Independent News Drop

KELI From Inkwell, this is the Amarillo News Drop. I'm Keli, with Hast.

HAST Good morning. Two arrests in Randall County this week after a theft ring that started in April. Jessica McKillip and Leticia Delgado are booked into the county jail — they were tracked down after the Amarillo Police Department spotted one of their stolen trailers being towed. Officers found additional stolen property inside the vehicle. The original report came in April when two trailers went missing from Cemetery Road. Investigators say the pair had been moving stolen items for months before the traffic stop caught them.

KELI The money story this morning is water. The Texas Water Development Board just handed the City of Amarillo sixty million dollars in low-interest financing through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. That money is earmarked for the Hollywood Road wastewater treatment facility — planning and design work to upgrade the plant. City Assistant Manager Donny Hooper says Amarillo will save over eighteen million dollars over the life of the loan by using the state's below-market rates. The city has also applied for another sixty million for the same work at River Road. Both plants are aging infrastructure — the state's bet is that upgrades now prevent costlier failures later.

HAST On the counter here — the simple read is "city gets a grant." The structural fact is that Amarillo's wastewater systems are old enough that state agencies are willing to subsidize their replacement. The predictable move: watch whether the city applies that sixty million to the Hollywood facility first or tries to split it between both plants. If they split it, both upgrades stall. If they focus, one plant gets modern and the other stays on borrowed time.

KELI Heat across the Panhandle this weekend. MyHighPlains is tracking low hundreds — upper 90s to low 100s through Sunday, with southerly winds pushing haze across the region. Tomorrow's looking similar. Sunday night is the break point — cooler air moves in Monday.

HAST One infrastructure note on the state level. Texas Minute reports a natural gas-powered data center is in planning stages for West Texas. The RRC is tracking the project because it'll tap state power and gas supplies — no financial details or timeline yet, but it signals the Panhandle and West Texas are in the hunt for major compute projects. Energy-heavy industry betting on available power and transmission corridors.

KELI Tax-free weekend runs through midnight Sunday in Texas. Clothing, school supplies, and most shoes under a hundred dollars are exempt from the state's eight and a quarter percent sales tax. If you're buying for the school year, today and tomorrow are the windows.

HAST One date marker. Sixteen years ago today, in 2010, a mudslide in Zhugqu County in northwestern China killed more than fourteen hundred people — one of the deadliest landslides on record.

KELI That's the Amarillo News Drop. Full script and sources at inkwell.wiki/news/amarillo.

KELI Before we close, a word from Inkwell. This drop comes from the same workshop as Gil's Intelligent Version — the Bible, re-ordered into the sequence events actually happened, and retranslated from the original languages.

HAST Its rule is simple: no author, only method. The full archive is at inkwell dot wiki, slash giv.