A Google self-driving car drove itself around Austin and across Texas over the last week. State laws don't yet appear to address the futuristic technology.

The agency that oversees the state’s 911 system and poison control centers has both too much money and not nearly enough. What’s more, every Texan with a phone is paying to keep it that way.

A new advocacy group is hoping to get lawmakers and the public as worked up about transportation funding this session as they are about water.

Members of the Texas House are in talks to add some money to public education in the current two-year budget. The Texas Legislature cut $5.4 billion from education last session. 

As they do every two years, state lawmakers are preparing to pay billions in lingering bills. What is usually an easy process could become challenging as House Democrats plan to push to restore public education cuts made in 2011.

Soon after their replacements were sworn in last month, eight former House members registered as lobbyists with the Texas Ethics Commission.

While members of the Texas Legislature can no longer act as lobbyists before state agencies, plenty of lawmakers still manage to lobby local governments. Others find work that critics would classify as lobbying by another name.

A planned interstate highway stretching from South Texas to Michigan remains decades away, but Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday that lawmakers should find more money for the project and ones like it.

The Texas Department of Transportation is two years away from a severe drop in funding unless lawmakers find more cash, agency officials said at a budget hearing Monday.

At first glance, the first drafts of the House and Senate budgets leave billions of dollars on the table. A closer look shows there may not be as much left as many have hoped.

The $1.8 billion in tax relief that Gov. Rick Perry called for this week was short on details, but the few that are out there are already sparking questions.

The Texas Department of Transportation is taking proposals for privatizing its information technology system, part of a larger movement by the agency toward outsourcing many of its functions.

Ongoing school finance litigation will likely prevent the Legislature from discussing education funding issues this session, two Republican budget leaders said at a TribLive event Thursday. 

As lawmakers look for a way to fix infrastructure crumbling under the weight of a drilling boom, talk of reducing the tax money that feeds the state's Rainy Day Fund is drawing attention. 

In his seventh State of the State address, Gov. Rick Perry ignored controversial issues and urged state lawmakers to do the nitty gritty work of government: fund water projects, build more roads and improve education.