In the race to represent Texas Senate District 28, Abilene’s Riley Rodriquez is challenging incumbent Sen. Charles Perry in November, and said, in his opinion, we need more work-a-day folks taking part in state government, instead of more-or-less the same bunch of well-off people getting elected over and over.
In fact, said he’d be in favor of Texas having a full-time legislature to make that possible, along with adopting a new state constitution to weed out the damage done by 30 years of government catering to special interests.
He said it seems like more people are willing to listen to what he has to say, and he feels like that’s progress.
A More Receptive Public
Rodriquez said what began as a straight-uphill battle has leveled off thanks to one issue in particular.
“As everyone is well aware, the data center issue has been a big motivating factor for people in our district specifically,” he explained, “There’s several dozen in the works, and nobody’s really sure yet how many we might end up with, but Haskell County’s alone has five in it.”
Rodriquez said this issue alone has made it easier to him to talk to people in the 40-county senate district.
“My strategy in the beginning was really traditional, quite honestly, knocking on doors and making phone calls, all the sorts of things that probably work great in more urban areas — I learned pretty quickly in rural Texas, it doesn’t work that great.
“I was pretty skeptical of the traditional tactics, simply because I am a rural Texan; for my entire life, if the phone rang after about 5 o’clock in the evening, nobody answered it — it didn’t matter who you were.
He said since the advent of cell phones, that type of campaigning is even more difficult.
“Pretty quickly, I realized I just have to go there. Just show up and try to find some people in town that are receptive to the message.
“Last year, I was thinking, ‘You know, maybe I’ll get lucky and there’ll be some people who have read enough in the news to know what I’m talking about with data centers, but then the subject kind of blew up.
“At first people looked at me like I was a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist, because like many other rural Texans, they heard there were jobs and revenue and thought it sounded great.
“But, being in Abilene, we quickly found out that jobs and revenue weren’t really all they were cracked up to be, once we started feeling all the effects, and then it just snowballed from there.
“Since last spring, I’ve been out here pointing out exactly what’s happening, and that there’s NO regulation, and that we needed a one-year moratorium right then, just because all of these compounding issues that rural Texans are facing right now — food insecurity, poverty, health issues, and lack of access to health care.
A Livable Place for Regular Working People
Rodriquez said one of his main priorities is making West Texas an affordable place for working people to live again.
“To speak frankly, it used to be pretty cheap to live out here,” he said, “So even if you weren’t making a lot of money, you could still afford rent and groceries, and that’s gone now.
“Our representatives are having to contend with the fact that they left rural Texas to rot… they were cruising on the idea that you could make $12 or $15 an hour and live in one of these rural counties because rent was only $600 month.
“But now Sen. Perry has to contend with the fact that he has a 15-percent poverty rate in his district, with more than 100,000 people living in poverty, and it’s only because the poverty limit starts at $24,000.
“But let’s be real, man. People are barely making a living on $30,000, much less $24,000. If you’re a family, you are probably suffering a lot at $30,000.
Regular People Need to Reinvent Government
Rodriquez said at the end of the day, the incumbents in Texas can’t pass the buck or blame Joe Biden; they’ve been firmly in charge of the whole thing for more than 30 years.
“They were supposed to make our streets better,” he said, “Now they’re worse.
“Which gets me to my point: we are in a unique moment, because the candidates that (Democrats) have running for office are real people. They aren’t people who’ve done nothing but meet with CEOs in high rise towers.
“I’ve talked to some of the people that have these conversations with our elected officials, and they tell me our officials are not having conversations about what tools that they can use to hold these people accountable.
‘These officials of ours basically saying ‘They’re not going to do it, because we told them not to, and they said that they wouldn’t.’
“That’s it. That is all they’re basing it on.
“Well, ‘OK,’ I didn’t realize that you had asked them not to do it. Now everything makes perfect sense.”
Rodriquez said that pressing elected officials for information at public meetings revealed they didn’t have any real plans to deal with the infrastructure strains associated with new data centers.
“After seeing the effects of what happened in Abilene, I wanted to know if there’s been any investment from the industry to mitigate those factors going forward — initial infrastructure investment before the build out, and the only answers I got were ‘I’ve made recommendations’ and ‘I’ve written a strongly worded letter.'”
Strange Days
Rodriquez said you can get a sense of the strange ripples in the political spectrum all over the place if you’re listening; speaking about a local podcast where a Republican Party chairman was asked if there was one major issue he could take from the Democratic Party platform, what would it be?
“I have a recording of this on my social media so people can hear it,” he said, “This man, in a room full of air, said out loud, “Well, I like how they’re trying to lower taxes and take care of people.’
“Then he was asked about what he thought the best thing to come out of the last legislative session was, and he talked about trans legislation.
“He didn’t talk about any of the things he could use to prop up the Republicans as pragmatic; only the culture war stuff — and then pointing out that the Democrats are trying to lower taxes and help people, so that’s where we are.”
He said he feels like many of his supporters are way past caring about the manufactured-outrage politics the Republicans seem to have been thriving on for decades now.
“Honestly, I think we’ve passed it on both sides, because there are plenty of people that support me who are full on Republican, and they don’t care about that stuff — they don’t want to hear any of that crap.
“They care about the fact that their rent is going from being $1,200 a month to $2,000 a month all of the sudden, and they have 60 days to figure out how to make $800 more each month.
“Nobody has time to care about culture war crap anymore, because whether you have a MAGA flag in your yard or BLUE WAVE flag, we’re all still broke as can be.”
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Can’t Trust or Afford the Food Supply
He said folks are also justifiably upset about all of the food recalls and outrageous prices.
“I was walking through the HEB, looking at some steaks and wondering if I could afford the prices, and for the first time in my life, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I should buy these.’
“That’s what people are thinking: I don’t know that I can afford this, but No. 2, I don’t know that I can trust this, and we’ve never felt that before.”
According to a Google poll on his website, of 172 responses he received at that point, when asked “Has your confidence in the safety of food at the grocery store shifted negatively in the last two years?” some 69 percent of respondents said ‘Yes.’
“And that’s is 34-percent Republicans, 48-percent Democrats and 16-percent Independents responding,” he said.
Get Back to Local Control
Rodruquez said folks seem to agree, people should be able to make decisions about the things that are going to affect them locally.
He said if Texas had full-time legislators and more local control built into the system, we could have easily worked together at all levels to introduce common sense safeguards that protected the public and our natural resources.
“It we could have handled all this data center stuff more intelligently in the last two years, this next legislative session could be about something completely different, because the people would have been able to handle it before it got too far out of hand.
“But instead, our state has created a system where they’re three steps ahead for corporations, and four steps behind for the people.”
Direct Your Anger in the Appropriate Direction
Rodriquez said he understands exactly why people are upset, but they need to focus their anger in the right direction if they want to have any chance of changing things.
“People are mad at their cities, and people are mad at their counties — and rightfully so in a lot of places… but you’ve got 150 people showing up to a rural county commissioners meeting, yelling at their commissioners, and their county commissioners have zero power to stop any of it, even if they wanted to, and meanwhile, the state leaders who are actually responsible just coast along and let people be mad at the commissioners and the city councils.
“They way our system is set up, it goes city council, then above city council, you have county commissioners, and then above county commissioners, we have our state representatives, and that makes sense because it’s geographic, right?
“Charles Perry, — and you can quote me on this– is just letting all his county commissioners take it on the chin while he hopes nobody pays attention to the fact that he’s the one who’s supposed to be controlling all of this, and he’s thinking he’ll just win another election and keep right on going.”
More About Data Centers
“It’s not that I’m a Luddite, or someone who thinks all technology is bad, but I believe we should be able to have a symbiotic relationship with them, and I don’t think you need 1,000 acres for a data center.
“You could put 2 million square-foot of data center and its power energy on 44 acres. That’s my problem. You only needed 44 acres for that.
They deserve to be held accountable because they didn’t come in here trying to do good or trying to help people. They came in here and took advantage of a system that was supposed to be for small businesses.
“The took advantage of incentives that are supposed to be for the machine shop guy who’s been working in machines for 45 years and now he’s going to start his own business. That’s what these incentives are for. It’s for someone who’s going be here for 30 years and raise a generation of children in this town, who might take that business over and keep paying taxes.
“What they’re doing is different; they are polluting our air and taking our resources. I don’t care if it’s a loop system or not. Water they have is water we don’t have.
Lightning Round: Questions and Answers
With produced saltwater coming up out of abandoned wells all over West Texas and the TCEQ
under pressure to allow the discharge of “treated” oil field water into rivers and streams, do you
have any thoughts about sensible oil and gas policies and/or regulations?
When it comes to discharging any produced water, cleaned or not, especially water from the oilfield, my stance is that discharging into our natural resources is at the bottom of the list, and should only be considered in the most dire situations.
Texans ought to be able to trust the bass they catch for their fish fry ain’t gonna give ‘em cancer.
We should have stiff guard rails on produced water use. First with full transparency on PFA mixtures the industry puts in the water they use.
If it’s been so highly treated and cleaned up then I see no reason why oil, gas and data centers can’t be required to use mainly produced water to run their industry.
Q: The governor is promising to lower property taxes, but Texas cities and school districts are struggling mightily to keep their heads above water with state spending controlled tightly by Austin, where they are sitting on a giant reservoir of cash. What should be done about this situation?
Pretty simple to me; give the school districts their money back and stop holding them hostage.
We elect school boards for a reason they and the parents in that community should decide how that money is spent. Texas public schools have been on the decline since Greg was in office and now he’s giving our money to private schools.
It’s time for Greg to head home and write his book.
Q: Would you support action to create a new state constitution? If so, what are your thoughts about that?
I would support the action. We need to modernize our legislature, remove all the amendments put in over the years that block antitrust legislation and strip you and me of the right to run our own counties.
We also need to remove those protections that help corporations avoid accountability.
Q: What other policy differences do you have with your opponent that you would like to highlight?
I believe in planning before profit, Charles Perry doesn’t.
I won’t take a corporation’s word for it and let them have free reign in my district just cause they pinky promised to be good.
West Texans can be confident any policy I have handed in will put Texans first — Republican or Democrat.
They can just look at the state of our district and the amount of Data centers flooding in to see the policy Perry has to offer. A vote for Perry is a vote for Data Centers.
Q: What is the best way for folks to help/contribute to your campaign?
The first and best way is to vote for me; early voting runs Oct. 19-30 and Election Day is Nov. 3, and please bring a friend with you.
To learn more, visit rileyforsenate.org
