AUSTIN, Texas — The Austin Independent School District's headquarters has been located at 1111 West Sixth Street for more than 25 years. But that's about to change.

AISD said their move to 4000 South Interstate Highway 35, at the northwest corner of I-35 and East Ben White Boulevard, is underway. The move is expected to be completed by September.

Staff from three district facilities will be co-located at the nine-story, 142,000-square-foot facility at the new location. The district said the new spot will allow them to better serve the community and students and "boost collaboration, efficiency and customer service."

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The district sold Carruth Administration Center on Sixth Street and the Baker Center on Avenue B in 2017. The new headquarters property was purchased in its entirety with real estate proceeds from those sales, according to AISD.

AISD said because construction and moving dates may change, anyone who is planning to go to a central office department is asked to call that department first to determine if it has moved. Visitors may also call the main phone number at 512-414-1700.

For more information on the new AISD headquarters, click here.

WATCH: New plans to create safer routes to Austin schools

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AUSTIN, Texas — A lawsuit to stop the city of Austin from collecting millions of dollars in property taxes for Project Connect has been dismissed.

Project Connect is the voter-approved, taxpayer-funded effort to revamp public transit across Austin. It has faced opposition from groups that say it was a “bait-and-switch scheme” as the scale of the project has shrunk and costs have gone up.

Plaintiffs said city leaders need to stop the tax, rethink the project in a feasible way and go back to people to vote for it in a bond election.

Bill Aleshire, the attorney for the group opposing the project, said the decision will “very likely” be appealed.

Aleshire said the class-action lawsuit was based on a “relatively new and untested provision” in Texas Tax Code 16.05. He said it strengthens taxpayer protections and can stop the city from collecting its property tax if the tax rate is miscalculated.

“By losing this case, so far, the court is saying that the law doesn’t provide that taxpayer protection,” Aleshire said on Saturday. “That court decision will entice the Legislature to fix this once and for all.”

Aleshire said the 2024 tax rate the Austin City Council approved on Aug. 14 is miscalculated and must be removed. He said what started as a $7 billion plan that included 30 miles of rail and a route to the airport and downtown now has a more than an $11 billion price tag and half the routes.

Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed an appeal with the Texas Supreme Court in a legal battle over Project Connect’s funding structure. It comes after the 15th Court of Appeals dismissed a previous plea from Paxton that froze a trial over the transit project’s funding.

While the appeal is pending, bonds can’t be issued for Project Connect and it is unlikely a contractor would agree to a construction contract with no guaranteed source of payment, according to Aleshire.

“Once again, I think the Texas Legislature will be interested in stopping Project Connect from becoming a model for bypassing bond elections (where the tax expires automatically when the bonds are paid off) and, instead, mis-using tax-rate increases to the General Fund that put a tax in place in perpetuity regardless of what changes the city makes to what voters approved in exchange for the tax increase,” said Aleshire.

The Austin Transit Partnership, which oversees Project Connect, called the lawsuit “baseless,” saying the money saved up now will be used in upcoming years for future construction.

AUSTIN, Texas — A section of South Lakeshore Boulevard in southeast Austin is closed for repairs due to a large sinkhole.

On Saturday, the Austin Police Department said the 1800 block to 1900 block, near Town Creek Drive, will be shut until further notice.

The hole, which is about 10 feet across, likely opened up due to an influx of rain, APD said. John Beachy said the hole is related to ongoing utility work in the area.

A temporary plate will be installed over the hole for safety until crews can fix the road, Beachy said.

No other information is available at this time.

MOSCOW, Russia — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologized to his Azerbaijani counterpart for what he called a “tragic incident” following the crash of an Azerbaijani airliner in Kazakhstan that killed 38 people, but stopped short of acknowledging that Moscow was responsible. 

Putin's apology came as allegations mounted that the plane had been shot down by Russian air defenses attempting to deflect a Ukrainian drone strike near Grozny, the regional capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya. 

An official Kremlin statement issued Saturday said that air defense systems were firing near Grozny airport as the airliner “repeatedly” attempted to land there on Wednesday. It did not explicitly say one of these hit the plane. 

The statement said Putin apologized to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev “for the fact that the tragic incident occurred in Russian airspace.”

The readout said Russia has launched a criminal probe into the incident, and Azerbaijani state prosecutors have arrived in Grozny to participate. The Kremlin also said that “relevant services” from Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are jointly investigating the crash site near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan. 

The plane was flying from Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, to Grozny when it turned toward Kazakhstan, hundreds of kilometers (miles) across the Caspian Sea from its intended destination, and crashed while making an attempt to land. There were 29 survivors.

According to a readout of the call provided by Aliyev’s press office, the Azerbaijani president told Putin that the plane was subject to "external physical and technical interference," although he also stopped short of blaming Russian air defenses.

Aliyev noted that the plane had multiple holes in its fuselage and that the occupants had sustained injuries “due to foreign particles penetrating the cabin mid-flight.”

He said that a team of international experts had begun probing the incident at Azerbaijan's initiative, but provided no details. Earlier this week, the Azerbaijani Prosecutor General's office confirmed that investigators from Azerbaijan are working in Grozny. 

On Friday, a U.S. official and an Azerbaijani minister made separate statements blaming the crash on an external weapon, echoing those made by aviation experts who blamed the crash on Russian air defense systems responding to a Ukrainian attack. 

Passengers and crew who survived the crash told Azerbaijani media that they heard loud noises on the aircraft as it was circling over Grozny.

Dmitry Yadrov, head of Russia’s civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia, said Friday that as the plane was preparing to land in Grozny in deep fog, Ukrainian drones were targeting the city, prompting authorities to close the area to air traffic.

Yadrov said that after the captain made two unsuccessful attempts to land, he was offered other airports but decided to fly to Aktau. 

Earlier in the week, Rosaviatsia had cited unspecified early evidence as showing that a bird strike led to an emergency on board. 

In the days following the crash, Azerbaijan Airlines blamed “physical and technical interference” and announced the suspension of flights to several Russian airports. It didn’t say where the interference came from or provide any further details.

If proven that the plane crashed after being hit by Russian fire, it would be the second deadly civil aviation accident linked to fighting in Ukraine. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed with a Russian surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people aboard, as it flew over the area in eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014.

Russia has denied responsibility, but a Dutch court in 2022 convicted two Russians and a pro-Russia Ukrainian man for their role in downing the plane with an air defense system brought into Ukraine from a Russian military base.

Following Wednesday’s suspension of flights from Baku to Grozny and nearby Makhachkala, Azerbaijan Airlines announced Friday that it would also halt service to eight more Russian cities. 

Several other airlines have made similar announcements since the crash. Kazakhstan’s Qazaq Air on Friday said it would stop flying from Astana to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains for a month.

Turkmenistan Airlines, the Central Asian country’s flagship carrier, on Saturday halted flights to Moscow for at least a month, citing safety concerns. Earlier this week, Israel’s El Al carrier suspended service from Tel Aviv to the Russian capital, citing “developments in Russia’s airspace.” 

AUSTIN, Texas — Years ago, what did you imagine the future would look like? Maybe like "The Jetsons," "Blade Runner" or "Back to the Future Part II"?

Those views of the future are far from what we see today.

As we approach the year 2025, we wanted to see what local experts in the past thought life in Austin would look like. We took a deep dive into the KVUE archives and found a news series from 1980 that peered into the future to forecast how Austin would change by the year 2000.

Former KVUE reporter Rick Hull interviewed some experts to hear their predictions about Austin. And although we're almost 25 years past that date, we discovered things in 2000 and today are quite a bit different than people thought they'd be.

In one report, Hull explored what Downtown Austin might look like in the year 2000.

"Architect Sinclair Black sees this as a section of our downtown area, where the buildings are no more four stories tall, built right to the edge of property lines but open in the center for the public, with parks and playgrounds and public spaces," Hull said.

It was an intriguing vision for a future downtown. But, as we know, high-rise buildings and a seemingly endless number of cranes dominate Austin's skyline today.

In another story from 1980, City of Austin transportation planners made predictions about how people living in suburbs would get downtown in 2000.

"The person would probably be picked up by a very small bus which served that residential area, and they would be brought into a local or area terminal,” the planners predicted. “And from that terminal, they would board a larger bus, which would then bring them into the Central Business District.”

City planners also predicted that light rail transit would become an economic practicality to move large numbers of people to and from popular areas.

“We could either construct those so that they ran in the air like a monorail system, or in areas like the University of Texas and the Capitol Complex, they might run below-grade underground like a subway system," according to the news report.

A few of those predictions were generally correct. Buses still play a large role in Austin's transportation system, and we have a limited light rail. But a subway system? Not yet.

Not every prediction was wrong. Hull said computers would likely take over our daily lives by the beginning of the 21st Century. Personal computers – only in their infancy in 1980 – have indeed become a vital part of our lives today.

But other predictions, like the guess that many of us would be living in round houses with tiny kitchens and shag carpeting? Well, many are probably thankful that one didn't come true.