Texas (KTAB/KRBC) –Riley Rodriguez, a candidate for Texas State Senate District 28, is campaigning on issues including rural healthcare, data center development, local control and public education
Rodriguez said he has lived most of his life in District 28, growing up around Abilene and moving throughout the area because of family circumstances
Big Country native Riley Rodriquez announces run for Texas Senate
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He said his father ran a ranch outside Abilene for about 11 years, while his mother worked as a probation officer in Anson. Rodriguez attended several high schools before graduating from Knox City High School
Rodriguez said his experiences caring for his parents shaped his approach to issues facing rural communities, particularly healthcare
“The moving around was due to family issues. One of the things that I bring to the table is I don’t just talk about rural healthcare. I’ve been through the system, and I know what the system can do for people like my mother, who had state benefits, and people like my dad, who had $700 and two dirty saddles to his name,” Rodriguez said. “What I bring to the table is a lived experience of what it is to be a rural West Texan in reality, and not just in rhetoric at the state capital.”
Rodriguez said rural healthcare needs more than temporary funding or mobile services. He said the state should consider strategic investments in rural hospitals and healthcare hubs
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“Yeah, I think that you know I’ve had this conversation several times, and my approach to that I feel like is pretty pragmatic. Mobile clinics are great. It’s great that we have mobile MRIs going to these rural places, but that’s not enough. A little bit of money here and a little bit of money there is not going to get anybody by. And lastly, depending on private industry to make a big investment in your rural hospital to save some face is also not a way that we should be supporting rural hospitals,” Rodriguez explained. “We have a massive economy, number seven in the world. We want to help rural healthcare. We have $28 billion in our rainy day fund. While our rural healthcare system is struggling, rural hospitals are closing, which are long-term jobs for that community… Instead of keeping every single one in the everywhere open, we could put real effective investment in a place like Seymour, where if you were to invest in that area, all of those mamaws and papaws in that area now don’t have to go an hour 90 minutes down the road to get a weekly procedure or a weekly treatment, they can now go a little bit closer.”
Rodriguez said he believes some healthcare services could be centralized within rural communities to reduce the burden on larger cities such as Abilene
“We can we can afford to centralize a little bit of healthcare in these rural places so that Abilene’s not serving an area that’s the size that’s like almost the size of West Virginia when it comes to patients, right?”
Data center development has become another area of concern in the Big Country, and Rodriguez said he supports pausing future projects that have not yet broken ground
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“Yes, absolutely. I would say pause future development. Just to be blunt, there’s just some you can’t stop at this point, right? Stopping those buildouts would open us up to probably a lot of very expensive legal litigation. But those that haven’t broken ground, I think we can put a pause on that for sure,” Rodriguez shared
Rodriguez said the rapid influx of workers connected to data center construction is placing additional pressure on housing and social services
He pointed to poverty, food insecurity and household income as issues he believes need to be addressed before additional development moves forward
“We have a 15% poverty rate, and that’s only because the level before you hit the level of poverty rate is at about $25,000 annually. Now I don’t know anybody who’s getting by on $30,000, much less 25. But we’ll leave it. We’ll leave that alone. That’s over 100,000 people who are in poverty. We have 86% rural food insecurity in rural Texas; the median salary for a household in our district is $63,000 a month. So that’s $5,000 split two ways. So basically, both people in that house, simple math, they’re making 2,500 bucks a month. What we are seeing in Abilene right now are the effects of not handling those issues, not raising the minimum wage, not putting enough, not having enough local control through the counties and through the cities to be able to prepare yourselves for that through setting investment ordinances that might be higher than the state standard. Now what we’re seeing is we had an influx of 7,000, but then all of these other counties started building them up, which pours a bunch more people into this town because there aren’t any hotels anywhere but really Abilene, Wichita, San Angelo, and Lubbock. That is not how rural Texas works. Our economy is like rural Texas; it’s slow and it takes time. You can’t just dump 1,000s of people in this area without any social safety nets, and no way to protect those social safety nets we do have.”
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He also argued that local governments need greater authority to respond to the effects of rapid development
“So, my long-term plan is to give power back to these communities because that’s where it’s really going to be effective, right? Like you and I going and lobbying at our city council meeting and getting an ordinance passed is a lot better than waiting for the next session, so they can argue about it for another five months, and people sit on the street and suffer for another five months,” Rodriguez said
On public education, Rodriguez said he believes state lawmakers should focus on funding schools while giving communities more control over decisions involving their schools
“We need to educate our kids and stop fighting over whether what religion we’re going to put on the wall in the school. Our government is obsessed with overreach when it comes to education. I come at this from the fact that I’m an American, and one of the biggest parts of our education is that it’s not biased. It’s not one side or the other. It’s supposed to be an unbiased view of our history as a nation, knowing all of the facts. They’re more concerned about banning books and paying private schools, while also at the same time saying we need to fund, you know, we need to take care of our teachers, but they continue to take money away from teachers. They continue to do this recapture crap and and hold our money hostage from our public education unless we acquiesce to what the state says,” Rodriguez expressed.
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Rodriguez said decisions about education should largely be made by people within individual communities
“I think that again, local control is important. The people that should make those decisions are the people who live in that community and whose kids are affected,” Rodriguez added
He said parents, teachers and librarians should have a greater role in determining what students have access to
“We trust our librarians, we trust our teachers, and we trust our parents to make the decisions for their community. And the only job the state has is to make sure they’re getting their money to fund their schools,” Rodriguez said
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As he campaigns for the state Senate seat, Rodriguez said local control is central to his platform
“The issues we’re seeing right now are long-running, and they are just now coming to a head, and we need to take back local control of our areas so that we can organize and make a difference in our communities. They have handcuffed us. They have handcuffed our county commissioners. They have put limits on what our cities can do, and this is the result of that: the extraction of our resources on our backs. So, if you want to be able to go to your county commissioners’ meeting, ask them to do something, and they be able to do something about it without fear of getting a $100 million lawsuit, you should vote for Riley Rodriguez in November 2026 for Texas State Senate and District 28.”
Rodriguez is running for Texas State Senate District 28 in the November 2026 election
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