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High schoolers in the Austin Independent School District are navigating a new transportation system this year. And some parents say their kids are having to walk long and sometimes dangerous routes.
Travis County’s $50 million investment in childcare is expanding access for some — but providers are still struggling.
Polling suggests a majority of Texans are opposed to a data center being built in their community. How can data centers can be built more sustainably and become better neighbors?
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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.
Jennifer Stayton High schoolers in the Austin Independent School District are navigating a new transportation system this year and some parents say their kids are having to walk long and sometimes dangerous routes and Travis County’s 50 million dollar investment in child care is expanding access for some but low teacher pay and ongoing financial challenges are still a problem. More about these stories coming up on today’s show.
Laurie Gallardo The Austin Signal is a production of KUT News, hosted by Jennifer Stayton.
Jennifer Stayton Plus, polling suggests a majority of Texans are opposed to a data center being built in their community. Is there anything data center developers can do to fix their PR problem? How data centers can be built more sustainably and become better neighbors? Stay tuned for that and more up next on Austin Signal. Hello, this is Austin Signal. I’m your host, Jennifer Staten. Thank you for joining us on this second day of September. The new school year is now a few weeks old and Austin Independent School District high schoolers are navigating a new transportation system as part of the district’s efforts to cut expenses. Now, some parents are saying that kids are having to walk long and sometimes dangerous routes. KUT’s education reporter, Greta Diaz-Gonzalez-Vazquez, takes us along on one.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez In a rainy afternoon, Margaret, a freshman at Anderson High School, got off the bus at her newly assigned bus hub a mile away from her home. She had three options. She could walk against traffic on Loop 360 with no sidewalk, walk on a trail for over an hour, or cut that time in half by going down a steep concrete embankment, across Bull Creek, and up another embankments. Last time?
Margaret I like almost passed out because it was too hot and like I didn’t know it was gonna be so hot so I was wearing long sleeves because I like room.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez Long sleeves. This time Margaret was ready for the heat. No long sleeves she was ready to walk in 100 degree weather but this time I didn’t know it was going to rain. At least the rain brought temperatures down to the low 90s. This was the second time Margaret it was walking home from the hub. The first time she took the shortcut along the trail.
Margaret Yeah, that’s the trail I went last time because I saw a bunch of cars and I was like I don’t want to go through the highway.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez Margaret’s bus used to drop her off right at the entrance of her apartment complex on Loop 360, but this year Austin ISD changed its transportation system for high school students as part of the effort to balance the budget. Under the new system, neighborhood stops were replaced with bus hubs at elementary schools, cap metro stops, and community centers. The change left Margaret’s mom, Daphne Harrington, trying to figure out how to get her kids home in the afternoon.
Daphne Harrington I shouldn’t have to feel like it’s an inconvenience for the kids to use the bus system. And they tried, the transportation department tried to tell me to use catbatch.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez Metro doesn’t go on 360. For the first two weeks of school, Harrington left work early, relied on friends to pick her kids up, and asked her kids to walk home, making her an easy.
Daphne Harrington I mean, I know it is what it is, and I realize there’s budget cuts, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the safety of our children.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez The transportation changes are saving the district money, $2.3 million. Chris Hafizizadeh is Austin ISD’s Executive Director of Transportation and Vehicle Services. He says he understands this is a tough change.
Chris Hafizizadeh As a family, Austin ISD never had this. So it can be challenging. It’s a new thing like any other thing that we may have. It’s also new thing for my team, the terminals, drivers, schedulers, and so on and so.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez Hafezizadeh says his team has received more than 3,500 comments from families and has been making adjustments.
Chris Hafizizadeh So we added more hubs, especially for the areas that are in the middle of nowhere, and we keep accommodating.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez Hafizizadeh says since school started, the district has gone from 98 hubs with an average distance of 2.5 miles from students’ homes to 108 hubs with average distance down to mile and a half. But Harrington says she emailed and called the district multiple times with little success. When I’ve
Daphne Harrington did reach somebody at transportation. I was told it’s my responsibility to get my kids to and from school.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez For Harrington, that’s not easy. She’s a single mother who works late afternoons. Leaving work early means a smaller paycheck.
Daphne Harrington I’m the sole caregiver of my children. I don’t get any assistance from anywhere. So they depend on, if I don’t work, I don’t have enough to cover my rent or my electricity or the bills, or we have to ration and spread out dinners.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez The bus her kids take from Anderson drives past their apartment complex on the way to the hub. So for Harrington, it seemed like a simple solution.
Daphne Harrington Take two seconds for or two minutes because it’s not even off the route if they would stop at the apartment complex and open the door, let the kids get out.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez Hafizzadeh says the district has added hubs in areas where it’s dangerous for students to walk and where there’s no public transit. But deciding where to add a new hub is a balancing act. If they add one stop, then other families will also ask for a closer stop.
Chris Hafizizadeh Then I’m gonna be adding another 20, 30 on the same route. Then extends the time of the route, causes delays to schools. Then if that happens, guess what I gotta do? I gotta create another brand new route, then yeah. Then now you’re talking 65,000 a year.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez That’s what one route costs, $65,000 a year, and most of it is paid by the district. The state of Texas doesn’t require school districts to provide transportation for most students. Austin ISD transports 18,000 students a day. Jafesizadeh says the district spends $7.22 per mile of bus travel. The state provides $1 per mile. He says his team has been working 12 to 15 hour days to make this new system work.
Chris Hafizizadeh I mean, can I say all families are happy? If I say that, that’s not a correct way of saying it. I’m sure everybody still likes them to go back to the previous neighborhood stops. But if we go that direction, we also got to think about where else we’re going to offset our deficit.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez With no other option, students like Margaret are having to walk. Every time the bus passes her apartment complex, she thinks…
Margaret Please just drop me off here. I wanna get home. I don’t wanna walk like 30 minutes or something.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez On this Friday afternoon, Margaret waited for a semi-truck to pass before walking along Loop 360. She walked against oncoming traffic, on the side of the road, no sidewalk.
Margaret What makes you nervous about this route? Cars. I don’t want to get run over. Just trying to walk home.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez It turns out she won’t have to walk much longer. After we told Hafizzadeh about Margaret’s situation, he wanted to get in touch with her family.
Daphne Harrington They came out and saw it for themselves and they listened and they’re making changes. So I’m very relieved.
Greta Diaz Gonzalez Vasquez Jefe Cicere told Harrington they will add a stop at her apartment complex by next week. But Harrington still worries about other families trying to figure out how to get their kids home safely. I’m Greta Díaz-González Vázquez in Austin.
Jennifer Stayton Two years ago, voters in Travis County approved a property tax increase with those funds going toward a program called Raising Travis County. The purpose was to expand access to early childcare and after school programming. But as Austin Current Government reporter, Sam Stark reports, some challenges remain and he joins us now to tell us more. Hi, Sam.
Sam Stark Hey, thanks for having me.
Jennifer Stayton Sure. So Sam, briefly, first of all, remind us what raising Travis County does.
Sam Stark Yeah, so a couple of years ago, Travis County leaders decided to put Proposition A on the ballot. And that’s because they found that early childhood education after school programs were prohibitively expensive for many families living in the area. And that issue coincided with these early childhood care providers really struggling financially and also struggling with retaining teachers. A recent survey found that. Early childhood care teachers had a turnover at about 40%. So that proposition went on the ballot and 60% of voters agreed with it. That raised, or that tax rate increase was expected to generate $75 million a year. 2026 is the first year that we’re starting to see those funds allocated to some of those programs.
Jennifer Stayton And Sam, one preschool director who was quoted in your recent article said the program has quote, stopped the bleeding. What was that bleeding and how has the program helped?
Sam Stark Yeah, so she was speaking from her perspective as an early child care provider in that, you know, like I said, they just were really struggling financially, they didn’t want to raise tuition prices for these families because it was already really expensive, but that was kind of necessary in order for them to, you know, gain revenue. So part of this program has allocated gap funding to these child care providers, that funding is just essentially trying to cover the cost between government subsidies for these families to access care and the actual cost of providing the care.
Jennifer Stayton So Sam, it sounds like there are still, though, some financial constraints than the child care providers and the programs are still facing. Talk a little bit more about that.
Sam Stark Yeah, so the Raising Travis County Executive Director said that, you know, there’s always going to be these razor thin margins within this sector. So it just, you, know, this is the first year that money has been allocated. And as the years go by, they hope that that will, you know, make them more financially viable. But the program has done a lot of good so far. So far, there’s been 50… One million dollars allocated within the county. That’s increased the number of childhood, early childhood care scholarships by a thousand. It’s led to over 7,000 kids being enrolled in after school programs. And yeah, like I said, it’s been that money has also gone to 150 providers for that gap funding.
Jennifer Stayton So, Sam, this is a program that is coming through Travis County. Have officials had anything to say about the financial challenges that still remain?
Sam Stark Um, yeah, so they they really want to focus on this teacher issue going forward. One of the preschools that I talked to, they said because of the gap funding, they were able to institute a 2% raise, you know, which is which is not a ton. I found that in Travis County, early child care providers earn about $19 an hour. So, you know, with the increased cost of living in Austin and everywhere else, that that’s a tough salary to get by on. So. They wanna really focus on making this a viable career that people want to go into, that people wanna stay in.
Jennifer Stayton We’ve been speaking with Sam Stark. He covers government for our reporting partner, Austin Current. Sam, thank you very much for taking the time today.
Sam Stark Yeah, Jennifer, thanks for having me.
Jennifer Stayton Coming up next on the show, the fifth and final installment in our series, the data center next door. This is Austin Signal. We’ll be right back. Stay with us. This is the Austin Signal, welcome back. Polling suggests a majority of Texans are opposed to a data center being built in their community. The opposition cuts across racial and ideological lines, and it’s especially strong in rural and suburban areas. The reasons for this data center skepticism are all over the place. In the last installment of our series, the data center next door, KUT’s Kaylee Hunt, Leigh Walden and Katie McAfee ask, is there anything data center developers can do to fix their PR problem?
Kaylee Hunt Everywhere you look, people are talking about data centers. I live near a data center, and this is the kind of water that I get out of my taps. On social media, people talk about how they’ll affect our water. This is what our first drinking water is going to look like in a couple years, all because of big AI companies like Chat GPT. What they’ll do to the state’s farmland and livestock.
Leigh Walden You know it’s getting bad when a farmer said he hasn’t seen a single bee nearby since a data center was built.
Kaylee Hunt What Texas leaders will do to stop them. We have literally zero regulation right now at the state level. And they’re concerned about where data centers are popping up. I don’t want to live next to a data center. You don’t wanna live next your data center Now people will say a lot of things on the internet, but even in real life, there’s angst about data centers.
Leigh Walden All that power and all that water is definitely a huge concern.
Kaylee Hunt How AI is shaping people’s lives. I have seen the trend of like using AI as your therapist. And what it might mean for computers to know more and more about us. I feel like if there’s more, there could be less security maybe, and then like people are stealing all our information. No, I don’t know if that’s even true. I might’ve just be pulling that out of my butt. The backlash over data centers has people coming up with some interesting solutions.
Leigh Walden We want your pee to cool these data centers.
Catch you too!
Leigh Walden Please give us your pee Let’s pee on computers together
Kaylee Hunt and some pretty extreme solutions.
Speaker 7 A data center fire cannot be put out. So since we’re all on the same page, you want to get rid of them, set them on fire. Laughter
Kaylee Hunt But do we really need to go this far?
Leigh Walden There are real concerns about them, but there’s other things that people are complaining about that I think are perhaps not as big a deal or there’s some misinformation involved.
Kaylee Hunt Dan Stanzione is the director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, or TAC. It’s the data center at UT’s Pickle Research Campus we went to earlier in the series. Stanzioni says data centers can use a lot of water. Many older data centers do. Especially crypto mining facilities that were built quickly over the past decade. It’s cheaper in Texas to use millions of gallons of water to cool a data center than it is to use a closed-loop system that uses lots of power.
Leigh Walden If you let people be bad actors, they probably will be, but a little bit of regulation would go a long way on this short of a sort of outright ban.
Kaylee Hunt But Stanzione says the water problem is an easy fix, because we already have the technology to run data centers with less water. Like at Stanzion’s data center, the TAC. Remember, it’s loud and. Stanzion says many of the servers here are cooled using water from a million gallon storage tank they filled up in 2012.
Leigh Walden It’s 2026, it’s the same million gallons that’s still circulating there, right? We don’t actually consume any of it. It just flows around and around in a loop getting chilled over and over again.
Kaylee Hunt And Stanzione says you can even cool a data center with no water at all. Tac cools some of its servers using a method called direct liquid cooling. It sounds fancy, but really, they just…
Leigh Walden Take the whole server and dump it in mineral oil, cool it that way.
Kaylee Hunt The state could force data centers to use these kinds of technologies. But right now, who knows what lawmakers will do when they meet next year. In the meantime, some companies at least seem to be trying.
Ben Townsend My name is Ben Townsend and I’m the Global Head of Infrastructure Strategy and Sustainability at Google.
Kaylee Hunt Townsend told lawmakers at a Texas House committee hearing this summer about Google’s efforts to limit water use at its data centers.
Ben Townsend We do not believe that water should be a black box topic. Communities deserve to know how much water data centers use, and water planners need to know how much data centers used.
Kaylee Hunt The majority of data centers operating in Texas have not shared that information. Townsend said Google did start disclosing that data publicly a few years ago. But we could only find publicly reported numbers for Google in Texas from 2022 and 2023. Google did not respond to emails asking for more recent data. So we asked Gemini, Google’s AI, how much water did the company’s Texas data centers use in 2025? It told us that data is not publicly disclosed. But asking for that information is something that communities could do. In fact, they could be asking for more than just information. Townsend says that Google and other data center developers have money to spend.
Katie McAfee They have room in their budgets to also help fund public water infrastructure and positive water outcomes for communities. If you want to develop in my backyard, I’m excited to have a discussion, but I really need these water solutions fixed.
Kaylee Hunt Thompson said all of Google’s new data centers in Texas will be cooled with air instead of water. But there’s a hitch. Saving on water means using more electricity. Water cooling is just way more energy efficient than cooling with air. And data centers already need a lot of energy. A single hyperscale data center can require two and a half gigawatts. That’s about the average energy consumption of the entire city of Austin.
Michael Weber You might have one Austin’s worth of power at one data center facility at one remote location. And so the power density blows away by orders of magnitude what historical data centers had.
Kaylee Hunt This is Michael Weber. He’s an engineering professor at UT Austin. He says a lot of things are requiring more electricity these days. Electric vehicles, people trading out old gas appliances for electric ones like stove tops and heating. But that’s easier to rally support behind because it’s offsetting other kinds of energy. Gas for your car, natural gas for your stove.
Michael Weber But data centers, it’s additive, it is new demand. It is not clear what oil and gas or coal is being offset somewhere else. In fact, it might lead to more gas used in the power sector, for example.
Kaylee Hunt Together, all the data centers looking to build in Texas want 200 gigawatts of power. That’s more than twice as much power as Texas uses right now. And they want that to happen in the next five years.
Michael Weber Most people who follow this closely don’t believe that number. Like that number just seems impossible, implausible, and unnecessary.
Kaylee Hunt Weber says a lot of things are slowing that growth down, like delays in raw materials for gas turbines and electrical transformers. But even if you don’t believe the big numbers…
Michael Weber But even the small numbers are pretty big.
Kaylee Hunt Like 40 to 50 gigawatts. If you’re keeping track, that’s about 15 Austin’s worth of power. Weber thinks that developers are going to throw a bunch of money at the grid to start generating new power as fast as possible. So that means more oil drilling, more natural gas production, more solar panels, more wind turbines, more transmission lines and more. Well, you get the picture. Weber isn’t worried about the power or water situation because he says those issues are more solvable. He’s worried about things like pollution. Noise, tearing down old growth forests and interrupting wildlife. But he says there’s hope.
Michael Weber If we install a lot of data centers and they are efficient and they use closed loop dry cooling, they will not hurt our grid or our water resources in fact might enhance our grid. And I would say that’s the goal. Let’s get the rich companies to pay to upgrade the grid.
Kaylee Hunt Just like the guy from Google, Weber says that communities need to negotiate. Tell data center developers what they want out of the deal. But negotiations take time. And you can’t make a deal with someone who won’t shake your hand. It’s mid-August and sticky with heat and humidity outside. At Sacred Heart Church in Bastrop County, rows and rows of tables are filled with residents gathered in opposition to a proposed data center.
Resident 1 What’s really happening is definitely dishonest. These big industries, they always choose the areas that the people of color and people of low income are living in, because they’re not gonna get the pushback they think. This is not good neighborly behavior.
Kaylee Hunt The proposal from Pacifico Energy is for a natural gas power plant. It would eventually power a new hyperscale data center on the same site. The facility is reportedly linked to Anthropic, one of the biggest AI firms in the world. But the developers are trying to do things the right way. They’ve withdrawn the request for tax incentives. They’re not planning to use too much water. They’re bringing their own power. But people here don’t really care.
Resident 2 It is some of the dirtiest way to produce the energy. I might want to move away because it wouldn’t be healthy for my children, for myself, for my asthmatic husband.
Resident 3 Their pollution is, it’s invasive. It’s land pollution. It’s air pollution. It’s water pollution.
Resident 4 Noise pollution.
Resident 5 They need to just go away.
Kaylee Hunt Outside the meeting, Kelly Jeske and Marie Blaisick are huddled together talking quickly. They look like the kind of older women who might host a rager of a craft club or have some butterscotch candies in their purses. Together, they probably weigh about 150 pounds. What if you ask them?
Kelly Jeske They have taken advantage of our citizenry, that’s what disturbs me the most. We are being victimized by these guys and that really bothers me.
Kaylee Hunt There’s not just one issue that has them fired up about the data center.
Kelly Jeske All of it, you know, water, my god, and of course, yeah, the air pollution and then the water and then electric bills and then just the noise and destruction of our environment, beautiful.
Marie Blaisick And look how pretty this place is.
Kelly Jeske Quality of life is going to destroy people’s quality of life.
Kaylee Hunt Jeske and Blazic say they’re not usually the type of people that come to town halls. They say they’ve been activated by the coming data centers.
Kelly Jeske I never spoke in front of anybody and I did in front of the county commissioners meeting and I may do it again.
Kaylee Hunt All over the state, data centers have awoken something in people across party lines. There’s no amount of money worth it, none.
Marie Blaisick Know to AI data centers, protect our water resources.
Kelly Jeske Data centers and AI are not worth fighting for. From what we’ve seen in town after town, it almost doesn’t matter what a developer says or does. People don’t believe the promises. They’ve already made up their mind. We don’t want it. We don’t want it in our backyard. Y’all can put it anywhere else but not in our backyard because I’m pretty sure y’all don’t want it in your backyard.
Kaylee Hunt For some people, this isn’t even about the data centers. Or about the power. Or even the water. People are worried about humanity. The trade-offs they’re making to facilitate artificial intelligence. What AI might take from them. And what, if anything, they get in return for the profits of trillion-dollar corporations. For them, opposing a data center is the only way of taking back control. I’m Kaylee Hunt. I’m Lee Walden. And I’m Katie McAfee in Austin.
Jennifer Stayton And that was the fifth and final installment of our series, The Data Center Next Door. You can read more online at kut.org slash data centers, and tune in on Labor Day for a special episode of Austin Signal. You can hear all five episodes in the series, plus an interview with reporters, Kayleigh Hunt, Katie McAfee, and Lee Walden. And that is it for us today on Austin Signal, Jake Perlman is our technical director, Alexandra Hart is our producer, Kristen Cabrera is our managing producer, and Jimmy Maas is our showrunner. I’m your host Jennifer Stayton. We will talk with you tomorrow.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
