Lord of Laser

Parents invest in things (opinions not from thumbs). Hook’em🤘

[Lord of Laser @ReformedFA]

@austintexasgov Of course it is written to mislead but then again it doesn't matter as real survey responders will be watered down by city employees and the DSA crowd taking it dozens of times each to keep the Idiocracy crazy training rolling another year. But hey, how's that going for AISD?

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

Back in January I broke the story on Thomas Vences, the man charged with the capital murder of Deputy Aaron Armstrong, who had a long record of beating women, breaking into homes, etc.

A second man was charged that night: Ronaldo Colindres-Simon.

After Vences shot Deputy Armstrong, a bystander started a tourniquet on the deputy’s wounded arm. Colindres-Simon got in a car and backed over that same arm. The bystander screamed that he was running the deputy over and stopped him before he could do it to the other arm.

Colindres-Simon was charged with assault on a peace officer, a second-degree felony.

As @MeredithonFOX7 reports, there was body camera footage placing him at the scene, as well as eyewitness and a vehicle ID.

José Garza nevertheless dismissed the charge. The stated reason: "insufficient evidence.”

[Lord of Laser @ReformedFA]

@PaigeForAustin @austinpetsalive https://t.co/xrGD711IRO

[Chaya Tong @chaya_tong]

“I don't know why this committee exists.”
That was one commissioner’s question as Austin’s Ethics Review Commission voted against advancing a campaign finance complaint against Council Member Paige Ellis. I’ve got the latest for @statesman:
https://t.co/RZBCvEalVO

[ATX data @data_atx]

This was a VERY heated meeting, one of the commissioners says he is considering resigning because the ethics complaint against councilwoman Ellis was not advanced

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

AUSTIN MAN climbed onto a sleeping woman's bed, claimed he had a gun, and strangled her until she nearly blacked out. She gouged his eye and beat him with a fan to get him off her.

It was the third West Campus apartment Octavius Brown broke into that morning. In the other two, residents woke to find him exposing himself and masturbating inside their apartments.

Octavius Brown has roughly 30 cases since 2013. Of the 14 charges filed since 2021, 9 were dismissed or rejected.

Last time I covered this man he was getting arrested for robbing a gas station while out on bond for exposing himself and masturbating in public for the tenth time.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

Saving LA - Phase III

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

AUSTIN MAN charged with running a sex trafficking ring and dealing cocaine, meth, MDMA, and Adderall -- caught fleeing police in a car after firing a gun -- just walked out with a 2-year deal and watched more than a dozen felonies vanish in a single afternoon.

Kaden Caro has 62 cases in the Travis County courts. In 2024, DPS arrested him after a vehicle chase that ended in a crash and an injured victim. (See video below.)

Officers found him with a gun he wasn't allowed to have as a felon, plus cocaine, meth, Adderall, and Xanax he was selling. He was indicted on a stack of charges, including trafficking and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

This April, DA Garza's office let him plead to two counts and dropped almost everything else from that arrest and others:

• Sex trafficking - waived in the plea
• Dealing cocaine - dismissed
• Dealing meth - dismissed
• Dealing MDMA - no charges
• Dealing Adderall - dismissed
• Robbery - dismissed
• Gun as a felon, twice - dismissed
• Tampering with evidence - dismissed
• Unlawful restraint, exposing the victim to serious injury - dismissed
• Fleeing police in a vehicle, twice - dismissed
• A 2021 home invasion charged as burglary plus two aggravated assaults - dismissed

He pleaded to firing a gun and one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Back in 2023, Caro sat on an ankle monitor for an aggravated assault on a mother in a family violence case. A GPS company flagged him twice driving back onto her block, within 200 yards of where she lived, in violation of his protective order. The assault charge was no-billed. The protective order violations were quietly folded into the district court and then dismissed.

Across 62 cases and 15 years -- robberies, assaults, guns, drug dealing, a trafficking charge -- Caro has never once faced a jury. Every felony ended in a dismissal, a reduction, or a plea.

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[Giggling Ganon @GigglingGanon]

P*ssed off father addresses township board over the cover up of an accident where his wife his son were hit by the son of a friend of the chief of police.

This father is demanding accountability at a North Huntingdon Township Board of Commissioners meeting, but the backstory behind this confrontation is a chilling look at a family's fight against small-town corruption.

​On July 7, 2024, Kathleen Morcheid was driving with her 13-month-old son, Jordan, when a vehicle driven by 22-year-old Nolan Patrick Mullen crossed the center line, striking them nearly head-on. Accident reconstruction experts later testified that Mullen was flying at 90 MPH in a 35 MPH zone just five seconds before the collision.

​While the toddler miraculously survived without major injuries, Kathleen suffered life-altering harm, including a severe traumatic brain injury and permanent physical tremors that stripped her of her career as a nurse.

​Nicholas Carrozza, the child’s father seen at the podium, quickly uncovered what he alleges is a deep-seated conflict of interest. Local critics and public complaints allege that Mullen’s father was close personal friends with high-ranking local police officials.

Carrozza claims responding officers failed to perform standard on-scene sobriety testing, ignored witnesses who saw the driver laughing after the crash, and systematically stonewalled his family's Right-to-Know requests for body camera footage and basic police reports.

​The systemic frustration peaked when the District Attorney’s office offered Mullen a lenient plea deal—dismissing the felony chargesin exchange for probation and home electronic monitoring.

Fortunately, a Westmoreland County judge took the unusual step of rejecting the plea deal, stating home monitoring was entirely inappropriate for an offense requiring prison time.

Carrozza fought back with constitutional law. He openly called out Township Manager Harry Fulk for attempting to bypass him, exposed threats of arrest from the DA for asking questions, and vowed to strip the board members of their qualified immunity via a federal civil rights lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.

As of June 2026

​The fallout has turned into a massive First Amendment battle. Instead of transparent answers, local authorities hit Carrozza with a wave of criminal charges, ordering him to stand trial for misdemeanor counts of disrupting a public meeting, illegal recording in a police lobby, and endangering a public official after he posted an officer's photo online to criticize the department.

​Carrozza maintains that these charges are an unconstitutional overreach designed to criminalize citizen activism and silence a father demanding justice for his permanently injured wife and child. Meanwhile, the family home has fallen into foreclosure due to mounting medical debt.

As far as the driver.

Mullen's defense attorney requested a special pretrial hearing to challenge the state's evidence, specifically arguing that Morcheid's injuries did not legally meet the threshold of "serious bodily injury" and that the felony charge should be thrown out.

​Judge Stewart firmly rejected the defense's request to drop the felony charge. The judge noted that Morcheid's daily life remains entirely upended by her ongoing brain injury symptoms, headaches, speech issues, and physical tremors. The prosecution also successfully presented accident reconstruction data proving Mullen was driving 90 MPH in a 35 MPH zone just five seconds before the impact, which the court agreed was the absolute "definition of recklessness."

Because the defense's efforts to dismiss the charges failed, Judge Stewart ruled that the final determination of fault and the severity of the crash must be decided by a local jury. Mullen remains charged with felony aggravated assault by vehicle, misdemeanor reckless endangerment, and multiple traffic summaries as the case moves toward a formal criminal trial.

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is sitting on a potential windfall of as much as $11.6 billion from an initial investment of about $300 million into @SpaceX in 2019.

This would make it the single most successful investment the pension plan has ever made. The Teachers portfolio, which manages $279B in assets for about 346,000 members, includes working and retired teachers in Ontario. https://t.co/IEcclT7UWb

[Yashu Sharma 🍊 @heyitsyashu]

@SawyerMerritt @SpaceX Don’t forget this is the same province that tore up the starlink agreement because it was cool to protest anti-Elon

[austinreform @austinreforms]

$1 million was stolen from Austin Energy over 6 years—and nobody noticed. 🚨

An investigative report reveals a massive failure in oversight by @austintexasgov:

❌ The Scheme: One employee funneled cash to 30 fake vendors.
❌ The Failure: His supervisor approved over $750,000 in charges without checking a single vendor name or verifying if any work was actually done.

When city managers rubber-stamp approvals, your tax dollars become a vending machine for fraud. 🛑

More auditing needed. More transparency needed. They work for *us*.

Let's send a message. Throw every single council member out of office in November. Accountability is back on the menu. 🗳️💥

Note: (We rounded up to $1M in our graphic, but the exact number from the official City Auditor report is $980k).

What do you think about this lack of oversight? Let us know below. 💬 👇

#AustinReform #AustinTX #ATX #AustinEnergy #TaxpayerAccountability #CityHall

--

Sources & Evidence: 📋 City Auditor's Investigative Report: https://t.co/LLKaedPBnz
📺 KVUE News Investigation: https://t.co/OIQEBYTKnl

[austinreform @austinreforms]

You asked for details. We dug.

One vendor rose to the top of the $279M consultant pileup: WSP USA collected $30.1 million from the City of Austin across 2023–2025, classified as "CONSULTANT-OTHERS."

That's nearly 11% of the entire $279M audited pool going to a single firm — more than any other vendor, by a wide margin.

Three consecutive years. One department. No contract visible anywhere in the public record.
---

Showing Us the Money

Every WSP payment in 2023 and 2024 traces to a single source: department 6100, Austin Public Works. The descriptions — "Financial Management Services," "Construction Management Services," "Project Management Services," "Land Development and Planning/Engineering" — point to one large, ongoing engagement, not scattered project work.

The spending didn't hold steady. It exploded: $6M in 2023, $14.7M in 2024, $9.4M in 2025.

On February 1, 2024, a single check of $4,001,223 went out the door, described only as "PROJECT MANAGEMENT SERVICES." That one payment represented two-thirds of everything WSP billed the city in all of 2023.

There is no WSP contract in the city's public catalog — active or otherwise. Austin's procurement rules require competitive solicitation for professional services contracts above certain thresholds.

The March 2026 city audit found 82% of sampled consultant contracts lacked any documented justification for the engagement. Without a contract in the public record, there is no way to confirm whether this $30M engagement was ever competitively bid, sole-sourced, or authorized under any documented exception.

---

Enter the Lobbyists

In 2022, WSP retained Greenberg Traurig — one of Texas's most powerful lobbying firms — to register two lobbyists with the City of Austin: Demetrius McDaniel (registered March 2022, terminated July 2022) and Elizabeth Hadley (registered August 2022, terminated July 2023).

McDaniel's registration lasted four months and terminated before WSP's spending accelerated. Hadley's is the telling one: her registration ended July 2023 — the same year WSP billed $6M, and the year before billing nearly tripled to $14.7M.

The pattern: lobby to get in the door, terminate the registration, collect the money.

---

Who is Demetrius McDaniel?

McDaniel isn't a minor player. He's ranked #7 among roughly 2,000 registered Texas lobbyists and has held Top 10 status since 2003. Greenberg Traurig lists him in their lobbying Hall of Fame.

He also has a documented personal financial relationship with Sheryl Cole — now Texas State Representative for HD-46, and formerly an Austin City Council member who chaired the Comprehensive Planning and Transportation Committee, which directly oversaw Public Works spending.

The Austin Bulldog reported that while Cole was a sitting council member and McDaniel was already a lobbyist, the two co-invested in over 100 vacant lots across Austin subdivisions — Crystal Brook, Las Cimas, and Northridge Park. The Coles sold most of their shares by end of 2007.

McDaniel registered to lobby for WSP in 2022 — years after the real estate partnership and after Cole had left the council. No allegation of an active quid pro quo is made here. What the public record shows is a lobbyist who built a personal financial relationship with the chair of the committee governing Public Works — and who later represented a firm now collecting $30M from that same department, with no contract to show for it.

---

WSP's Hands in Other Cookie Jars?

The city isn't the only government paying WSP in Austin right now.

TxDOT selected WSP as one of the prime engineering consultants for the I-35 Capital Express Central project — a $4.5 billion, eight-mile reconstruction running directly through downtown Austin, concurrent with the city engagement. The specific value of WSP's state contract isn't publicly disclosed.

One firm. Two governments. The same corridor. No visible contract on the city side.

---

A Note

We're volunteers, and fallible. If we missed something, or need to add context -- comment and let us know.

[Lord of Laser @ReformedFA]

@JenRobichaux 45 minute commute that should be 15 minutes is worse for the environment. The children at @rethink35 are idiots.

[austinreform @austinreforms]

Austin spends more on homelessness than Denver and Nashville... *combined*.

And heading into 2026, the Homeless Strategy Office (HSO) is demanding $101M for annual operations 👉 https://t.co/bGzoR71Wo8

While blowing 9 figures a year on operations, the city is trying to force a brand-new $220M housing bond onto our November ballot. They are hoping you won’t notice that over $170M is still sitting unspent from the $350M bond we gave them in 2022!

Peer cities use fiscal discipline; Austin demands a relentless taxpayer double-dip for a broken pipeline with zero visible results on our streets.

Piling hundreds of millions in new bond debt onto our property taxes won't fix the problem. VOTE NO on the 2026 bond package. 🛑

#KeepAustinAffordable #ATX #atxcouncil

[Jen Robichaux @JenRobichaux]

Excuse me @KirkPWatson why is the Austin City Council violating Ordinance NO. 20250724-105?

Part 5 states that Council Members should submit items *before* the Draft Agenda is posted. It also states that the Draft Agenda should be posted *13 days before* the meeting.

As such, the Agenda for May 28th should *not* include any "Items from Council" which were submitted later May 14th.

Yet there are *9 items* submitted by Council Members after the draft was posted, as evidenced by their absence in the draft agenda and their mention in the 'summary of changes' memo.

*There are a total of 111 items on this agenda*. It's only been a week since the last agenda, which **also** contained seismic items and **too little time** for community input.

It's hard to believe it when you say that you stand for transparency. Your actions speak much louder.

This pattern of disregard for the rules and procedures of City Council proceedings is unacceptable.

> Austin City Council meeting agenda for May 28, 2026 https://t.co/o0w6hGQ6PA

> Ordinance No. 20250724-105 https://t.co/LFx00ZO1Uy

[Lord of Laser @ReformedFA]

@ATXVideos @KUTnathan @CapMetroATX Homeless...the ditch equal to the next onramp streams the worst! @KUTnathan finally throwing the towel after complicity destroying Austin, priceless lmao

[Austin Videos @ATXVideos]

Translation: a homeless individual with a track record longer than a CVS receipt set the @CapMetroATX bikes on fire, and now nobody can ride the bikes.

P.S., no lawsuits will be filed against us for this tweet, and no investigation will conclude that the cause of the fire was anything other than the aforementioned. Please, by all means, prove us wrong.

[Lord of Laser @ReformedFA]

@JenRobichaux $120mm for office???

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

Austin is measurably more dangerous and lawless than it was before DA Garza and the pandemic.