Newsworthy by Faculty Member

State lawmakers began their third special legislative session of the year on Monday. This time the primary task is to draw new political maps. But the question on a lot of minds right now is whether the Legislature will have the final word on these maps Or they headed to court?

Sherri Greenberg spoke with Bloomberg News about Texas Democrats who left the state to stop voting on the election bill. LBJ appears in this story twice: Two paragraphs after Professor Greenberg, alumnus and Texas State Representative Gene Wu is also quoted.

After a toddler fatally shot his 8-month-old brother this month in Houston, authorities and elected officials echoed the same theme: Accidental shootings by children are avoidable. But a state law aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of children by charging owners when a child gets hold of a firearm is seldom used in Texas, Department of Public Safety records show.

10 features from the week 

The LBJ School begins accepting applications each September, with the priority funding deadline Dec. 1. Read on for helpful recorded webinars, student videos and more, to help you put your best foot forward in the application process.

The electricity grid failures that left millions of Texans shivering and without water for nearly a week — and as many as scores of people dead — have scrambled not only the Legislature’s agenda but the political calculus for next year’s elections.

Moving forward, policies aimed at reducing health disparities must prioritize cross-sector collaborations, improve insurance reimbursements for social services impacting health, work to achieve digital inclusion, and enable data sharing and evaluation to improve equity.

Twenty-nine LBJ School authors have come together to craft interdisciplinary and resilience-based policy solutions, published in one toolkit called Resiliency in the Age of COVID-19. This toolkit comes as researchers from across The University of Texas at Austin continue to offer first-of-its-kind groundbreaking research and discovery in the fight against COVID and its long-lasting impacts on public health, business and the future of governance.

Republicans had a lock on the state Senate, governorship and at least four of the five seats on a little-known board charged with settling disputes over redistricting, the decennial exercise of redrawing political maps to account for population changes.

Mike Gleason on Tuesday became the first Democrat to be elected sheriff in Williamson County in 30 years after defeating embattled incumbent Robert Chody, who outspent him by more than $1 million. Sherri Greenberg, a professor at the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs, said several factors helped Gleason win, including the lawsuits against Chody, the changing demographics of Williamson County and the fact that the county’s voters also supported Biden over Trump.