Television commercials are back to pitching deodorant and dishwasher detergent instead of trashing politicians with out-of-context quotes and embarrassing pictures while ominous music plays in the background. The election must be over.

But now the real work begins. Congress is back in Washington in a lame-duck session, staring down the fiscal cliff – a dangerous cocktail of big tax hikes and drastic spending cuts that could send an already soft U.S. economy back into recession.

Those of us on the border are watching closely to get a sense of how our issues are going to figure into the next Congress and what priority level they’ll take in the administration.

So here’s a post-election to-do list straight from the border for the president and Congress:

Here’s my hypothesis¹: The abundance of cheap domestic natural gas – what I’m calling the Natural Gas Revolution - makes “renewable” energy sources like wind and solar financially untenable, and possibly unnecessary, for the next 90 years.²

I can’t prove my hypothesis because energy pricing is complicated.

Figuring out the "price" of energy derived from traditional fuels such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear is not as straightforward as it may seem. I’ve made an attempt based on a conversation with an official at CPS Energy in San Antonio. But every financial assessment depends on a series of assumptions: from the future price of input fuels, to regulatory changes, to models that take into account the depreciation of assets such as a nuclear or coal plant.

We know that energy produced from nuclear and coal plants has relatively low prices, partly because, in the case of my local utility, it bore the cost of building the nuclear and coal plants long ago. As a result, we can afford that energy. We also like the price of natural gas, because both plant construction and current market prices are low.

On the other side of the ledger, my local utility in recent years added solar- and wind-derived energy to its energy portfolio, both of which cost considerably more. At a free-market price, wind power would be about 50 percent more expensive than natural-gas energy, but a federal government Production Tax Credit (PTC)³ brings the wind-energy price within the range of natural-gas-derived energy.

GEAA takes aim at one of the backbones of development: sewer systems.

The Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance unveiled an interactive map Friday that documents sewage spills in a 15-county region over the aquifer during the past eight years. Like most visual data, it’s rather more persuasive than the sheer numbers alone – all those black dots and gray circles on top of the recharge zone, where San Antonio's main source of water meets the land. According to records the researchers collected, more than 800,000 gallons of raw sewage – equal to roughly 2.5 acre feet – were spilled in the recharge zone in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s Region 13, which includes Bexar, between 2008 and May 2012.

The sewage-spill map is just one piece of the research GEAA is conducting into human waste disposal over the aquifer. The organization, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization, is exploring whether centralized sewer systems such as SAWS are the best solution in the ecologically sensitive area over the Edwards contributing and recharge zones. GEAA Executive Director Analisa Peace suggested Friday that methods such as septic systems might make more sense. But developers tend to disfavor them, she said, since regulations allow fewer residences per acre on septic systems than on centralized utility systems.

The Houston-Galveston Area Council's Livable Centers Program helps communities develop livable communities built around daily life.

A Pattern Language, the 1977 community planning guide by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, describes an important neighborhood design pattern called Activity Nodes. Their description begins with a complaint: “One of the greatest problems in existing communities is the fact that the available public life in them is spread so thin that it has no impact on the community. It is not in any real sense available to the community.” San Antonio overhauled its City Master Plan three years after the publication of those words, but most would agree that the problem articulated by Alexander and his colleagues holds true here today.