, all because of these cops and them wanting to shoot their guns at a little kid at a park for having a water bottle. It is what it is, but long live, long live Antenna, and that’s all I got to say. No justice!
Andrew Weber [00:03:05] That was Anthony’s father, the elder Anthony Williams, leading those chants. After speeches, he led the crowd to Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza’s office. Protesters piled into the lobby, marching past the metal detectors. The protest escalated quickly. One unidentified man confronted the security guard at the front desk. The guard stared down the crowd and retreated to a nearby room, seemingly locking himself inside, while the demonstrator pounded on the door. The chanting rose to a fever pitch. The elder Williams pushed demonstrators outside, as two more deputies showed up, trying to kick people out and bar the door, scuffling with protesters, and holding the line. After a tense standoff, Anthony Williams, a grieving father, pleaded with demonstrators to fall back. And after burning an American flag, the crowd marched back to Wooldridge down Guadalupe. That’s where I caught up with Clarenne Williams. He’s not related to the family, but he does share their experience. His younger brother was shot multiple times by APD in 2017.
Clarenne Williams [00:04:18] And right now, the father isn’t ready to speak and see a proper legal counsel.
Andrew Weber [00:04:22] Can we talk about what just happened though? He was holding everybody back.
Clarenne Williams [00:04:25] Yeah, yeah, he don’t want everybody to get hurt. He’s still in peace. He’s grieving. He’s in pain. He’s hurt. He’s crying. He don’t know who to trust. But he still is finding a way to do it the right way.
Protestors [00:04:43] NO JUSTICE!
Andrew Weber [00:04:47] Garza’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the demonstration ahead of Florin Williams says his office should prosecute the three officers, all of whom have never been accused of excessive force, and he pushes back on the narrative that the younger Anthony L. Williams’ death could have been a suicide by police. He hopes Garza and APD fully investigate the shooting. I’m Andrew Weber in Austin.
Miles Bloxson [00:05:32] Last week, Midland ISD in West Texas announced it would be suing the state over the recapture school finance system, also known as Robinhood. The lawsuit could have implications for Austin ISD, which pays significantly more in recapture than any other district in the state. Austin Signal host Jerry Kehano spoke with Jayden Edison, public education reporter for the Texas Tribune, who is following the story.
Jerry Quijano [00:05:58] So the Texas School Finance System is a complex topic, but can you quickly explain how the Perhaps your program works, and why does it exist in the first place?
Jayden Edison [00:06:07] I think the biggest thing for people to recognize or maybe understand is that a major source of revenue for public schools is property taxes, right? Property tax revenue. If you don’t have a kid in school, you probably recognize that. But essentially what the state has set up is a system that really dates back decades at this point. And what it says is that if the state determines that a certain district generates excess funds in property tax revenue, in other words, property wealthy districts, state determines they make more than maybe what they need to provide a fair and equitable education to their students, then those districts send the excess funds back to the state and the state then redirects those funds to districts with low property values, districts who presumably could benefit from the additional boost in funding.
Jerry Quijano [00:06:56] Uh… So you said the the program has been around for decades now has it ever been uh… Challenge it with it with the lawsuit prior to this web most recent one they’re gonna talk about in a second
Jayden Edison [00:07:04] It’s been challenged many a times, right? I mean, dating back to the 90s after it was passed, the 2000s as well, and as recent as about a decade ago. And so it has historically been a controversial method of school finance. And you know, you think about it, it’s hard to make a state that has more than 1200 school districts and over 9,000 campuses with varying degrees of need, rural, suburban, major urban districts. And so, as you can imagine, there’s no one size fits all approach. And so certainly, this particular system of finance has run into various challenges, but also you have districts out there and advocates out there who feel that it is needed in this state, in a state where there’s so much difference, there needs to be something to kind of ensure that there’s a level playing field so that students can receive a fair and equitable education across the board, regardless of…
Jerry Quijano [00:08:00] Of where they are. Well, now Midland ISD is preparing to sue Texas over this Robin Hood program. What are they arguing and why is it Midland, I’m surprised you know, I guess Midland doesn’t immediately jump to mind when I think of what I presume to be property-rich districts. Correct. Yeah, well.
Jayden Edison [00:08:18] So if you think about Midland, oil rich, rich in gas, and so when it comes to the local property values, they are deemed by the state to be a property wealthy district. And you talk about kind of what makes this particular, you know, basically why Midland is the question. And I think there’s a couple of things. I think what Midland is particularly arguing is that there is a post-2019 landscape that previous legal challenges have not accounted for. And when you think about 2019, that was a major year in Texas as it relates to school finance with a major overhaul to the way Texas funds public schools through a bill known as House Bill 3 at the time. And basically what Midland is arguing in this legal filing is that there were changes made that took away local control and that gave the power to set property taxes in a way that districts would deem suitable. That power has effectively been handed to the State Education Commissioner, who currently is Commissioner Mike Marath of the Texas Education Agency. And so what they’re arguing is that the district is not able to tax the residents as they determine suitable. In addition to that, the money that they’re making, they’re saying that the state has too much control over how that’s spent. And what they are also saying is effectively that they feel that the State is unfairly taking credit for funding. That the district itself is generating locally, right? And so it’s a pretty complex argument there, but basically what they’re saying is that previous legal challenges did not account for this new landscape. And as we continue to evolve as the state as it relates to school funding and school finance, the state is imposing more and more restrictions on how we spend our funds. And effectively, they feel that they don’t have the tools needed to be able to provide their students the education they need. Even though they’re considered property wealthy, they’re seeing this is not necessarily the same thing years. Educational wealth we have students who have significant need and so we deserve we need the flexibility to be able to meet those needs That that’s effectively what they’re arguing here
Jerry Quijano [00:10:15] Okay, well we’re talking about Midland, but this case is of particular interest here in Austin as Austin ISD has led the state in recapture payments for years. In fact, your story has this bar graph that’s kind of jarring when compared with the other nine closest payments compared to Austin IST. If Midland were to win, what would that mean for Austin ISP? Could Austin ISC keep more of its local property tax revenue? That’s a more
Jayden Edison [00:10:40] complex question because effectively when you think about all the recapture challenges that have happened over the years, you think dating back to the 90s, what recapture was and what it accomplished, a world without recapture would mean a significant overhaul to the way Texas funds public schools. And so basically what that would require is for the state legislature to go back to their drawing board and figure out a system that’s going to work more for all districts, right? And so as you can imagine, that is a significant challenge for them. And that speaks to why it’s been so difficult to find a method of finance that works for everyone in a way that everyone feels is fair. And so to your point, I mean, Austin by far is the leader in recapture payments. You know, we looked at the data. I think it was almost 20 consecutive years of Austin being the leader and recapture payment at the same time that the district is. Opting to close schools. The district now is at threat of a state takeover, right? Of having its school board replaced by a state appointed board of managers and potentially a new superintendent. And so you think about some of the frustration that exists for recapture. A lot of that is we’re facing these challenges, but we’re sending funding away that could potentially help us kind of attack some of these local challenges that we are facing.
Jerry Quijano [00:12:02] All right, that is a story that Jayden Edison will continue to keep an eye on. He is the public education reporter for the Texas Tribune. We’re gonna have a link to his story in today’s podcast. Show notes, Jayden, thank you. Thanks for having me, appreciate it.
Miles Bloxson [00:12:19] We’ll have more coming up after the break. I know it’s hot out there, so try to stay cool. This is Austin Signal, we’ll be right back. Welcome back, this is Austin Signal. Data centers are popping up everywhere in Texas. Hundreds are already operating in the state, and hundreds more are in some stage of planning or construction. In fact, some estimates show that Texas may be on track. To outpace Virginia as the data center capital of the U.S. That’s if most of the data centers being planned actually get built. But what actually is a data center? KUT is starting a series today called The Data Center Next Door. For the first story in our series, KUT’s Lee Walden, Kaylee Hunt, and Katie McAfee went looking for answers.
Leigh Walden [00:13:24] The machine humming in the computer visualization lab at UT Austin is soft, almost a friendly purring.
Kailey Hunt [00:13:31] Today the 20 or so TV sized monitors are lit with graphs and human body scans glowing with saturated colors.
Katy McAfee [00:13:38] We’re meeting a man who has spent his career working to, well, cure cancer.
Tom Yankulov [00:13:43] Hi, my name’s Tom. Thank you for taking time to meet with me. It’s a delight to be here. First time caller, long time listener.
Leigh Walden [00:13:51] Tom Yankulov is not what you might picture when you imagine a cancer researcher. There’s no white coat and latex gloves. He’s just wearing a t-shirt with a flannel over it. Yankalov isn’t a medical doctor. He doesn’t work directly with cancer patients. He kind of just does a lot of math.
Tom Yankulov [00:14:06] This is the rate of change of the number of tumor cells at position x and time t, and that is equal to how the cells are moving around. That’s given by a diffusion term.
Katy McAfee [00:14:14] Yankalov’s lab uses physics models that are built on a ton of data data from patients
Leigh Walden [00:14:19] data from existing cancer treatments, data from how tumors move around and grow and respond to drugs. Lots and lots of data. A computer crunches all of that data and comes up with predictions for how a tumor in a cancer patient will grow. And more importantly, how a tumor will respond to different types of treatment. But it didn’t happen overnight.
Tom Yankulov [00:14:38] It took us ten years basically to get from the idea on a whiteboard to a system of equations that we could populate with data we could measure and then show that it had very good predictive accuracy.
Katy McAfee [00:14:50] A decade ago, Yankalov’s team didn’t have the equations. They didn’t even have the technology.
Tom Yankulov [00:14:55] You have to have computers that are fast enough that can actually do these computations to solve these partial differential equations, these systems of partial differential equations on a grid size that’s the size of, say, the human brain, for example.
Leigh Walden [00:15:08] Their research needs powerful computers to make these predictions. Stacks and stacks and stacks of re-
Kailey Hunt [00:15:14] really powerful computers.
Katy McAfee [00:15:15] And there’s one place on campus that has those kinds of machines. It’s called the Texas Advanced Computing.
Leigh Walden [00:15:20] Center, or TAC, and it’s UT Austin’s data center.
Niall Gaffney [00:15:24] You can see here what our data center looks like. It’s just racks of computers with a lot of cooling.
Kailey Hunt [00:15:31] That’s Niall Gaffney. He took us on a tour of TAC with his colleague Tommy Menyard last March. We wanted to see what exactly goes on inside a data center.
Leigh Walden [00:15:39] Tearing through a glass pane, it looks just as Gaffney described it, a big room filled with rows and rows of computers. It’s like a forest of black pillars. It looks like
Katy McAfee [00:15:49] something out of a sci-fi movie. Gaffney had a warning for us before we actually stepped inside, and it’s a good warning for our listeners, too.
Niall Gaffney [00:15:57] Be careful with the headphones, because when it gets loud, people aren’t supposed to wear hearing aids in there, for example.
Leigh Walden [00:16:04] We opened the door to go inside. He wasn’t kidding.
Katy McAfee [00:16:10] It’s extremely, almost painfully loud inside. The loudest parts of the room reach up to 100 decibels. That’s like having your ear next to a running chainsaw.
Leigh Walden [00:16:19] It’s coming from hundreds of cooling fans that make sure the stacks of computers don’t overheat. Cooling is a big problem for us.
Kailey Hunt [00:16:26] For data centers. We’ll get more into that in the second story in our series.
Katy McAfee [00:16:30] At first, the air inside the room was uncomfortably cold. A few steps later,
Leigh Walden [00:16:35] then cold, then hot again. Gaffney’s colleague, Tommy Minyard, says it’s like this on purpose. This setup helps them save energy.
Tommy Minyard [00:16:42] Basically what you do is you put the racks back to back so all the hot air is in one location and then the cooling units can pull all the hot air out and blow cold air to the front. So this actually keeps the hot and the cold air separate so it improves the overall efficiency of the cooling.
Kailey Hunt [00:16:57] We keep walking through the room, fluorescent lights.
Katy McAfee [00:17:00] Illuminate the rows of hot and cold. Wires weave in and out of server racks that blink with blue and red and white and green bulbs like Christmas lights. As we leave the room, the humming feels like it’s following us.
Kailey Hunt [00:17:15] Most of the servers at TAC are busy crunching data that scientists use to study things like climate change, medicine, and even our-
Katy McAfee [00:17:22] TAC processed some of the images of the earliest galaxies from the James Webb Telescope.
Leigh Walden [00:17:27] Other data centers are used for storage, everything from bank transactions to medical records to memes shared on social media.
Katy McAfee [00:17:34] But more and more are being built for AI. And those data centers need more of everything, more space, more power, and more water. But why?
Leigh Walden [00:17:43] The data centers of the past have mostly been doing things like Google searches. When you search something on Google, a little robot goes into an index of everything it’s seen on the internet
Kailey Hunt [00:17:52] like a card catalog and a library.
Leigh Walden [00:17:54] It finds the pa-
Katy McAfee [00:17:55] on the internet that answers your question. But when you ask an AI chatbot a question, the robot pulls from its own memory all the information it’s been trained on and gives you what it thinks is the most likely answer.
Leigh Walden [00:18:10] That’s pretty easy. But there’s harder questions out there. Like if you ask an AI how to deal with my difficult in-laws, it’s going to have to work way harder to find an answer. And this takes more…
Katy McAfee [00:18:20] Computers, which takes more data centers, which takes more space. And guess who has that space?
Leigh Walden [00:18:28] Texas is becoming ground zero for the development of data centers known as the backbone of digital infrastructure. So why is Texas a magnet for new data centers?
Mike Kamelander [00:18:37] Our track record says this is a good place to do any type of development and data centers are no different.
Leigh Walden [00:18:43] This is Mike Kamelander. He’s the president and CEO of the Hayes-Caldwell Economic Development Partnership.
Kailey Hunt [00:18:49] Comerlander’s work brings him close to the data center boom, overseeing developments throughout the southwestern part of the Hill Country.
Mike Kamelander [00:18:56] Texas has a number of things going for it. First of all, Texas is big. It has a lot of land and it has it at scale, right?
Leigh Walden [00:19:05] Data center campuses can consist of several warehouse-size buildings. The more buildings you can build next to each other, the more computers you can have. Then you need electricity to run…
Katy McAfee [00:19:13] Those computers.
Mike Kamelander [00:19:14] The ERCOT grid generally allows faster interconnection.
Kailey Hunt [00:19:19] Most of the United States runs on big multi-state power grids.
Katy McAfee [00:19:23] But not here. Texas has its own grid, which allows big energy users to get plugged in and connected faster. Plus, Texas is kind of known for being business friendly.
Mike Kamelander [00:19:32] Regulatory climate that is known and predictable.
Katy McAfee [00:19:37] All of these factors make it attractive to developers looking to build some of the biggest data centers in the country. Even UT’s data center is expanding. They’re building a new one in Round Rock. We took a trip to see how the project is going. It’s still in the early stages, but its concrete walls already tower over the condos and swimming pool that sit across the street. I don’t know how many…
Christina Schwetter [00:20:00] Square footage it is but it’s insane. Christina Schwetter can see it from her kitchen. It just kept getting higher and higher and higher and wider and it just never seemed to stop as you can see. It goes on almost forever like a concrete model.
Leigh Walden [00:20:17] When she moved in a couple of years ago, there was already one, smaller data center across the street. She was fine with the old one, but the new one? Not so much.
Christina Schwetter [00:20:26] There are stretches of land where Tesla is and Amazon is, and no residentials are really there at all. Why couldn’t the monolith have been…
Kailey Hunt [00:20:37] Constructed there. Schwatter says she worries that once it’s finished, the new data center will affect her utility bills, and her ability to sell her home in the future.
Christina Schwetter [00:20:47] Will it be pulling from our water resources? Will it pulling from electricity as well? Will our electricity bills go up?
Katy McAfee [00:20:54] Next time, we’ll dig into those questions. How much power does it take to run a warehouse of computers? How much water does it takes to keep them all cool? And what does it mean for the rest of us? I’m Kaylee Hunt. I’m Lee Walden. And I’m Katie McAfee.
Miles Bloxson [00:21:08] Round Rock. We’ll have the next part in our Data Center Next Door series next Wednesday on Morning Edition right here on KUT News 90.5. You can also find out more at KUT.org. 60 years ago this week, the University of Texas at Austin was changed forever when a gunman opened fire from the observation deck of the UT Tower. 25-Year-old Marine veteran Charles Whitman killed 17 people in all and injured dozens more. The Texas Standard takes a look at how events unfolded that day in their documentary, Out of the Blue, airing Friday. Joining me now is Laura Rice, managing producer for the Texas Standard. Welcome, Laura. Thank you so much. Of course. Can you tell us a bit about this special episode and what listeners can expect? This was
Laura Rice [00:22:03] a really special undertaking that we did with the Texas Standard. It was a month’s long effort. We actually collected more than 90 interviews, most of whom were direct eyewitnesses of events that day. Some directly interacted with the gunmen, others had never before spoken publicly about those events. And we wove this all together, really David Brown did, in this beautiful moving narrative that sets the scene of August 1966. Takes us through what happened, this really horrible event, and follows a little of what happened.
Miles Bloxson [00:22:35] Afterwards. Why did Texas Standard feel it was important to tell this story? I mean I know how important it is because I went to the University of Texas at Austin. So why why was it so important for y’all to tell the story?
Laura Rice [00:22:45] This was a huge moment in history, not just for UT or for Austin, but really for all of Texas and the U.S. It’s widely cited as the first mass school shooting of its kind in American history, and as they’ve become more commonplace, I think listening to this can kind of help us understand where we’ve been. Also, frankly, it’s been 60 years now, and these survivors are getting older. We need to make sure that their stories are
Miles Bloxson [00:23:08] forgotten. In working on this episode what were some stories that really stood out to you personally?
Laura Rice [00:23:13] I was really struck at the lack of context that people had for this. I mean, in having conversations with, like I said, up to 90 different people who had different experiences with this, the number of times I heard from them that they did not realize that the sounds that they were hearing were gunshots because the idea that someone had opened fire on campus was just inconceivable. They thought, you know, construction was going on. It was August. It was sort of a summer session. They thought maybe pallets of Coke bottles. These were glass Coke bottle days were being stacked That was what they thought maybe this sound was or a car backfiring. No one I talked to thought gunfire except for this Assistant professor at the time Michael Hall who had served in World War two He was actually the first person who said I made this instant connection and he made the first Emergency call that day about the shooting that said hey, we need help someone is firing on the UT Austin campus
Miles Bloxson [00:24:10] That seems common with mass shootings like a lot of times when it first happens people often think it’s something else. Yeah, you know, yeah
Laura Rice [00:24:16] And I do think that that’s true, but I also think, again, what I heard so many times from different people was that there was no Columbine. There was no, you know, Parkland. There wasn’t a this can happen on campus. There was this idea that they were really safe and that this wasn’t possibility.
Miles Bloxson [00:24:35] Yeah, you’re right, because this happened 60 years ago. So we, unfortunately, we’ve seen more and more of these situations happen on college campuses and in other places, and 60 years ago, like you said, it was something that wouldn’t happen. Typically, you would be safe if you were at school.
Laura Rice [00:24:50] That was the thought, and of course that wasn’t fully true, and they learned that. What do you hope listeners take away from this project? I have to say that as I was listening back this time, and particularly to our supplementary content, we did some longer interviews that we posted on YouTube, I was struck by how many survivors took this hard, horrible moment and said that they really wanted to make it. Their lives count. One became a teacher, another became a lawyer for the ACLU, and they said, you know, because I survived, I wasn’t shot, I want to make sure that I make a difference. And so I think that it honors their efforts and the memories of those 17 people who died that day, and the memory of those people who died to remember what happened.
Miles Bloxson [00:25:41] Happened that day. Well, thanks for doing all that you do. We’ve been speaking with Laura Rice, she’s managing producer for Texas Standard. Their special Out of the Blue airs Friday. Laura, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Well that’s it for us today on Austin Signal. Rayna Sevilla is our technical director, Alexandra Hart is our producer, Christian Cabrera is our managing producer, and I am your host Miles Bloxson filling in for Hi buddy, Jerry Kihano. We’ll talk with you tomorrow and thanks for joining us today.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
