Texas’ Senate District 28 includes 41 counties, from Wheeler County down into Taylor County. The seat to represent the district in the state legislature is on the ballot in the November midterm elections.
Riley Rodriquez is a small business owner in Abilene. He is the first Hispanic Democrat to run for the seat in 30 years.
Rodriquez sat down with Allison Diaz from KTTZ’s partner station KACU to discuss his campaign and priorities.
You can find KTTZ’s interview with Rodriquez’s Republican opponent, incumbent State Senator Charles Perry here.
You can find more coverage on the midterm elections here.
Early voting runs Oct. 19-30 and Election Day is Nov. 3.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity:
Allison Diaz: Thank you, Riley, for being here today.
Riley Rodriquez: Thank you for having me.
Allison Diaz: Alright. What do you think the most important issues of the election are?
Riley Rodriquez: This is an easy one at this point. It's data centers. It quickly became the very important issue. If you had asked me six months or eight months ago or a year ago, I would have said it was the vouchers. Funnily enough, we're in a unique moment where they managed to upset both sides twice in less than two years. First with vouchers, and then once everybody kind of started to figure out what these data centers were about, and that kind of just snowballed.
One of the reasons I decided to run was honestly because of a few things, but mostly data centers. And I thought when I first started that it was going to be just kind of one of those like, ‘If I win, I'll work on this like in on the back burner,’ because I believed what what our politicians were running on, which is like jobs and and revenue, but I knew the the back end of it, but I just didn't think people were going to pay that much attention to it till long, long down the road. And boy, was I wrong. Because immediately, the first event I did was in Seymour, Texas, and it was at a bar there, Seymour, Texas; I had like 20 people show up, and that's all we talked about was data centers.
So it's definitely data centers, but to put a finer point on it, it is what they represent in our communities and our current like political culture, which is the bulldozing of anybody's right to even say anything. And then when you bring it up, you're called crazy or a conspiracy theorist, because you care about the fact that while you know the real estate lobby and the real estate market makes money hand over fist, regular Texans are getting put out on the street. So, yeah, the biggest issue I think is getting our right to control what happens in our own community back this election.
AD: Do you also feel like that is the most commonly voiced concern when you talk to voters as well?
RR: Right. Yeah, I think that people have their own things when they come and talk to me. It's mostly water, you know. People want to talk about water, people want to talk about the massive tax breaks. But when we, you know, when we kind of get down to it, it's the fact that– it's just really we didn't have a say in it, and what's becoming more clear to people is not only did you not have a say in it, you're not really allowed to. There are several laws, and that have been in place for years, some since the '90s, that essentially take any right of you, any right for us as Texans to actually control things. We can like have our public meetings and they'll pat us on the head, but at the end of the day, that platform's getting built whether you like it or not.
You know, right now we're dealing with the TCEQ permit. I don't know if you've seen any about that, but they're going to build a gas plant, and they sent out a notice to people who are going to be out there, and letting them know, in their words, ‘substantial amounts of air pollutants.’ And of course, we have a problem with that, and so we got our representative, Stan Lambert, to reach out and do a public hearing over it, and that's all well and good. But the problem is, is that rebar is in the ground; those machines are built. So, regardless of what you, regardless of what happens at that public hearing, and we can ask for things, and there are things that we can do, but it's all about sweetening the toxic fumes that you're still going to breathe in. And basically, how much can you pay me to do that? When I worked in the oil field, we worked around H2S gas a lot, and we were on a well one day that had high levels of that. And if you're not familiar with H2S, when it is deadly is when you cannot smell it. So once you can't smell it anymore, you're done. And the safety protocol for when H2S gets toxic is to leave. Whoever goes down, leave them and get out. That's the safety protocol, because if you go, then you die, and and that is how that works. You want to know how much they paid me extra to be on that well? My life was worth $5 extra an hour, and that is a simplified version of what this is. Which is we're still going to build it, dude. You're still going to get sulfuric acid in the air and in the mist, only five miles down the road, but we'll let you yell at us about it for a minute. And that is a cause of our state legislature being three steps ahead for corporations and two steps behind for us as a public.
AD: So, you've said before that you want to put a pause on future development of AI data centers, but hesitate to claim that current development can be stopped since it's so progressed already. What is the most pressing aspect of AI that you think state lawmakers can actually practically address?
RR: I think that the first thing that we can practically address when it comes to– Now, to be clear, are you asking about the technology AI or data centers? Data centers, okay. Practically address it right off the bat? We're stripping away sales tax exemptions and property taxes, our property tax abatements like that. We need to strip them down, and there's no reason why a heavy user like that should have a sales tax exemption on their electricity. And I'd like to just throw this out there for those listeners: everything that Abbott is saying, he is taking from the populist platform last year. So if you want somebody who's going to run and actually run this thing, right? You should vote for the people who already had the idea. Those sales tax exemptions ideas, all those little things that they're thrown out there, have been taken off of the populace platform from last year when we were talking about this. So that's practically what we can do now.
And I'm gonna give the credit where it's due here: I've had meetings with the mayor of Haskell, and she's a great lady. And in our talks, I agree with her, and I would like to be a part of this as if I can. Is we need to establish a state task force on data centers to analyze these things, and it should be made up of representatives who haven't taken money from data centers. I don't care what your intentions are. I don't care if there's an R or a D by your name. If there's a data center contribution in your political campaign contributions, that's a conflict of interest. We don't let the father who's a judge of somebody in criminal court preside over that. We shouldn't let somebody who's taken 10 grand or 500,000, like our governor, from decide on how we're going to do this. And secondly, on the task force thing, these corporations are are hoping to to engage in what's called regulatory capture, which is that what they're going to do is ‘You let us self police and we'll create regulations that work for us because we have billions of dollars in capital, but we'll we'll pretty much eliminate effectively eliminate any competition that could come out of that.’ And I just, as somebody who does enjoy the free market, I like people to have to innovate, right? And we have experienced the – I don't know if I can say this word on here – so we have experienced a poorer quality of product as Americans. And those few things right there, I think, can be done immediately.
AD: So locally, so many people have been priced out of housing. What type of guardrails do you think should be placed on the data center development to give breathing room to the housing crisis specifically?
RR: As far as the guardrails go for data center development, I think that the first thing that data centers should be required to do is a study on what these what the – specifically in rural areas. We're having two different conversations, I think, at the state level and at the local level, right? And what I point out to people is, it's one thing to build these things out in like Fort Worth and Dallas and stuff, where they can take a hit of like 12,000 new people, and it doesn't really – some prices will go up, there'll be some fluctuation, but there's the the infrastructure is there built out in the suburbs. And all of that stuff, right? Like you can, workers can stay in all these small suburbs around there. They're fairly close.
When you come to rural Texas, you have Abilene, who has a whole bunch of hotels and apartments, and then you have nothing outside of it. And now you're going to dump – not just 7,000, because our own city officials here have made the point that, ‘Well, we thought we could handle 7,000.’ Yeah, but you didn't know that Shackleford was going to do it. You didn't know that Nolan was going to do it. Haskell was going to do it. There's people out even further, and none of those, you know, in Haskell. In my conversation with the mayor, they're seeing the same pricing, and it's price gouging. People don't want to talk about it. People would rather make it an amalgamation. But the fact is, there's a lot of greed running around in our local communities, and us as citizens in Texas don't have the right to look at the real guardrails that we need. We literally can't. People have said to me, ‘Well, you can't blame it on the data centers because it's it's landlords' price gouging.’ Well, yeah, but it's actually illegal for us to do anything about that, like literally. And price gouging legislation doesn't exist for the real estate market.
So when it comes to data centers, if this is what we're going to work with, right? Because let's not pretend like the real estate lobby in Texas isn't massive. So if this is what we're going to work under, then a data center should be required to plan before they profit. Okay? The mayor of Haskell has asked several times, and she's in talks with the, – I'm not gonna speak to what they have necessarily worked on, but she's brought up ideas like, ‘If what you want is to build out this community and help these people in this area. I don't want RV parks. I want modular homes. I want actual things that when your workers leave, my residents can use, or the new residents have come in.’ But instead, what they're experiencing out there is a Venezuelan family living in a duplex, right? What we're experiencing here, people I've met at the fair, a woman explained to me that it's her, her husband, her two kids, and then their family and their two kids because they can't afford to get a house. And those issues for a long time have gone ignored, because the fact of the matter is, it's easy to be broke in rural Texas, right? You can coast on a 15% poverty rate in your district because it don't cost all that [much]. You can make $12 and live in Haskell, Texas, but you can't do that anymore. And If what we're going to do is let these things come in here because they already have opened the door to them, then we actually need some guardrails that help people after they leave, not just give the hotel owners you know $500 a night.
AD: Okay. Another concern that's been expressed is about the way that the centers impact power and water. What do you think the state should be doing to address the water and electricity scarcity issues
RR: Again, you know, it's planning before profit. I think a big thing that we could do, and what I would have liked to have seen was: all of these committee meetings about three years ago, those that haven't been developed, and you asked me about this earlier, how I hesitate to say stopping the ones that are working right now because we have to be realistic. And if you were to try to do something like that, while – hey you know I'm on board, let's fight you know tooth and nail, but realistically, you're going to open up the state to billions and billions of dollars of lawsuits, and it's not going to get any of the things that we want done done. So, on that regard, what we have to do is pause the future development on anything that hasn't started yet, or buying things, and the state can start to really look at the scale of these things. Do we need a hyperscale? Did you know that if you had a million dollars – if you had a million square feet in data center and a million square feet to power it, it would be 44 acres. 44 acres. So you need 1,100 acres to do this. And it's not to run our Facebook, right? So as a when it comes to the energy scarcity, the fact is we don't have the infrastructure, so don't overload the infrastructure until you have built the infrastructure. And one way to do that is to say you're going to have to scale them down. We're not doing hyperscalers; we're going to have to bring those down. So number one, we're not going to have to build – like out in Knickerbocker, Texas, they want to put at the end of the day 480 gas turbines with 180-foot stacks out there, in those people's community. That's insane. That is insane. And maybe we wouldn't have to have that. Maybe we could require that – no, we should – require these data centers to build to scale not only to their community but to our power grid.
And when it comes to our water, we have an issue. And Childress just did this, and everybody's touting this like it's a good deal. So I want to bring this up. So data center bought land out in Childress, and because of rural capture, they're able to now they had and they tapped two wells into the Greenbelt Aquifer. That's their water now, and they're saying, ‘Well, we're going to send it back to the city.’ And that's great. But they can also do whatever they want with it, and so it doesn't have to just go back to the city. They can send some to the city, and then they could sell some more. And now they're selling water out of that aquifer, and we can't do anything about it. So when people talk about like protecting our water supplies, we are going to have to have some tough conversations about how we're going to let our water be depleted like this. We don't get a lot of rain out here, and you can't drill a well outside going towards Shackelford County. We have to have stronger regulations on how we let people use our water. That's it. And if we were to scale back a little bit, who's to say that – you know, ACU is working on a nuclear reactor? Like we could scale back, hold off a little bit, save our ranch land, save our farmland, and for God's sake, save our health, and potentially have an even cleaner source of energy in just a few years. Just a few years. And yeah, that's going to also require some usage of resources. But at least it's providing a perpetual resource, which is energy, which we're going to need in the future for desalination. I definitely agree.
You know, people have asked me what my differences are with Charles on like water conservation. Water conservation is water conservation. The difference is he's allowing a timeline that we all know we're on. Right? We all are aware in this area we're going to have to pay more for water supplies in the future. The issue is you are bringing things into our community that are speeding up that timeline, while our wages are still way, way, way, way behind. And lastly, on the water, we need to find out what kind of biosolids and what we're going to do with the biosolids that they that they that come out of the water that they've treated, because when you run these loop systems that they keep talking about, it's not just water. It is really just like your radiator you put in which you put antifreeze in, and that is essentially what's happening with this stuff. Well, when you treat that water, because they do have to blow it down because it builds up just like anything else, and you have to get it out after a while. When you treat that water, there is no chemical that eliminates PFAS, so you have to use biosolids to glom onto them and when they filter through, to put it simply, what it does is create a toxic sludge of all of that PFAS. Well, up north, they've had this issue before. People were using it as fertilizer, and I bet you can guess what that did to the food. Well, you can still do that down here in Texas. We already have high PFAS in Abilene, so how is this going to affect that? What are you putting in here, and how much of your toxic sludge are we treating, right? Water supply is important, but qe can have all the water in the world, and have it full of PFAS ain't gonna do us no good. So that's another issue that's not being talked about by anybody who is claiming they want to regulate this stuff.
AD: So another top issue for voters is always education. Texas ranks in the bottom half of U.S. states for education. Where do you believe the system is currently falling short, and what actions would you take to improve that?
RR: I would say, you know, there's an obvious answer, which is, we don't fund our public schools. Rural public schools are suffering. And another easy, low-hanging fruit is we just gave a billion dollars to vouchers, and now we got a comptroller who wants to give them another couple billion. But we have a legislature that is more concerned about regulating and controlling how a child decides to think about themselves and telling them who they can be instead of worrying about the fact that our reading levels are abysmal. People like, I believe I want to say on a show. I'm going to say – don't quote me on this – but I believe it's about 5 or 6 million people lack basic literacy skills. Yeah, exactly! You know what I'm saying? Product of the system here. No, but we have too much focus on cultural issues. We have too much focus on, again, how parents raise their kids, but only certain parents, only parents that we don't quite agree with. Other parents are fine. The parents that have purity ceremonies with their daughters and all this weird stuff, like Mike Johnson, like that that's fine. But like, God forbid, you let a kid read a Twilight book or something, you know, because they might, I don't know, become an individual.
What I would do different is, I went to rural schools my whole life, nothing but rural public schools. Not one of my teachers tried to indoctrinate me. Not one of my teachers tried to do – Not one of my librarians ever showed me a book that was inappropriate for me. And if there was a book that was inappropriate, she is a librarian and a good person, so she would get it and she would say, ‘Hey, this isn't cool.’ We have a whole system for that, and I would like the system to just go back to working. I would like our teachers to not have to worry about what they might say, and here's a great idea: if you'd stop shutting down public schools, teachers would have less students in their classrooms. That's just how that works. I went to Hamby in elementary school, the biggest class that I was in in Hamby had nine kids in it. One teacher taught us every subject. Now that is a very very rare situation. And guess what? They shut that school down too. And we were exemplary every year on our testing because it was seven kids in a class, one teacher. And I can tell you as I've had some learning difficulties as a kid, so in those areas it was very easy for me to pay attention. It was very easy for the teacher to give like actual effective help. I moved to Clyde, no shade at Clyde, just a bigger student body. Right when they shut Hamby down, my grades immediately dropped because there's 35 kids in the class now, and you know everybody's asking questions. By the time my question gets answered, we got five minutes left of class. So we have to just literally give funding to these schools. Stop taking their money from them. The fact that like Haskell got a bunch of money from – you know, and this is good – they got donated money by the data center for a PR stunt for sure, but they had to give a million back from their taxes because they got too much money, and that's ridiculous. If what we're doing, if it's supposed to be such a benefit to us to have these industries in here, and then, our state and is going to do like a recapture and hold money hostage for school districts because they don't teach the right subjects, because they don't put the right biblical text in their in in their science class. That's crazy. That is crazy. And as a state senator, my goal would be to give communities back their power. We have school board meetings for a reason. We have SLAC for a reason. Just because they're not banning the books you want them to ban doesn't mean it's not working. It just means you don't like what's happening. But guess what, Bubba? That's a free world. And the people who should be making their decisions, much like the data center stuff, should be the people in that community. And whatever creative policy they want to come up with to mitigate the issues that are affecting the people in their communities, they should be allowed to do that. And I bet it would take a lot of work off the legislature's plate if they'd let us, you know, control our own lives.
AD: Okay, rural healthcare is also a major issue. According to the Texas Organization of Rural Community and Hospitals more than half of the state's hospitals are at risk of closure. Many areas do not have enough doctors to provide specialty care, everything from cardiac and diabetic care to maternity care. Some rural areas are even at risk of losing their hospitals.
You've said that you think there should be more healthcare serving District 28 other than just Abilene or other big areas. Are there clear steps the state could be taking to make sure that rural residents have access to care in more areas?
RR: Yeah, on a practical standpoint, more mobile clinics I think, would do good. I have a certain perspective on this. So both my parents have gone through healthcare issues, and so I've experienced rural healthcare on a very visceral level. My mother had a bad car wreck when I was in like third grade. Then she was a part of, say that she was a part of that opioid epidemic, right? She started having chronic pain, and instead of taking steps before they put her on more painkillers, they just kept feeding her painkillers. And so we were going to the doctor a lot, and we had to move to Seymour. Seymour's got a great, and I like to use them as they've got a great little hospital district there. And luckily, she was able to come out of that. But now we're going through like the nursing home thing. My dad, on the other hand, went through the rural healthcare system his entire time. He had – you know, my mom was lucky enough to have state benefits as a probation officer – he had no benefits. He was getting $1,100 a month in Social Security, and he couldn't get on Medicaid because he was too young. He started having renal failure early on. He was having those issues then in kind of just a string of unfortunate events, broke both of his Achilles tendons in half. I then had to go to work for him when I was in high school, like at the job he had, and then right after he got after that, he broke his hip. So it pretty much just snowballed after that, and then he ended up in full renal failure before he passed away. I would, two days a week, drive him to Abilene to get dialysis. Sometimes I wasn't there; he would drive himself, which is very dangerous. And throughout all of that, like you know, and me being a rural Texan as well, like never having the same doctor. His doctors that he had there in Knox City, they left because they couldn't afford to live there anymore, weren't making the money, whatever.
And mobile clinics are great, but like we have an aging population in rural Texas, and the fact of the matter is, our legislature don't want to spend no money. That's it. Like I'm tired of dancing around all of this, these policy, governmental, political, like talking points. They don't want to spend the money. They want to do it, and they don't care. They don't care. They are corporatized. They think that the that what helps rural Texas, even though the two long standing jobs in rural Texas are nurses, CNAs, teachers – and doctors. There used to be a time when there was just one doctor in the town, and everybody saw him, and you go in there, and he'd seen your parents and all that good stuff. We don't do that anymore, and the fact is, they don't care. They don't want to do it. They, you know, we've let them monopolize. We let them do whatever we want because the right people are in the right places. And the way I look at it is, give them some money, they want to depend on private industry to do all of these things. They want to say, ‘Well, we'll bring industry in, and then they'll be the ones that contribute.’ But then they give them an 85% tax abatement, or some of these places don't even have a you know district hospital district tax, so it doesn't make any difference. ‘But well, they'll donate the money. Well, we'll depend on the altruism of billionaires and corporations because they're so altruistic, and that'll fix it.’ Instead of just going, ‘There's 28 billion in a rainy day fund. Rural hospitals are closing all over the place, and we can do something about that.’ And people have said to me, ‘Well, you can't do it for every hospital.’ Okay, fine. You know, yeah, you guys have let this industry die to a point that, sure. I guess some of them are going to get lost, but we can centralize.
We can invest in a place like a Baylor County hospital. That's 30 minutes down the road from a lot of those seniors. We have double mountain buses. We have some infrastructures built out in rural Texas, where if we just literally put a little money that we already have to it, we could fix a lot of these issues. And another thing that I like is, or that I think we should do is give our doctors a little bit of a break. Let it make it profitable to open up a private practice in a rural county. You know, if a doctor's willing to move to a rural county and live there and open up a private practice, why doesn't he get an 85% tax abatement? You know, that's 5, 6, 7, jobs right there for nurses, for receptionists, for long-term jobs that people can get there and they can work there and they can retire and even bring nurses in and if it's a good enough market it can grow. But also you're not going to bring 7,000 people into a rural area and jack up their rent $3,000. If we're gonna talk about rural Texas, then we have to talk about rural Texas in a rural way, not like it's Austin. Knox City's never gonna be Austin, right? Seymour's never gonna be Austin. But we can make it better for the rural people there.
AD: Okay, kind of pivoting a little bit. Let's talk about the border right now. The recent attempt to expand border barriers into Big Bend has seen bipartisan opposition, which led to a pause in the work. Are you concerned that it may start up again, and do you think that it would compromise the environmental quality of the area and the park?
RR: Yes, simply yes. I don't know how to put things other than the way that I think them in my head. But like it's Greg Abbott, okay? Where the Republican Party is unpopular right now because they're the reason for all of this. Turns out, when you do a bad job for 30 years, it's really hard to tell people that it's somebody else's fault. They're pausing it because they're afraid they're going to lose an election, and then as soon as the election's over, ‘Oh no! Well, we found these other reasons why we got to do this.’ And they're full of it. It's going to screw up our national park. These people do not care. They're not conservatives. They're just bootlickers, okay? And right now it's unpopular. They need to win a midterm. James Talarico's – I mean, what do you expect? – but like James Talarico's polling high. It's all about maintaining power. They'll pause it now. Just like the fact that they put the pause on data centers, but none of those audits are even going to come in till after the election. And I'd be willing to put a little substantial bet that a lot of those are just going to get approved. ‘Hey guys, well, they did a really good job.’ It's all of these, conservatives will say, ‘How are you going to pay for that?’ But my question is, how are you going to enforce that? Because you've created a system that doesn't allow you to do that.
So yeah, I think it's going to start right back up as soon as the election's over if they win, and it's no more than people trying to get money. Like it's just people are like, ‘I don't understand why they're doing this. I don't understand why they're doing that.’ It's money. They don't care about anything. For God's sakes, the president's about to open up his own central bank, right? It's called a grift, and that's how this works. And whatever companies are invested in that, they're going to get rich off of it. And what's happening now is, ‘Hang on till after the election, boys, and then we're going to rip up another national park.’ It's sickening, and even like right-leaning law enforcement people on their border are going, ‘This is ridiculous. Nobody can cross this. Like we don't need this.’ So when I look at that, you know, when I hear hooves, I think horses, not zebras, and it just sounds like corruption to me.
AD: Okay, what do you think Austin can do to improve affordability in Texas, regarding like property taxes? Governor Abbott is proposing an end to school maintenance and operations portion of property taxes. Do you think that that would improve affordability in Texas?
RR: No, I don't think that taking money away from our school districts is ever a good idea. Stop giving tax abatements to corporations that are buying thousands of acres. People will go back and forth with me and on this, and this is why I'm running. I'm a blue collar guy who sees things the way they are, and when you tell me that, ‘It doesn't work, it's complicated. It doesn't work like that.’ Okay, well, here's the thing: two things pay for our public services: property taxes and sales tax. Our sales– our property taxes are going up, and that is ridiculous. And then you go outside and you see that there's a thousand-acre data center that got an 85% tax abatement. And then you say, ‘Okay, well, I don't stop wanting good roads. I don't stop wanting good schools. I don't stop wanting good public services.’ So if somebody's not paying 85% for 1,000 acres in an area, somebody's got to cover that to keep those services up. And you can't just jack ours up a quarter because you'd start a revolution, but you can do it a little bit at a time.
And to put an even finer point on it: his property tax plan only helps one group of people, and it is people who are over the age of 65 who are still living in massive houses. And that is creating pressure, and we have to deal with that. And I'm sorry, I know you don't have kids in school anymore. But we still want good cops, we still want good roads, and we still don't want dumb adults one day. We want people to be able to be literate, because those will be the people that will be taking care of you in the future. And I don't know about you, but if I'm in a nursing home, I would like my CNA to be able to read at least. So it's just playing to party politics. It's these are the people that show up to vote, so this is what I'm going to do. They offered $5,000 to vote for Republicans. Like we're owed $13,000 by our president right now for the promises that are made.
This is just another cynical way of doing this, instead of having a real conversation about taking care of our seniors and taking care of our young families who are going through pressures right now. What’s a really good idea is to invest in them as well. Why is it that first-time homebuyers have to suffer through all of this? Why is it that the the answer to a small, you know, three person family is, ‘Get two more jobs a piece and put your kid in daycare for $700, which is insane a month, and then figure it out.’ But that's not the world we live in. That's not the world you live in. You're– how old are you?
AD: 22
RR: 22, right. Are you excited about being an adult? You know what I mean? It's not exciting anymore. You will own nothing and be happy about it. And so, if what we're going to talk about is bringing affordability back, then we're going to have to stop being so cynical and start saying, ‘All right, you guys got to start paying for everybody's going to have to start paying their fair share everywhere.’ Did you know that the bottom – the lowest income earning Texans pay three times more in taxes than the top 1% in this state. And 96% of our state is privately owned land by people who are way way way older and have owned it for generations, if they're not a corporation. And maybe I'm overreaching here or whatever, but these conversations aren't happening because they don't want them to happen. They just want the vote, right?
You can't run on lowering property taxes if you don't raise property taxes all the time. Geez, Louise, you know, ‘We can't keep ourselves in power, boys, if we fix the problems that we create. Then we might have to, I don't know, retire and go write our book or something instead of controlling lives that in 25 years we won't even be here to have to deal with.’ That's what we're looking forward to, you know?
AD: So what what ideas do you have for helping the struggling residents that are currently suffering from increased property taxes,
RR: First of all, I think that let’s talk about the quality of product. I'm a sole proprietor, and I run two businesses. I think that one thing we can start to do is to say, okay, you know, if you buy a house– I have a friend of mine in Throckmorton who bought a house. It's a nice house, but they haven't done anything to it. Our appraisal district still came around and jacked it up $100,000. I would like to stop the speculation that is in our appraisal district. I would like to implement home hardening policies that say, ‘Okay, this house here was worth this much last year. What has been done to it? Nothing. Has it been improved’ – aside from maintenance, like a new roof, ‘You know what? To avoid my property taxes going up, I should just have a leaky roof.’ – Like, no, it's crazy. ‘Has this person maintained this property and maintained the quality of the property that it has before? Okay, well then we are not going to increase property taxes so much.’ Like literally, you can get notices where it can go from like a single percentage point to triple percentage points, depending, right? There's nothing crazy about property taxes going up on a place where you build a house, build a pipe fence, build a barn, build a roadway. Like, you make these improvements to this property because you brought the value up. But now it's just like, well, everybody's paying this much, so you guys might as well pay this much, and that's where we see this like unregulated just like booming in these areas.
Secondly, we need to– instead of cutting massive property tax cuts, to people over 65 plus, I think we should kind of move that back over towards the people who need it. And our median age in this district is 34, I believe. Median household income is 63,000. And the average home is six figures. So we have to move back to taking care of young families as well as our seniors. But like, we want everybody to be a senior one day, right? We don't want to start dying again at 45. And that's the track we're on, is people are getting pressured and pressured and pressured. So investing in first-time homebuyers, giving first-time homebuyers huge tax breaks. Those are the people that need them, right? Like me and my girlfriend, we own a house, and I'm gonna tell you what, if she wasn't a veteran, it'd have been a real, real tough slog for us, just like it is for everybody, even more than it already is. Those tax breaks should be going to those people. I think that one thing we can do is give somebody a year. I mean, this might be crazy, and I'm sure I'd be willing to negotiate in the state senate. But I think somebody could have a first time homebuyer to have no property taxes for a year. Let this person catch up. It's not like they're not paying their mortgage. They've got all these other bills, and if you don't plan on doing anything about $700 a month childcare, then somebody's going to need to save a little bit of money, and 63,000 a month – or 63,000 a year for a household ain't enough. Per capita income in this area is 33,000, right? And we're a generation that lives in a time where – my dad bought a house at 18. That is crazy these days, right?
So I think that we can give a little more to our first-time homebuyers and hold corporations more accountable to these issues. If they were paying their sales tax and they were paying their property taxes, then you could afford to do all of this. But our government only talks about it in a vacuum, where they go, ‘Well, you can't just do that. Then we'll lose all this money.’ Well, we could do that if you would have a little backbone when it came to holding these corporations accountable. And that will always be part of it, is you have to go after the corporations as well to pay their fair share. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what kind of policy you put in the working class, because there's a big giant vacuum over here that's sucking up all the money.
AD: Okay, last question. This is your first election. What leadership qualities do you possess that make you stand out from the current leadership, and that make you the best candidate for the position?
RR: My leadership qualities: I'm a strength coach. I deal with people all day, and I'm a sole proprietor, I work for myself. I still work for myself, and I don't have generational wealth. So I know what it means to create an effective strategy because when my feet hit the floor, I gotta hustle or I don't eat that day. That's just flat out. And when you live like that, you have a certain perspective on the way that that business and that social interactions should go. When you're somebody like me and you live in a town like Abilene, you have to create a symbiotic relationship all the way around you, because one bad review, one bad thing could really hurt you down the road. And so you have to provide a quality product, and providing that quality product has to come at an affordable price. So I understand quality and affordability. So we're not just raising the price and getting the same quality product. I don't raise my price on my customers unless I'm providing more of a better quality product. That's how business works.
When it comes to social leadership: I believe that people ought to just be left the hell alone. Alright? We live in a free society. You don't have to like somebody, and they don't have to like you. You're allowed to be weird, and you're allowed to think people are weird. What you're not allowed to do is go tell the state that they have to tell that person they can't do that. And sure, there are concerns on both sides of things, and the way I think that should stay is in the community, right? You're going to have a much more civil and understanding conversation with your neighbor than the bureaucrat in Austin is, who may have even more radical ideals than you do about it. And they're going to say, ‘Well, you know, we should do? We should just lock them all up.’ And that's not what we want, and that is not what creates a civilized society. You know, my opponent is more concerned about going to a school board meeting and threatening a state takeover of a school because they don't ban books that he likes, than he is going to a CEO of a data center and threatening to regulate them if they don't start taking care of his constituents better. Those are the priorities that are different because you can look on my Facebook right now and there are there are videos of me going to city council meetings and saying ‘Y'all better wake up. Y'all better do something about this because people are fixed start hurting.’
And you can be as mad as you want to about cultural issues while we're standing on the bread lines, or we can start handling this. I've lived in District 28 for 35 years – well, I'll say 30 years. Five years I was in Midland. But I've lived here my whole life, and I have watched people that tell me that all of these things that are good for my communities, my communities are still going down. My public school. I hadn't been to high school in you know over a decade, and it's still dwindling. My community is still dwindling, still suffering. So everything these people keep telling us isn't working, and I know that because I live here. I have lived under Charles Perry's leadership for the last decade, and it ain't got better. He's got a 15% poverty rate, and that's only because it starts at 24,000. Ain't nobody making it on 30, much less 20.
When I come into that state senate, the voice that comes in with me is the voice of rural Texas. Is the voice of Texans that are tired of having to drive an hour and a half to see their mama and papaw. Texans that would like to one day just own like maybe a little bit of land, maybe one homestead, instead of looking forward to having to live in a more cramped place, maybe just a one-bedroom apartment, and work three to four jobs just to get by. That is the voice that goes in there. Not the voice that tells you that your concerns are overblown. ‘It's going to be good for you in 10 years.’ When they're not in office and can't say anything about it anymore, conveniently. The voice that goes into that state senate is a fighter. If I was in that state senate right now, I'd be the only one still yelling at the top of my lungs about the issues that we're having here, instead of playing grab *bleep* with my buddies.
It's just politics to them, right? But this is our lives, man. This is like college kids can't get a place to live right now. You guys don't care, right? When I was in college, I paid 275 a month for rent. Yeah! You know what I mean? And that was all bills paid in Stephenville, Texas, right? ‘But your concerns are just overblown, and you don't understand that back 40 years ago it was this way.’ Well, that was 40 years ago, and you could buy a house for $25,000. So, you know, miss me with that. All right, we are dealing with different problems here. And these people– we got a representative that don't even know how to run a PowerPoint, and he's going to regulate AI? We got a representative who is saying that THC is a killer, while he's literally backing the alcohol industry, which thousands of people have died from. I know several people in my life, who are dead from alcohol. I don't know a single person who's ever run off a bridge smoking a joint. Most of the time, they just stayed home.
And the disregard for human suffering in our area is despicable, quite frankly. And if you care about humans, then I'm the person that you should be putting in that Senate seat. If you care about keeping the corporations wealthy, then yeah, I guess you should probably stick with Charles because he's the one that's going to look out for them. But the difference between us is I'm doing this because it is very busy running for office, and I did not come into this with any wealth. My opponent dropped $50,000 in his own race his first time running. Yeah. That's his whole salary for a blue collar worker. That is why blue collar people in working classes are hurting, because you don't have a blue collar representation in there. You have somebody in there that's been in there for 15 years who has made it clear he doesn't want to even really do the job. He'd like us to meet every four years. Well, if he doesn't want to do the job, then you better just give it to me because I'm here to govern and get these problems fixed. I would like to, I envision fixing the problems and then having nothing to talk about, instead of talking about the same problems for 30 years. That is the difference between him and I. I want to do the job; he just likes to be there.
AD: Alright, Riley Rodriquez, thank you for coming in.
RR: Thank you. A little spicy.
AD: Riley Rodriguez is a first-time candidate, running as the Democrat on the ballot in the race for Texas Senate District 28. Check out the extended version of this conversation on our website KACU.org and click on Local News. You'll also find links to the Rodriguez campaign and other interviews in the series. The early voting period begins next week on October 19. Primary election day is November 3. I'm Allison Diaz. This is KACU.