North Texas leaders consider local funding to keep Heartland Flyer running to Oklahoma City
Heartland Flyer facing permanent suspension after Texas legislature declines funding
And with that growth comes challenges, chief among them: the worsening traffic along I-35.'There's going to come a point very quickly, I think, where we need a viable rail option to move people between those two cities in a timely manner,' he said. 'At some point, we're going to have commuter rail, and instead of driving to Norman because it's going to be so congested.'But Mann also sees opportunity.'I mean, we're bringing the Olympics in,' he said. 'The World Cup is going to be in the Dallas-Fort Worth area next year.'He said losing the Heartland Flyer would undercut that momentum.'When you bring people in from other countries, they expect rail service,' Mann said. 'I think if this goes away, it sends a signal that we're not interested in rail service.'In a statement, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker echoed that concern, calling the Heartland Flyer 'key to ensuring Fort Worth's continued success as a global destination.'She pointed out Fort Worth is Amtrak's busiest station in Texas, 'generating millions in economic impact annually.'On Tuesday, the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG)—an alliance of more than 200 cities, counties and school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—confirmed they are working to 'figure out a long term funding solution' using local funds, once Texas' funding is set to expire in September.'It may come down to municipalities or counties that have to step up if we want to keep the service going,' Mann said.He said he's also working with the Oklahoma City Chamber to explore what other states have done in similar situations.'We're currently trying to find out and ascertain has this happened in any other states? And if so, how did they handle it?' he said. 'Really, anything we want to do in the future related to rail hinges on keeping this line open.'An Amtrak spokesperson told News 4 they also want to keep the Heartland Flyer running, noting they had plans to extend the line north to Kansas, where it could connect travelers to major lines headed toward Chicago and Los Angeles.'Ending this service would sever a well-established transportation network,' Amtrak said.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Rowers revel in beach sprints in the run-up to LA's 2028 Olympics
LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) — It's a beach run, a coastal row and a music party rolled into one, and it's about to become an Olympic event. On a sunny Southern California morning, nearly two dozen athletes gathered to try their hand at beach sprints at a camp run by USRowing in Long Beach, not far from where the inaugural Olympic races will be held in 2028. Many were long-time flatwater rowers who wanted to take a shot at something new. Others were already hooked on the quick-paced and unpredictable race format and have been training with an eye on LA28. Two at a time, athletes run to the waterline, hop in a boat, row a slalom course, then turn around and return to shore to jump out and dash across the sand to hit a finish-line buzzer — all in about three minutes. "You don't just have to be a good rower — you also have to be a good athlete, and what that means is you've got to be able to be dynamic and adapt to whatever Mother Nature throws at you," said Maurice Scott, a long-time rower from Philadelphia who moved to Long Beach to prepare for the Olympics. The next summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles and nearby cities. Interest in beach sprints has risen since the International Olympic Committee announced its inclusion, especially since the games will no longer feature a lightweight rowing category popular among smaller athletes. Rowing officials developed the beach sprint format a little over a decade ago hoping to engage spectators in a sport that's otherwise removed from people watching from the shore. A standard 2,000 meter-flatwater race is typically only visible closer to the finish line. In beach sprints, athletes compete close to the crowds in a dynamic and much shorter race that fans can easily track from the sand. Guin Batten, chair of World Rowing's coastal commission, said the vision is to have a fun, lively event on the beach where spectators can listen to good music, be close to the action and follow their favorite athletes. The entire event runs just an hour. 'It's knockout. It's chaotic,' said Batten, an Olympic rower who helped develop the format. 'Until you cross a finish line, anyone can win that race.' Many traditional flatwater rowers accustomed to steady strokes on calm waterways have no interest in the ups and downs of wind and waves. But other long-time rowers are hooked. Christine Cavallo, a beach sprinter on the U.S. national team, said she loves the unpredictability of the waves, which can humble even the most incredible athletes. 'You could be the best rower in the world and get flipped by the wave," Cavallo said. Coastal rowing has long been popular throughout the world but different cultures have used different boats and rules. Part of the appeal of beach sprints is the boat has been standardized and is provided at competitions, which makes it easier for more athletes to try it. The first major international beach sprints competition was at the 2015 Mediterranean Beach Games in Italy. Head of the Charles, known for its yearly October flatwater regatta in Massachusetts, hosted its first beach sprints event in July. About 100 rowers, twice as many as expected, participated, said Brendan Mulvey, race director. Since the Olympic announcement, Tom Pattichis, British Rowing's head coach for beach sprints, said he now has athletes training full-time in the event. Meanwhile, Marc Oria, the USA Beach Sprint head coach, said camps in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Long Beach aim to bring the race to long-time rowers and others who haven't tried it. Athletes find it exhilarating because it requires them to be agile and adaptive as well as superb rowers, he said. 'It's growing exponentially in the last four years all around the world,' Oria said. 'Our goal for U.S. rowing is to create more events, more opportunities, and to create a good pipeline for 2028.' At the camp in Long Beach, competitors included a teacher, an Olympic rower, a marketing professional who began rowing a few weeks earlier and a high school senior. 'I tried it and I really loved it, so I came back,' said Bridgette Hanson, a 17-year-old rower from Arizona who raced in beach sprints for the first time this year in Florida. 'It requires a lot more brute force.' John Wojtkiewicz, coach of the Long Beach Coastal Team, called out to racers to help guide them through the course. He said he's eager to see how the Olympic venue is set up and hopes spectators can get a good view like they do at surfing events. 'What is great about the beach sprint — and this may have helped its development — is you can watch the entire race,' Wojtkiewicz said. "Anything can happen.'
New York Times
29 minutes ago
- New York Times
Hans Henken is the SailGP star who wants to become an astronaut: ‘I still have those aspirations'
Shooting for the stars and achieving the extraordinary is nothing new for elite athletes who reach the pinnacle of any sport. Hans Henken is one of the world's finest sailors; an Olympic medalist last year, a member of the U.S. SailGP team, and a Rolex Yachtsman of the Year. But he is a man whose ambitions aren't restricted to sea level. Advertisement 'If you ask a five-year-old what they want to do when they grow up, everyone says they want to become an astronaut. I still have those aspirations,' the 33-year-old Californian tells The Athletic over the phone from his home in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, ahead of this weekend's SailGP Grand Prix in Germany. Henken's is not an idle dream. The Stanford University graduate has a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. 'I was really drawn to it, obviously, because of my childhood dream, and the astronautical engineering is one of many prerequisites that NASA looks for in terms of their application process,' Henken says. 'Part of me just wants to work on really challenging projects that require the nth degree of precision. And I think there's nothing more precise than trying to build a rocket that goes into space.' For now, however, his focus is on the current Rolex SailGP season, a high-octane close-to-shore championship, and improving his U.S. team's fortunes. The current campaign has proven heavy going for driver Taylor Canfield, team boss and strategist Mike Buckley and the rest of the crew. After a promising third place at the first event in Dubai last November, the Americans have struggled and are currently last in the 12-team standings. In the six-member crew, Henken is the flight controller, managing the ride height of the boat above the water, aiming to avoid any costly nosedives or crashes. He has in the past likened it to being a soccer goalkeeper, given that there is nowhere to hide if things go wrong. Team USA constantly reminds fans they are all working hard to get better. They have access to the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center in Santa Monica, California, where its personnel spend time going through physical and mental training programs, as well as picking up ideas from athletes in other sports. Advertisement 'I still go, minimum, once a week,' says Henken, who, along with teammate Ian Barrows, won America's sole sailing medal at the Paris Olympics last year. 'It's a bit of a long drive from my place in Long Beach, but the coolest thing about Red Bull is the diversity of their athletes and the diversity of sports. I've been asking some of the extreme-sports athletes how they train for whatever crazy thing they do, and they're like, 'Oh, we don't do a lot of training physically. We do a lot of visualization, because you only get one go at it.' 'In things like skydiving or base jumping, they only do it so often, so they have to use a lot of visualization techniques. I think there's a lot to pull from that kind of mentality and put it towards SailGP because we have a similar challenge of minimal training time.' The main question the team has to answer is how to raise performance levels when practice time is so limited. The Americans are experiencing a level of publicity and scrutiny that sailors haven't previously experienced and would probably rather do their learning away from the spotlight, but there's no avoiding it because the one thing they severely lack is time on their F50 catamarans. There's no other boat that prepares you for the high-tech, foiling F50 than the F50 itself. Access is generally limited to just one practice day before each two-day race weekend. With 12 events across the current season, plus a few extra training days, it adds up to just 42 days. 'We're talking 24 race days plus a training day before each event, plus a few extra, so you probably get 18 training days,' Henken said. The lack of training time stands in stark contrast to Henken's decade on the Olympic trail. A bronze medalist in the men's skiff competition at Paris 2024, he has taken time away from that scene to focus on SailGP, a relative newcomer in sailing in its fifth season, and is weighing up whether to compete on home waters in Los Angeles at the 2028 Games. Advertisement 'We campaigned for multiple years, spending over 250 days per year on the water to go racing for five days at the Olympics,' he says. 'Here in SailGP, we don't count days on the water, we count minutes on the water. It literally is 'Minutes matter', and if we're getting an extra 20, or even just 10, minutes at the end of a day, it really goes a long way towards learning new things about performance.' With the bulk of their time on the F50 spent racing in the heat of battle, there is little option but to try new ideas and test the limits while going full bore at up to 50 knots, side by side alongside 11 rivals. Ahead of the New York Grand Prix in June, Henken talked about using that time to 'push the envelope on performance.' 'If you're never pushing to what you think the limit is, you're just gonna get passed by boats,' he said. 'You might be beating another team because they're pushing the limits and crashing, while you're keeping it safe and consistent. You might be beating them for the first three events, but by event five, six, seven, or maybe even the next season, at some point, they're going to go past you. 'Because the time frame's so short, you have to make rapid decisions really, really quickly on how you're going to utilize that time. If you don't do it that way, you end up spending too much time not exploring your options. And then you kind of get stuck in a No-Man's Land of not really committing to one process or another, and you never really quite find out if it was a performance gain or not.' Current leaders of Season 5 are the New Zealanders, led by driver Pete Burling and his wing trimmer and long-time sidekick Blair Tuke. Together they won three Olympic medals in the 49er skiff, including gold at Rio 2016, and have helped win the past three America's Cups for their country. They are the hottest properties in sailing, but Henken points out that for all their undoubted prowess, even Burling and Tuke have had to serve their apprenticeship in SailGP. Advertisement 'Pete and Blair are the duo that everyone wants to be. Everyone wants to be exactly who they are because they are winning at the highest level and everything that they do,' says Henken, recalling the New Zealanders' difficult start in SailGP. 'They come into the league in Season Two. They push the envelope, they're learning the boat. They're not winning events. But by Season Three, Season Four, all of a sudden, they've figured it out. They've pushed hard, and they've used that time and training at every regatta to be able to find that. 'I think right now, our team is basically trying to find what that (winning formula) is in racing, and it's really, really challenging.' For Henken and his teammates, the next opportunity to test their progress comes this weekend in Sassnitz, a town on northern Germany's Baltic Sea coast. Some crew changes are in the offing for the eighth event of the 2025 season, and even Henken did not know if he would be on the boat this time. 'I imagine that will probably be announced about five minutes before the first race… We've been doing a lot of rotation (in training), a lot of changes. Not one person has been on the boat all day long,' he says. 'We're going to wake up on Saturday, the roster is going to get filled out, that's going to be the A team and they're going to go racing.' For more SailGP, follow Global Sports on The Athletic app via the Discover tab Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
New York Times
29 minutes ago
- New York Times
Enjoy the new Premier League season, there might not be many more like it
If, like all of my social circle, you did not follow this summer's expanded Club World Cup, you missed some decent games, a few upsets, a lot of Donald Trump and a surprise win for Chelsea. It was fine, but fine was good enough to ensure it will happen again in four years' time — perhaps sooner — and that means you also possibly missed the beginning of the end of football as most of us know it. Advertisement When the new Premier League season starts tomorrow evening, many of the world's best players will embark on an 11-month season that will finish at next summer's World Cup, the old-fashioned one but with 48 teams and 104 games, not 32 and 64, as per recent editions. This will be less than five weeks after Chelsea beat Paris Saint-Germain in New York, but only two weeks after Manchester United drew with Everton to clinch the Premier League's very own American showcase event, the Summer Series. It is not just the world's best players who are now locked into an endless content-creation cycle. The first round of Champions League qualifying took place on July 8, the same day Chelsea beat Fluminense in the semi-final of the Club World Cup, a tournament that neither brought the curtain down on 2024-25 nor raised it for 2025-26 — there is no curtain anymore. The lower leagues in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and elsewhere in northern Europe are always early starters, but England's Leagues One and Two began their new campaigns on August 1. In fact, League Two's Barnet and Newport County had already played each other in an EFL Cup preliminary round on July 29 — in other words, before most of their fans had gone on their summer holidays, let alone taken some time off to enjoy the cricket season, the Lions tour, a music festival, a summer fete, anything other than football, basically. The English Football League had no choice but to start so early, as it is the only way to ensure there is room in the schedule to include the record nine Premier League teams who have qualified for European football this season when they join the competition in the third round. What else can the EFL do when UEFA adds a third European competition, the Conference League, in 2021, and then expands all three of its club competitions in 2024, adding extra games and teams? The Champions League leapt from 125 to 189 games last season — once that happened, every new edition of the EFL Cup is a minor miracle. Advertisement The EFL could just stop scheduling it, I suppose, but Premier League clubs appear to like winning it, as do their fans. Newcastle United's certainly did. It also makes up a big chunk of the EFL's broadcast revenues and the Premier League's participation in the competition is one of the least painful contributions the top flight makes to the rest of the professional pyramid. Take that away and Premier League boss Richard Masters is going to have an even harder time trying to convince his shareholders to send more money down the pipe before the new independent football regulator makes them. But that is not his only headache. Masters has been talking about the fact that the Premier League has been the same size and shape for more than three decades — 20 teams, 380 games — for several years now. He was at it again earlier this month, when the BBC asked him why the Premier League does not just shrink to 18 teams. After all, that was the original idea back in 1992, when the Football Association encouraged the top clubs to break away from the EFL, its ancient rival, and form the Premier League. The clubs were only half-listening, though, and having cut the top division from 22 teams to 20, decided to stop there. 'I don't think we should be forced into that decision,' said Masters. 'I am all for the growth of the game and the exciting competitions our clubs can participate in, but not at the expense of domestic football.' FIFA and UEFA have been dropping not-so-subtle hints that 18-team leagues, with a maximum of 306 games, is where everyone should have arrived by now. Germany's Bundesliga has had 18 teams since 1965, but France's Ligue 1 got the memo in 2023, having scrapped its second domestic cup competition three years earlier. This means only England, Italy and Spain still have 20-team leagues in Europe. Advertisement Italy's Serie A actually voted on whether to go to 18 teams last year, but the clubs backed the status quo by a 16-4 margin. Ominously, the less-is-more quartet were the Milan duo, Juventus and Roma. If La Liga put it to their clubs in Spain, we can be fairly sure of how Barcelona and Real Madrid would vote. For what it is worth, that French decision looks worse with every passing season, as their domestic television deal has cratered and PSG, insulated by Qatari sovereign wealth and their overseas earnings, have disappeared into the distance. Everyone apart from them could use the extra matchday revenue and broadcast inventory now. But big clubs have broad horizons, with foreign fans and global sponsors. UEFA and now FIFA have shown them the value of international competition and they want more of it, which means less time for domestic chores. Would England's aristocrats vote to cut the Premier League? Maybe, maybe not. Unlike their European peers, they can still see the benefit of domestic football in their profit and loss accounts, as the Premier League, for a variety of reasons, has become the closest thing to a European Super League since the Big Six briefly conspired with Barca, Juve, Real and Co to create a more regular and lucrative place to get together than the Champions League. A combination of crass planning, fan power and opportunistic populism on the part of the British government saw that abomination collapse inside 72 hours, but instead of being punished for their treachery, the ESL's 12 founding clubs were rewarded with an expanded Champions League and revamped Club World Cup. With the Premier League's overseas media rights still rising in value, its stadiums full (and growing) and almost half of its clubs playing in Europe this season, the status quo looks pretty good right now. But Masters can see the writing on the wall. Advertisement Entirely fed up with FIFA grabbing bigger chunks of the calendar, the Premier League has teamed up with Europe's other domestic leagues and the continent's players' unions to lodge a formal complaint against the global governing body at the European Commission. By bringing European Union competition law into football's fixture squabbles, the leagues and players are telling FIFA they believe the game has reached saturation point, the players are knackered, and there are no more cup replays to scrap. To be honest, questions could be asked as to why the leagues and players did not combine to resist UEFA's expansionism, but the European confederation at least invites representatives from the leagues and unions to its meetings before telling them it is going to create new competitions, grab more exclusive midweek slots, and maybe pinch a weekend or two. The Premier League also knows it cannot get too stroppy with an organisation that provides at least a third of its shareholders with large cheques each season, not to mention the fact that the race for European berths is a vital component of the Premier League's annual narrative. FIFA, on the other hand, consults via press release and photo opportunity, as FIFPro, the global players' union, has been pointing out of late. And, unlike UEFA, its president, Gianni Infantino, is not trying to defend a dominant position, he is attempting to disrupt it, globalise it and own it. Which brings us back to the Club World Cup that may have completely passed you by. Perhaps you did not watch any of the games, but you read about some poor attendances, extreme weather and a couple of mismatches. You may have only just seen a few memes of Cole Palmer doing something brilliant or funny or both. For the record, I did not properly watch a single moment of it live, although I did read about it and watch the best clips on social media, which is not that dissimilar to how my children follow most football. The closest I got to watching it live was on holiday in Spain, where the final was on all the TVs in all the bars and restaurants that you would expect to show live football. FIFA and its Saudi-backed streaming partner DAZN may even have counted me and thousands of other passers-by that night in their viewing statistics, which is fine, as I did notice the score and got slightly interested when PSG's players and manager Luis Enrique lost their tempers at the end. That suggests they cared about it. And Chelsea's players looked very happy afterwards, albeit a little confused as to why the U.S. president had decided to photobomb their celebrations. Advertisement But nobody looked happier than Infantino. He knew he had done enough to ensure Saudi money will continue to flow FIFA's way until 2034 at least, as the Gulf state appears to be all-in on its big bet on sport. He knew that if I had more friends in Africa, Asia or South America, my social circle would certainly have watched the tournament. And he also knew that the inaugural event's host, the aforementioned commander in chief, was so pleased with how it had gone that he joked at half-time that maybe he should scribble one of his presidential decrees to replace 'soccer' as the game's name in America. 'The jury is out about the competitiveness of the format and the scheduling and the underlying economics, but it is not my job to assess the success or otherwise of the Club World Cup,' Masters told the BBC. 'It is my job to assess whether these new competitions have an impact on the domestic calendar and domestic competitions, of which the Premier League is one. 'Since 1994, the Premier League has been 380 matches, 20 clubs. We haven't changed shape at all. Now we are starting to redesign our domestic calendar at the altar of European and global expansion. 'We are asking the players to play in more matches. There has to be, at the top of the game, a proper dialogue between FIFA and all the stakeholders about how these things go forward. That has been sadly missing.' Yep, and now the only dialogue is going to be a row about whether the Club World Cup should go to 48 teams in 2029, with more spots for Masters' shareholders, or maybe we should just let FIFA do it every two years, floating from summer to winter as it crosses the globe. If that happens, and there is no question that FIFA wants that to happen — ideally in rotation with a biennial men's World Cup — we can forget 18-team domestic top flights, with deep professional pyramids and historic national cup competitions. We will be lucky to find time for a 16-team domestic league and when that happens, we will all realise that fixture congestion was never just a problem for a handful of superstars. So, enjoy this season — cherish it, even — because there might not be many like it left. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
