The City of Alexandria’s lead arborist Phil Jubert resigned Friday, two hours after a tense community meeting on tree preservation amid plans to build a new George Mason Elementary School on the current site, multiple people familiar with the matter said. Jubert’s departure as urban forestry manager in the Department of Recreation, Parks & Cultural Activities, at which he served 18 months, corresponds with community-raised alarms around the perceived lack of transparency from the city and ACPS concerning tree removals. Although ACPS organized various virtual community meetings to hear feedback on its plans to modernize George Mason, it fell on one private resident sifting through the 124-page permit application to unearth that as many as 108 trees were slated for removal, or 55% of all trees on the school property, according to the project’s permit.

In a rare, if not unprecedented move, a Travis County district judge this week blocked $440 million in road bonds that Hays County voters approved last fall, finding that the county violated the Texas Open Meetings Act. Judges generally are reluctant to undo voter decisions, said Austin attorney Bill Aleshire, who represented the plaintiffs. Other lawyers agree. “I’ve seen and read all the cases on this,” said Houston Attorney Joe Larsen, an Open Meetings Act expert on the board of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. “I’ve never heard of a bond issue that’s been reversed” based on open-meetings violations. “It took courage for the court to do.”

Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company with a presence in thousands of communities across the U.S., has stopped agencies across the country from searching cameras inside Illinois, California, and Virginia, 404 Media has learned. The dramatic moves come after 404 Media revealed local police departments were repeatedly performing lookups around the country on behalf of ICE, a Texas officer searched cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion, and lawmakers recently signed a new law in Virginia. Ordinarily Flock allows agencies to opt into a national lookup database, where agencies in one state can access data collected in another, as long as they also share their own data. This practice violates multiple state laws which bar the sharing of ALPR data out of state or it being accessed for immigration or healthcare purposes.