A Cedar Park restaurant offering traditional Italian cuisine is celebrating its first year in business.

Dough It Up—which will open a Leander location later this fall—offers a wide variety of salads, sandwiches, pastas and pizza. Owner Mimoza Hajmeli emphasized that the restaurant uses "clean" ingredients and draws on her experience in the Italian food industry.

Respecting the craft: The menu incorporates traditional approaches to dishes, like the Lasagna alla Bolognese. The dish is cooked in the style of Hajmeli's home region of Emilia-Romagna as it features housemade pasta sheets with béchamel sauce and no ricotta.

The drink menu: Dough It Up offers wines sourced exclusively from Italy and selected to complement the restaurant’s dishes. While most of the wines are organic, two are biodynamic—planted organically using holistic techniques like hand-picking.

Looking ahead: The restaurant will celebrate a year of business in Cedar Park Oct. 25 and plans to open a Leander location along Ronald Reagan later this fall.

• 1540 Cypress Creek Road, Ste. 106, Cedar Park

• 15609 Ronald Reagan Blvd., Leander

Check out three key transportation projects that will impact the way people get around the Leander-Liberty Hill area.

• Ronald Reagan Boulevard lane widening: The ongoing county-led project will see the widening of approximately 7 miles from FM 3405 to Hwy. 29, including separated northbound and southbound roadways. New traffic signals are operational at Ronald Reagan Boulevard and Santa Rita Boulevard.

• Freedom River Parkway East and West: Upcoming construction of new east-west roadway connections from Hwy. 29 to RM 1869 and from Bagdad Road, CR 279 to Hwy. 29, improving Liberty Hill bypass connectivity.

• CR 214 extension: Upcoming work includes the construction of two bidirectional lanes to extend CR 214 from Lariat Loop-South Hemingway Loop to US 183 over the San Gabriel River.

Additions to Leander High School, a new H-E-B in Buda and an apartment in Austin are among the five most expensive projects filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation in the metro this week.

1. Leander ISD high school modernization ($68 million): This project involves building additions and renovations at Leander High School.

2. H-E-B ($61.2 million): A new H-E-B grocery store is coming to Buda, with construction set to begin next spring.

3. The Ridge Apartments ($11.8 million): This project involves the construction of a four-story multifamily building

4. Residence Inn ($11 million): The hotel brand is coming to Hutto, with construction set to begin in December.

5. Texas State University pitching lab and batting cages ($4 million): This project includes an addition to the existing softball pitching facility and a new pre-engineered metal building to house baseball's pitching and hitting facility.

Austin Community College trustees unanimously approved a tax rate of $0.103643 per $100 of valuation, up from $0.1034 last year. Because property values fell, the average bill will drop about 2.2%, and the average homestead bill will drop about 1%. The owner of an average home will pay about $557, down from $562 last year.

The details: The new rate is below the college's no-new-revenue rate, meaning it will collect less from existing property. District officials said the slight rate increase is tied to debt on a $770 million bond voters approved in 2022. Property taxes fund about 67% of the college's $583 million budget.

What's next: Tax bills typically go out in the fall. They are due Feb. 1, 2027, because Jan. 31 falls on a Sunday.

The Texas Education Agency is asking state lawmakers to spend $97.3 billion on K-12 education initiatives and staffing in the next two years, up from about $91 billion in the current state budget.

The details: During a Sept. 29 hearing on the agency's legislative appropriations request, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath noted that the TEA is "largely a pass-through vehicle to fund schools around the state of Texas." This means that while funding would be allocated to the agency under Article III of the state budget, the majority of that money would be sent to school districts, outside of funds used to pay TEA staff and cover operations for associated entities, such as the State Board of Education.

The TEA is asking for about $49.6 billion for fiscal year 2027-28 and $47.7 billion for fiscal year 2028-29, totaling $97.3 billion for the 2028-29 biennium. Morath said those amounts would "preserve 100% of all funding for public schools" through the Foundation School Program, which is the state's main funding source for K-12 schools, and other initiatives.