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.
Charles Perry is the incumbent Republican running for the position. He was first elected in a special election in 2014 and then won the following three elections without any challengers. He is now seeking his fifth term in the Texas Senate representing District 28.
Perry sat down with KTTZ’s Brad Burt to discuss the issues he would be focused on in next year’s legislative session if re-elected, primarily those affecting rural communities, including data centers, public education, and affordability.
KTTZ’s partner station in Abilene, KACU, conducted an interview with Perry’s Democratic opponent Riley Rodriquez. You can find that interview here.
You can find more coverage on the midterm elections here.
Early voting runs Oct. 17-30 and Election Day is Nov. 3.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity:
Brad Burt: Thank you for sitting down. We're going to get right into what we were just to talk about, which I think will be a big issue for a lot of people going into this legislative session, is the data centers. You've had some interesting comments on that, and not just the water and electrical issues that seem to be a lot of the concerns, but also what some of these facilities could actually bring to rural communities.
Charles Perry: Well, specifically on the data centers, I'm neutral in the sense of are they good or bad. I think it's just like anything. There's good stuff and there's bad stuff. There's good actors, there's bad actors.
What I have found is the large ones, the large capex companies, the Metas, the Googles, the Amazons, those big guys, right, have a lot of capital. So, from a lens of where I sit as a legislator, rural Texas' number one for going on 16 years now, you're always looking for economic development activity. This is one of those rare opportunities where, for the first time in the history of rural Texas, there is opportunities that have never been there before. So they're they're they're not going to be large job creators, probably 100 to 200 depending on the size of facility.
There's some economic development activity, but really, from where my lens was from day one, having received a call, January, February ranged. Google had contacted me, the engineers. The guy said, ‘Hey, Texas was pretty clear. Our grid is under capacity. We need to develop our own power.’ Said we're good with that. ‘There's plenty of gas. There's renewables. We're going to develop our own power autonomous to the grid. We may hook to the grid. We may not need to hook to the grid. Or if we hook the grid, we may actually become a provider.’
So I said, ‘We've heard a little bit about water,’ and he said ‘What do we need to do in water?’ I said ‘Well, you’re in luck.’
I saw these guys as an opportunity of capital. This is one of those things that literally money to develop undeveloped water resources solves the community's problems. So, with that said and framed that way, I said ‘You need to develop brackish aquifers in the communities you go to.’ and they said, ‘Well, we don't use that much water.’ I said, ‘I understand that. I totally understand that,’ I said. The million-gallon-a-day well is being drilled in Childress. That the agreement will be signed on the 20th of this month by Lancium. They're going to sign an agreement to develop a million-gallon-a-day well at about 20 to $30 million cost to them for the benefit of a community. Had it not been for them – pre-AI, no AI in the conversation – they were out of water in ‘27 by the fall.
So this is what I focused on from day one. This is a capital that we never envisioned. It's not state dollars. It's not local taxpayer dollars. It's Wall Street dollars. So if some investor wants to drill a well for a community that was going to be out of water that couldn't afford to drill the well, I'm all about that. So, you know, I guess that old adage: you take lemons and make lemonade out of it. I just see it for what it's worth. It's the one component that separates meeting Texas' water needs tomorrow that we should be working on today and getting it done sooner.
Brad Burt: Going into this legislative session, are there changes that you've seen with the [data center] conversations that we've seen over the last year or so?
Charles Perry: I've got a guardrails bill. There'll be – I've said it’s 181 guardrails bills because every member has a district has data center in it, so somebody's going to file something, right? Well, I took the charge on water along with some local government code interactions that need to be addressed specifically. If you're not giving a tax abatement, do you really have a lot of control? We think we've found a way to give control without giving ordinance; my county judges – I have 41 counties, I've had 51 for 10 years – are saying ‘Please don't give us zoning. Please, we don't need zoning. We don't have the capacity to absorb zoning. We'll just grow county government huge to do zoning.’ But we do need statutory regulatory reform to guarantee that things are in place that they're just common sense stuff. But here's what I would tell you: Number one, we did have state regulations, and that was another piece of the misinformation. In order to get emissions permitting, TCEQ had to permit you pre- pre-hyperscalers. That was already in the code. That wasn't geared towards data. So there's anybody that has a 75 megawatt facility coming online, SB 6 put that in play. But we had emissions control already. If you were in a water district area, you had permitting on water use already in place.
What people don't understand is two things. One, you can't give a company more power than we have to give. We're only limited. We're limited by how much we have, and that's going through a very intense vetting process, so that we're giving it to the people that are ready to go. We don't want to reserve power for somebody that's not ready five years from now. We want to make sure it's going to be deployed. And we can only give them so much, and they know that. So there's a lot of things that were already in as barriers that the general public has had social media ratchet up to an angst level that created very much unwarranted anxiety.
BB: One of the issues that has stuck with rural communities is public education. Several small communities that are losing enrollment. That's a fundamental part of those communities is public schools. Last session was record breaking in new support for public schools. But the vouchers, I think it was a report, came with that last week. It's looking at like $227 million collectively across the state that public schools could stand to lose because of students’– [attendance].
CP: Well, and now flip side – and I'm kind of was neutral in the voucher. I fought it for a while. And after a while, the ship sailed, right? The voucher conversation, I was really shocked at the number of requests. There was 275,000 kids or parents that decided they wanted an alternative to public schools.
BB: 117,000 of those were accepted.
CP: So there's about 60 [thousand] sitting out there, I think in the waiting list now. So from a perspective of where I – we funded, I thought 55 [thousand] or so – I don't know how we got to the 115 [thousand], but that's what they're saying now. So anyway, my point, I guess, is I didn't see it even being subscribed. I didn't see the need. I didn't see that. What I was hearing was there are people screaming for this, especially in some of the urban areas, and I didn't quite believe the need was that big and that real.
But to have 275 show up and saying we need an alternative. And when you look at some of the public schools that those needs are coming out of, then you know when you've got a D consistent failing school. Who loses in that? When you've been told from TEA, ‘You got to get it up, you got to get these kids grade level, you got to get them to where they can read and write and do basic math when they graduate.’ And for four plus years, that one generation of freshmen going through senior year, still it's at that? You've lost that group on just basic stuff that the employer of the day can teach them a lot, but just the basic foundation doesn't exist. So I see from both sides, and with that kind of number coming out, I can see where you know there's a real cry for something different.
And then you know I'll say, I have 140-something school districts and I had 150 plus for 10 years. Majority, not all – you never get 100% of anything anymore – but the majority of my guys in rural Texas like, ‘You know, look, we provide a good product. We're integral part of the community. People know us. They sit in church with us. They see us at the grocery store. If they got a problem, they tell us.’ But truthfully, they're performing pretty well. I mean, they do okay. So, it's just that balance you strike of trying to meet every Texan's kind of conversation, and there's just a huge need that I did not expect to see come out of that.
BB: But if they stand to lose money that is based on the – what is it? The Weighted Average–?
CP: Yeah. WADA. [Weighted Average Daily Attendance]
BB: If they expect to lose money off of that, is there any kind of compensation? How can they hire the better teachers?
CP: So I would look at it from this lens, first of all the kid’s leaving for a reason. You weren't meeting a need. So you can't meet all of them. You know, if you're a severe 504 and you're in a small school, you may not have that support network you need, but there may be a provider in the region or online or something that can do that better. So, there's those unique anecdotes, I call them, a little bit one-offs, but most parents don't leave an A, B, even a C school. So, if you're losing kids, you need to look internally as to what that looks like because there's teachers that don't make a lot of money that teach really well that have A, B's, and some C's, and there's teachers that get paid really, really well.
Back to business, I forgot what city it was, their maximum teacher was $116,000 salary. Lubbock is on what's called the – gosh, it skips my mind – it's an incentive allotment for teachers. And there's cohorts, I think they're in their third, maybe fourth cohort. They've got teachers in Lubbock ISD that make 75 up. And I think when I started, the average age of teachers [was] in the 50s. I think we're at 68 now. So remember, the household in Texas is 63. So a household two-income earner potentially is a 63. We've got teachers at 68 now. So we pushed it up a bunch.
But to say this is taking money out of the public schools, what I would say is this is taking money out of the state budget that could have went to public schools for sure, but putting it in another school environment that the parents have said they desired to have. So at the end of the day, this was a parental kind of conversation. Our school's not getting it done. They don't show the potential to change to get it done, regardless of money.
I mean, when I said we put 90 plus billion dollars, that's more than 50% of our discretionary income. And what does the other discretionary income cover? Medicaid, which is almost the next level, about the same 80-some-odd-billion. So we run out of real discretionary money, and then the smaller amount that's left is for prisons, DPS, the other things people expect the state to do. No water, no infrastructure certificates, no grid. Those are all bigger conversations.
So I understand that public schools see it that way. I have to look at it through the lens of what are we trying to achieve? We're trying to give options to kids that their parents believe they should have options to do We're trying to give options to kids that their parents believe they should have options to do and that's kind of the way Texas thinks is how can we be best for everyone that's in this mix, knowing that never are going to meet happiest place, right, for all concerns.
BB: You gave a comment to the [Lubbock ISD] school board recently about the libraries, and I think a lot of the response – I think it was the month after there was a bunch of people, I think I counted something like 40-something people at the school board meeting, and then the opposition to your points had I think two things in there that I thought were interesting.
One was parents saying, ‘When is it other parents' right to decide what I think is appropriate for my child?’ You know, they’re kind of the parents' rights side of the conversation, but also a lot of the books that they brought up were not actually even being checked out by more than a couple or a dozen kids in the library.
CP: That's a false argument, right? I mean, it's on the shelf. It shouldn't have been on the shelf. The state legislature said, ‘Don't leave it on the shelf.’ Whether anybody knew it was on the shelf or not is is that's that's a different – that's a it's not a good argument, right? I mean, it shouldn't be on the shelf was the point of the law, the point of the statute. And I remind people, you can buy that book on Amazon today. You can go over to Barnes and Noble, I assume, and it's on the shelf today. And you can rent it, and you can buy it, and you can read it. Public taxpayer dollars, that's not the highest best use, and there's no virtue to be gained from that, in my opinion.
Now, I've heard the movie's great. We have someone in this building that said, ‘I love that movie,’ and I said, "Was that in the movie? He said, ‘Nope.’ So you know, I might go see the movie now, I don't know, but if that's not in it. But we are stewards of $358 billion taxpayer resources, and I would guarantee, almost without exception to the minimum, that most parents would not accept that book on the shelves today.
BB: I think the point, though, was that determining – other people determining what they believe are–
CP: We've had obscenity laws in this state for decades. It's on the book. Common sense and moral values have changed a lot in my 65 years. There's still one – this is just me personally – but there's still one unchanging moral code, and I use that lens. So, from a biblical perspective, that doesn't meet it, because not as much as the language. It's what it reflects. It's a diminishing of humanity when you have that kind of vulgarity in writing and condone it as acceptable. So, is people offended that I made that judgment? I didn't make that judgment. The law I live under made that judgment about 3,000 years ago.
And I think people think and would expect at some level in their minds that we get to change our DNA when we show up. That's when you got a problem, because you may not agree with me, but I'm anchored and I'm consistent. And in today's world politics, to know where I stand and to know I'm not going to change tomorrow in where I stand outside of the individual issues that we can agree to disagree on in a lot of ways. You know, my pastor one day said, ‘He's the senator here, and we don't always agree with him. But I don't always agree with myself.’ But the point I guess is, we don't have an anchor anymore. And I think there's more people that would believe that to be offensive than not. And as long as we're in a republic where every voice can be heard, but the majority still wins, that's the route. That's the byproduct.
BB: You've been elected 12 years now?CP: I've been in since 2011.
BB: Is it 2011?
CP: Going in 17th year next year.
BB: Okay. So there you go.
CP: So if majority chooses that that's okay. Then I'm probably not the guy. And that's alright.
BB: So are we going to get to a point, like if the kids are going to find a way, like in the books’ case, but not many of them are even reading these books. What's the point of the legislation? I mean–
CP: So we have a lot of laws that are not enforced. We have a lot of laws that are not complied with. If I could go in and change everything today that's not being complied with, as long as it wasn't a public safety issue or or a moral issue, in my book, I'd change them. But we have a lot of laws on the books that probably equate back to pre-cars. You know, we're constantly trying to evolve to technology. To your point, social media. Sitting in hearings for the last 10 years, and the impact that this is having on our ability to focus, our ability to learn the social aspects of the bullying natures, the self esteem issues. What is it? It's an addiction. I learned this in a hearing just a few weeks back that you know where you see people and they're flipping, and that's called scrolling, right? Well, that's an addiction now that people are hooked to scrolling. And so we have tried in the legislature for at least three, maybe four, trying to get the creators of social media to default – not even not to not allow it, but just the default – the parental controls that come out of this. So out of the factory, you can't do all of that, and they refuse to. But you just saw Meta get rung up for a multi-billion-dollar settlement that is putting a lot of the guardrails we've been pushing for in statute federally, I think down the road. And as you get trial lawyers involved, I wish they'd get involved in several things. They tend to pick things they like, but THC is a good trial lawyer case for me.
But my point, I guess is the bigs can put some limits and safeguards internally into this phone where it requires an actual parental to undo the control and allow access, and they choose not to. But hopefully that's coming. But screen time, I mean, you got to limit kids. But that is, since 2011, that's the biggest change in my political world, both from a narrative, from a information/misinformation campaign, from an anxiety driven, but the impact it's having on our youth, and getting them to where they literally cannot sit still for more than 15 seconds at a time and learn something that's not visually tied to their the dopamines and everything in your mental capacity. So that's going to be a… We're going to pay for that one long term.
BB: Well, I have one more topic that I have to touch on. The other one was affordability. The other one was affordability. Is there… This is such a broad topic that I get kind of weird when reporters ask about our affordability, but it is the driving issue for a lot of people going into this election. Is there anything that Austin can do to support Texas?
CP: So there's several things we're working on where it lands and how effective it is. Time will tell. So I will caveat a couple things. First of all, we're feeling inflation. Inflation is part of our normal economic cycles, right?
Sometimes we artificially influence it. When you print 40% money supply, more money supply coming out of COVID, both administrations, this one and the previous one, flooded the market with money. When you do that, you create inflation. That's really the root of inflation to start with, when you print too much money, and there's nothing backing it. That's inflation. 40% and we hit like a 9% I think, under the previous, and we're back down around 4 now, something like that.
But what I'm getting to is, and I spoke to a group of Tech kids the other day, and it was doom and gloom. ‘We can't buy a house. We can't afford to graduate. We're not going to have a job.’ All these things. And I said, ‘Well, let me give you a little frame of reference here.’ Historically, mortgage rates were probably in the 6 to 7%. 6% kind of normalized, a little lower, maybe. We just had periods there because of artificial influences like a COVID and hings like that, where rates went to zero, 2%. You know, Japan's had mortgage rates at zero to 2% and you've seen what it did to their currency.
So we kind of artificially messed with it, got it to a point where people begin to expect that it's reality. So really, we're not out too far, but it still feels like we are because the perception was we didn't – I use this as a reference when I graduated Tech in '84, me and my wife bought our first house. We were in double digit inflation and double digit mortgage rates under the Carter administration coming out. It's why he got voted out. You know, so it's not him. It's just he just happened to hit the season, right? Our economic turns. We thought we'd hit the lottery at 9.5% mortgage. Now, arguably the house was a lot less, but we made a lot less too. So, all in perspective, I said ‘These days will pass. Our cyclical free market economy works through these things. So it's not going to be here 20 years from now. It's not going to be here five years from now. It's probably not going to be here six months from now. So just kind of take a deep breath. It'll be okay.’
But affordability. So you have a lot of things that impact your day-to-days. The cost of diesel is undeniable. It runs through everything delivered, right? Which, we deliver everything. So that piece is real. That should come down a little bit. We'll get that mess cleaned up over there and get us back to oil. And then with Argentina, we're not getting that production here yet. But the thick nature of that oil requires a different refinery, so they're working through some of that. So we're gonna we're gonna catch up on oil supply in the next year, six months to a year. Probably sooner with that mess over there.
But affordability, you got home homeowners insurance was skyrocketed, and if you look to the root of that skyrocketing coming out of COVID again, supply chain. The inventory of goods and people to deliver those goods labor wise to build homes and stuff was not there, so you went from Lubbock 200 a foot to 350 a foot, and it's coming back down. So we're seeing some pullback on some of those. But that said, there's not really a way you change your labor slash construction market unless you change the underlying materials. And what I have argued is someone like an Elon Musk, that's got more money than Methuselah and more ideas than any human mind could possibly conceive, is if I really wanted to impact people on the on the boots on the ground level, I would come up with an alternative building material that you could put together, piece together, and deploy quickly. It wouldn't be brick and mortar, but it would be good stuff, and it would be affordable, and it would be you know the right market for the right person.
My point, I guess, is we need to research some of that. We need to give some money out to some of the public universities to go out and find us a new material supply that's not oil and gas dependent. Plastic, that's not timber development, a finite source that we can come up with a composite material, and they're already out there. It's just getting the industry to move that way. So maybe we [incentivise] some of that.
Insurance affordability was jacked up because the underlying cost to construct or rebuild, if you had a catastrophic event, was double. So if you can get that factor, that'll help, but on that insurance front, Abbott's pitching a support system, if you will, for premium subsidy. I think is kind of the nut of it. I haven't studied it, but at the end of the day, if you put a Class Four shingle on your house, you get a significant discount. The reason you get the discounts is because if you have an event, it's got to be a catastrophic event to get a new roof. And Texas is so big geography-wise. We always have a fire, a hurricane, a tornado, heavy rains, no rains. So we're always in the mix of a catastrophic meltdown with insurance. And insurance is a pretty easy model. You take the event, you add your markup, and you socialize it across all premium bases across the country. So it's just not that complicated, when your underlying cost to rebuild or fix goes up, the cost of doing it. But insurance came down. I know my premium on my personal house is down probably 20% where it was four years ago. So it's pulled back because some of the supplies caught up because of things we're talking about. So insurance affordability is one.
Property tax reform. We've got $54 billion commitment before we ever show up. 61% of 65 year olds in Senate District 28 now no longer pay school district taxes. That's significant. That's $100 a month. You don't see it because you pay that bill once a year, but we've dropped property taxes by 61% – 69 across the state – but 61 in my district, I believe, is the number that they don't pay any homeowners insurance for school district portions. So that's one area. So you got that. You got insurance affordability.
Healthcare affordability. We continue to nibble, but truthfully, that's mostly federal. Mostly federal. We've done balance billing. We've done – I was the author on the insulin bill, where we got the copays locked in. The PBM, pharmacy benefit manager, is the middle guy in our drug cycles that used to be an administrative function where they process claims. Got way out of their box. They're federally regulated, and they ended up being the markup guy in the middle instead of just the administrative function of three or 4%. This administration, Trump's administration, took that on. It is a major mega monopoly. It's 85% of the market. They're vertically integrated with CVSes and Walgreens and pieces, so they were literally jacking up the rate three, $400 per drug just for their being. Supposedly, I haven't seen it in place, haven't read it, but I'm understanding he has reversed that back to an administrative model only. So, if that is truly going to happen in the next 18 months – so we're into 12 months of the 18, I think – if that truly happens the way I hear it is, that is a game changer for pharmaceutical, which will bleed down to Medicaid pharmaceuticals at the Texas budget level, to the individual that's not on Medicaid and private insurance reimbursement, so those things are are big deals. That PBM legislation is probably the biggest thing that nobody understands or is talking about. If it's going to do what they say it is, that will help Texas.
So insurance affordability, we learned of some models that seem to work that are somewhat state regulated, and we'll fix those. That was a Health and Human Services hearing back in April or May. I think that we had alternatives pitched and some different models that have promise that the state can implement. So we're looking for healthcare insurance, property taxes.
Insurance also on the auto and some of that. We have, you know, I think it's 20% of your insurance premiums for uninsured motorists. I don't know how you fix that. The guy needs 25 bucks to get gas to get to work today, and he ain't got 25 bucks to pay for a weekly premium. I don't know how you fix that, but it truly does raise your cost of insurance because everybody's covering that liability. So there's just little things like that, but we're working on it.
It's a national – what's a little frustrating is I know that we're going to jump out here and throw money probably, and try to encourage, incentivize, or fix something that is temporary. And what I've seen down there, being as long as I have, is when we jump on something temporarily, something to fix on it that's temporary, we end up creating a bureaucracy post-natural. And we can't get rid of it. So I'm a little cautious. We need to do some things, and we can do some things, but I want to be sure we don't open up a whole new bureaucracy to do it, and see all the savings we saved an individual come back on the individual from a state.
BB: I mean, it's kind of like the data centers, right? People are reacting to what they saw on a Facebook page.
CP: Yeah, it’s a good point. I mean, nobody predicted the velocity that those hit, but a lot of the things people are screaming about have already been fixed, and most of what they're screaming about is just not factually supported. I've looked for the science that says it's going to kill all the cows. Haven't found it. I've found anecdotal reports that are not scientifically peer-reviewed. So it's just frustrating, right?
BB: I think on the affordability thing was for farmers that are mostly dealing with right now – high input costs and problems with the beef prices. A lot of that is on the federal level. But on the state level?
CP: So on the state level, we put $100 million grant program in for small farmers to buy equipment, land, and property, cheap interest loans, and grants targeted towards the young farmer, because young farmers being run out of the business. So we, as a state, not federal, put $100 million into the program. It's already emptied. We will go back and fund that again. So we are looking at how do we keep farmers in the farming business, and we're going to work on that again. We need to put another 100 in. It was a successful program because guys could afford 3% or could afford grants, or could afford equipment, and we got farmers leaving the business because it's not profitable, and that is a federal market issue. We've subsidized or not subsidized so much that our market's jacked up.
And when you're trading a global market that doesn't have equal labor components. If you're paying $2 a day to harvest your crop in Brazil, but U.S. is paying you know 15 with benefits or whatever, you can't compete. So that's why the farmer subsidy people get mad about it a lot, but you can't exist in a global market if you're not at least trying to compensate for the unleveling of government policies you can't control. So that's works on the farmer level. $100 million grant program needs to go back in place. That was mine and Burrows. Parks carried it, but that was kind of came out of our conversations here for the cotton guys.
Interesting enough, the cattle is an interesting thing because we had COVID, where the packing plants couldn't produce, so that shut down the inputs, and then we had fires, and then we had Winter Storm Uri. Truth of matter, I believe the cattle inventory currently is about a third down from where it normally is. So for supply and demand, less supply, more demand, or same demand, you have cost increases. So that's one of those pre-COVID, pre-fire, pre-winter, pre- everything that I don't know that we see a desire for cattle industry to go out and add a bunch more cows in a very uncontrollable scenario. Because if we have a hard cold winter again, then they lose 50,000 head. There’s 25 million head typically up here in Amarillo. Then you threw in the screwworm conversation, right? Which, here's the sad truth about it, goes back to temporary versus long term. We need to get ahead of the screwworm. Long term, we were. We need to go back there. But the first good freeze, all the flies are dead. So nature takes care of it here in about 30-60 days. But we should get back to a point where we're pretty confident we don't have outbreaks.
Right, so the cattle industry is 100% supply and demand. We've lost a large part of the inventory, that's probably – it takes three years to get a heifer to calf – so, if you had the fire and you had the storm, you're probably coming to that cycle with whatever heifers. But then, when you have a drought and you got to deplete your head, because you can't feed the heads you have. It's this constant shuffling of the inventory the last six years that have created this beef price. So I don't get to control the weather. That's probably the biggest component.
But to be truthful, COVID did change our buying patterns and our suppliers because there was a point where you had to see the car to get the car. This next generation is buying them off the internet from the factory, and so inventory they don't have to keep as much, and consumer has shown that they will wait, and so we are in a different time now. We really are. It's a different model. I'm glad I'm old. I like the old one where you could go in and touch it, talk to the guy that knows about it, and you know you're not expected to go on AI and get all the specs.
BB: I think that's probably the theme of the conversation is it's new times, new things going on.
CP: And my job is to try to see the damage long term before it's here and try to prevent it. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don't.
BB: This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it.
CP: I appreciate you taking time.