Star-Telegram endorsement: Sprawling Fort Worth City Council District 11
Voters in Fort Worth City Council District 11 have a clear choice of a candidate who knows how to get things done in government.
Incumbent Jeanette Martinez was the first representative for the district, an amalgamation of varied neighborhoods pieced together in the last round of council redistricting. She has earned a second term.
Martinez, a Rosemont resident who turns 42 before Election Day, is best positioned to help the district catch up on basic needs, especially street improvements, sidewalks and other essential infrastructure. But she also understands that council members must consider priorities for the city as a whole and work well as a team to ensure they are met.
She works as executive administrator for County Commissioner Roderick Miles, after years in the same position for his predecessor, Roy Charles Brooks. While that creates the potential for conflict of interest, as Martinez acknowledged in our interview with the candidates, it also gives her knowledge of government processes and connections that her rivals cannot match.
Martinez said she wants to ensure District 11 gets its share of the city's next bond package, slated for voter consideration in 2026. She noted the importance of keeping the focus on infrastructure needs and less on amenities that, while important to city life, can wait while basic needs are addressed.
Her status as a county employee is fodder for opponent Christopher Johnson, a 57-year-old Polytechnic Heights resident. Johnson raised it in our interview; Martinez said she seeks city legal advice for when to recuse herself from any issues.
Johnson, who owns a cosmetics line and formerly had a salon, touted himself as the only candidate with extensive business experience.
The third candidate, Hilda Cuzco, a 77-year-old Central Meadowbrook resident, is running as a representative of the Socialist Workers Party. She works as a packer in a bakery plant.
The district's neighborhoods include Echo Heights, Meadowbrook, Riverside, Rosemont and Worth Heights.
If no candidate wins an outright majority, the top two vote-getters will participate in a runoff election. The winner earns a two-year term. Early voting starts April 22 and ends April 29. Election Day is May 3.

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Chicago Tribune
an hour ago
- Chicago Tribune
Chicago could force Uber, Lyft to hike driver pay
Rideshare companies like Lyft and Uber could soon be forced to pay Chicago drivers more if an ordinance up for debate Thursday moves ahead, a change the companies say would cause the cost of rides to skyrocket for passengers. Ald. Michael Rodriguez, 22nd, said his measure would make sure rideshare drivers make more than minimum wage and get paid when they wait for and drive to riders. But critics and the companies say the legislation will raise costs and could even put many drivers out of work. 'While prices have increased for years, pay for drivers has decreased,' Rodriguez said. 'Almost half the time, they are working, but not getting paid.' Rodriguez's ordinance would raise driver pay during rides to $1.50 per mile and 62.5 cents per minute in July 2026. It would also establish a $7 minimum driver payout for each trip. The City Council's Workforce Development Committee, chaired by Rodriguez, is set to discuss and vote on the measure Thursday. If it passes, it could face a final vote from all aldermen next week. That timeline is far too tight, Ald. Matt O'Shea, 19th, argued Monday afternoon. The Beverly alderman is concerned the ordinance could 'put a gaping hole' in the city's budget by making cost-averse Chicagoans less likely to take rides that generate tax revenue. 'We don't know what this is, but we do know in just a matter of months we are going to have the most difficult budget vote in the history of the modern era,' O'Shea said. 'Can we afford to take another hit?' O'Shea said 'everybody' believes rideshare drivers need to be paid better, but added that he fears the ordinance will make it more expensive for working class Chicagoans to take rides. It is unclear what effect the ordinance will have because the committee and the administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has appeared to remain neutral throughout the debate so far, have not shared analysis, he said. In addition to pay raises, Rodriguez's ordinance would require fare breakdowns be shared with both riders and drivers. It would also add driver safety measures — like requiring passenger identities to be verified — and would reconfigure the driver disciplinary process by giving drivers a seven-day notice ahead of suspensions and details explaining why they have been deactivated. Both Uber and Lyft blasted the potential forced pay hike Monday. Lyft spokesperson CJ Macklin likened the ordinance to laws in New York City that have 'forced thousands of drivers out of the app for hours at a time.' 'This misguided policy could nearly double ride fares, pricing out communities that depend on us while reducing driver earnings as demand plummets,' Macklin said. 'We support fair driver compensation, but this disastrous proposal will leave riders, drivers and Chicago worse off.' A 500-person poll commissioned and shared by Uber and conducted by pollster Impact Research determined 62% of likely Chicago voters consider rideshare 'an everyday necessity' and 63% oppose the pay-hike proposal. 'The proposed legislation, as currently drafted, would dramatically raise ride costs for Chicagoans by nearly 40%, slash city tax revenues by tens of millions of dollars, and force workforce reductions impacting up to 10,000 drivers,' Uber spokesperson Josh Gold said. 'This approach risks undermining both affordability for riders and economic opportunity for thousands of working families.' Rodriguez's proposal faces considerable changes if lobbyists for the rideshare companies convince enough of his colleagues to vote against it. The companies are likely to place pressure on the City Council and on Johnson, who has so far avoided publicly taking sides. And the companies have pressured local politicians before. Uber used its presence on huge numbers of Chicago phones to share messages urging riders last month to act as the Illinois General Assembly weighed new rideshare taxes to fix a massive transit funding shortfall, and Lyft has shared similar political messages in the past. The ordinance comes amid a long-running feud by competing powerhouse unions to organize rideshare drivers. The Service Employees International Union Local 1 and Mechanics' Local 701 have backed the ordinance with their 'Chicago Gig Alliance' coalition. These unregulated rideshare corporations are reaping millions of dollars in profits off the backs of Chicago workers,' Ronnie Gonzalez, special representative to the machinists union's Midwest chapter, said at a City Hall news conference last month sparked by Block Club Chicago's reporting that Uber had overcharged local riders. 'It's time to hold these companies accountable and ensure that wealth created in Chicago stays in Chicago.' But the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150 opposes the measure. The union, which has already signed a labor peace agreement with Uber to ease its driver-organizing efforts, believes it it is not 'the right timing' to move ahead on the pay raises, according to Marc Poulos, executive director of Local 150's labor-management group. Poulos said the New York-inspired legislation is 'fitting a square peg in a round hole.' While many drivers there are full-time professionals, many Chicago drivers work more flexibly for Uber and Lyft, he said. The ordinance could compel the companies to end that flexibility by making less dedicated drivers too expensive to employ, he said. He also believes the ordinance does not do enough for drivers regarding workplace injury and de-activation. 'There's just a number of things why we would love to see this ordinance be delayed,' Poulos said. But Rodriguez said he does not buy the claim that higher pay for drivers will lead to higher costs for riders. Prices have already risen, he said, and if they rise again, it 'would be a decision of the companies.' 'Industry will always say that the sky is falling when you're raising rates, but the fact is that we know increasing worker pay makes our economy better,' he said.


Chicago Tribune
an hour ago
- Chicago Tribune
Indian Prairie School District 204 to increase breakfast and lunch prices
Students and families buying breakfast or lunch at Indian Prairie School District 204 schools can expect to see a higher price tag for meals next year, after the school board recently approved the district's request to increase prices across the board by 25 cents per meal. Previously, lunch was set at $3.30 for elementary school students, $3.40 for middle school students and $3.45 for high schoolers, per the district's website. Breakfast was priced at $2.25 for all students. The district also offers free breakfast and lunch to eligible students, and reduced rates of 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch for students who qualify. Next school year, lunch will cost $3.55 for elementary school students, $3.65 for middle school students and $3.70 for high school students paying full price for meals, according to a memo from the district's Director of Support Operations Ron Johnson to the school board that was included in Monday's meeting agenda. Breakfast next school year will cost $2.50 for those paying full price. The following school year, prices will increase by another 25 cents for lunch, while breakfast prices will remain at $2.50, per the memo. The meal price increases were approved unanimously by the district's school board at the meeting on Monday evening as part of the consent agenda. According to the district's memo, the increase is required for compliance with the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, passed by Congress in 2010. The district says that legislation requires that they ensure there are sufficient funds provided to the nonprofit school food service account to serve lunches for students who are not eligible for free or reduced price meals. Reimbursements for free and reduced price meals cannot subsidize the cost of paid lunches, the district noted. The 'true cost' of providing lunch to district students, a memo from Johnson to the board states, is actually $6.14, but the cost to break even is around $5.36 when factoring in the revenue generated by paid student meals and a la carte items as well as federal reimbursements from the United States Department of Agriculture. According to Johnson's memo, the district is currently paying its food service provider, OrganicLife, about $4.41 per lunch served and about $2.31 for breakfast.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Republicans Have a Revenue Problem
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Congressional Republicans love to talk about the deficit and federal spending, particularly when Democrats are in power. Before he became House speaker, Mike Johnson argued in his 2018 statement titled '7 Core Principles of Conservatism' that America was facing 'an unprecedented debt and spending crisis.' In Johnson's view, Congress had 'a moral and constitutional duty' to bring expenditure under control. In 2023, before he became the Senate majority leader, John Thune inveighed against 'reckless, out-of-control government spending' and argued that if spending reform is a priority for the GOP alone, then there is 'something seriously wrong with the Democrat Party.' They had a point. Aside from the brief period from 1998 to 2001, the federal government has run deficits for more than 50 years. When Ronald Reagan entered office, the federal debt-to-GDP ratio—a standard metric economists use to measure government indebtedness—stood at just 32.5 percent. It currently stands at 121 percent, an extraordinary level for peacetime. In President Joe Biden's last year in office, the government brought in revenues of $4.9 trillion against outlays of $6.75 trillion, resulting in a deficit of $1.8 trillion, or about 6.4 percent of GDP. And President Donald Trump's One Big, Beautiful Bill Act will only compound the problem: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that its proposed extension of his 2017 tax cuts for another 10 years will add more than $2.4 trillion to the national debt. The United States is now experiencing a structural deficit with potentially dire fiscal consequences. Serious efforts to curb spending—which DOGE is not—are desperately needed. Yet the task of closing the huge gap in our government finances has another dimension besides cost-cutting: Raising revenue, too, is desperately needed. [Jonathan Chait: Why DOGE could actually increase the deficit] The Republicans' focus on spending—when they're not responsible for it—obscures the fact that the U.S. collects significantly less money as a share of GDP than comparable countries, and less than it has taken in historically. Among OECD countries in 2023, the United States ranked 32nd out of 38 for the revenue it collects as a share of GDP. Among advanced industrial democracies, only Ireland and Chile collect less. And at 17 percent of GDP in 2024, federal revenues are well below their peak of nearly 20 percent in 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration. The following year, the United States enjoyed a $128 billion surplus, and the Congressional Budget Office projected that the national debt would be paid off by 2009. Instead, tax cuts under George W. Bush in 2001 added $8 trillion to the deficit; a further round of cuts by Trump in 2017 contributed another $1.8 trillion. Spending went up as well, but the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that 37 percent of the current deficit can be attributed to these tax cuts. For the Republican Party, tax cuts are now divorced from any specific fiscal context and have become a way of life. In a fusion of ideology and self-interest, a powerful nexus of monied interests, lobbying groups, members of Congress, conservative intellectuals, and media worked together to enforce anti-tax orthodoxy and stamp out dissent. Tax cuts were one of the few policy areas that the party's disparate factions—Wall Street Republicans, Main Street Republicans, Silicon Valley libertarians, and social conservatives—could all agree upon. Yet this long-established anti-tax consensus now confronts several looming challenges. The first is the party's shifting composition. The Republican base has become more populist in temperament and more working class in character, and low-income voters are less sympathetic to tax cuts that mainly favor their high-income peers. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center reveals that a plurality of Republicans and Republican leaners actually prefer raising taxes on households with incomes greater than $400,000, by a margin of 43 to 27 percent. (Among all Americans, 58 percent favor raising taxes on those with high incomes, whereas only 19 percent favor lowering them and 21 percent would keep them level.) Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's claim during his confirmation hearing that high-income 'job creators' need the incentive of tax cuts may have been welcome to the GOP's wealthy donors and 'starve the beast' enthusiasts, but such views are now a minority in the party. A second challenge is the distributional impact of the new bill's tax-cutting measures. Many commentators wonder why, during a time of record deficits and debt, a further round of upper-income tax cuts is necessary. Analysis from the Tax Policy Center notes that while average effective tax rates barely changed from 1945 to 2015 for most Americans, the rates for high-income households have fallen sharply. Tax Policy Center scholars have also noted that nearly half the benefits of an extension of the Trump cuts would go to the top 5 percent of households (those making $450,000 or more). Democrats have been quick to seize on the inequity of cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits to finance this upper-income giveaway. The third challenge is that, by taking revenue increases off of the table, Republicans have saddled themselves with an unsolvable fiscal conundrum. Cuts on the order of 27 percent across the entire federal budget would be needed to bring spending in line with revenue. If major categories of expenditure such as Social Security, Medicare, defense, and debt servicing are exempted, spending cuts alone cannot tackle the deficit. Acknowledging the magnitude of this gap, a few fiscal hawks in Congress, such as Senator Rand Paul and the House Freedom Caucus, have called for even deeper cuts. But many Republicans fear with justification that such a course would bring grave political risk. What Republicans are not grappling with, but should, is the disconnect between their intellectual justifications and economic and fiscal reality. Their first rationale is that tax cuts ultimately pay for themselves in higher government revenues through increased economic growth. To be blunt, no persuasive evidence exists for this contention at either the federal or the state level, including in the record of the 2017 cuts now proposed for extension. Republicans' second rationale makes a more nuanced assertion that higher taxes will depress economic growth, reducing jobs and inhibiting the downward distribution of income. Yet rigorous comparative analyses across multiple countries have found no serious evidence to support this contention. The economist Paul Krugman has referred to such arguments as 'zombie' ideas that keep 'eating people's brains' long after their intellectual credibility is dead and buried. Buffeted by these forces, cracks are starting to appear in the GOP's anti-tax orthodoxy. Some MAGA voices, such as Steve Bannon, have recently come out in favor of a tax hike on the wealthy to finance cuts for the middle class. Others, such as Vice President J. D. Vance and Project 2025 eminence Russell Vought, have expressed interest in raising taxes on those earning more than $1 million a year. They met fierce resistance from Republican luminaries such as Newt Gingrich, Larry Kudlow, Sean Hannity, Mike Johnson, and Ted Cruz. And the ultimate enforcer of tax-cutting orthodoxy, Grover Norquist, recently compared any Republicans willing to consider tax increases to a 'little cancer cell in the party.' Trump himself has tried to have it both ways, toying with the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy to cater to his populist base without actually doing anything to forestall his tax-cut extensions. His gesture toward putting America on a sounder financial footing is to argue that his tariffs can play an important role in replacing income-tax revenues. The Congressional Budget Office has calculated that, under certain configurations, tariffs could raise significant additional revenues over the next decade. But all credible projections suggest that tariffs will be unable to compensate for the lost income tax. They are also a highly regressive form of taxation that may spark retaliation by other countries, result in higher inflation, and reduce both economic growth and the tax revenues that flow from it. [Read: Republicans still can't say no to Trump] Republicans who are serious about the deficit have several options. The most obvious one would be to close the gap between the tax revenues owed to the government and what it actually collects. The IRS estimates that in 2022, about 13 percent of taxes, totaling $606 billion, owed to the federal government under our existing tax code were not paid. Many analyses of federal tax policy and enforcement—including some by conservative scholars—have argued for beefing up the IRS, with a focus on high-net-worth individuals and households. Few investment opportunities yield a higher rate of return than IRS audits on upper-income filers, yet the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have moved in the other direction and sought to cut the agency's staff and funding. Other steps Republicans could take would aim to end tax breaks for the über-rich. Sunsetting the 2017 bill's higher estate-tax deductions, which now stand at $14 million for individuals and $28 million for married couples, would bring in an estimated $201 billion over the next 10 years. The state and local tax (better known as SALT) deduction changes in the proposed bill are extremely regressive, with much of the benefit flowing to upper-income households; they are another loophole that could be closed. Republicans could also raise revenue specifically for transportation infrastructure by increasing road-user fees and gas or mileage taxes. (The gasoline tax has been frozen at 18.4 cents a gallon for more than 30 years.) None of the above will be easy, or even possible, to achieve in this Congress. The Republican Party has come a long way from the days when Ronald Reagan raised taxes four times after his 1981 tax cuts led to higher projected deficits. The official posture of fiscal rectitude continues, but the GOP's $10 trillion secret—the amount that tax cuts have contributed to the national debt—is that, if forced to choose, many on the anti-tax right would prefer bigger deficits to higher taxes. The United States no longer has that luxury. The government's interest payments have become larger than its defense expenditures, debt-rating agencies are downgrading the U.S., bond traders are demanding higher yields on U.S. treasuries, and risks to the dollar as the world's reserve currency are piling up. To redeploy Thune's phrase, something is 'seriously wrong' with a party that worries about running deficits yet refuses to consider any sustainable way to pay for them—and instead slashes services to its rural and working-class constituents. Rigid principle must give way to pragmatism: Any genuine deficit-reduction conversation needs to include not just spending cuts but higher revenues. Article originally published at The Atlantic