The Texan Podcast - Denise Villalobos on Flipping a Seat, House Dynamics, and Policy Priorities

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Denise Villalobos sat down with The Texan's Senior Reporter Brad Johnson to talk about being appointed to chair the big upset when she flipped a democratic seat, her priorities in policy, and the different aspects of being in the House.

Hello everybody, this is Brad Johnson, senior reporter here at the Texan. Today we have Denise Villalobos, freshman Republican representative from the Corpus Christi area. Denise, welcome. Thanks, thanks for having me. We're glad to have you. I know you're a listener to the pod and glad to finally have you make your debut on this. So I think we'll jump right in with your race was first of all you flipped the seat from Democratic to Republican so that's quite notable. It was one of the most watched races you know below the top of the ticket in November last year. First of all how'd you get into this? How'd you get dragged into running for office?

Always wanted to do it ever since I was a little girl Didn't have the best life growing up We're well under the poverty line dad struggled with substance abuse a lot of domestic violence in my home But public education was my safe haven and went to school every day turned my life around got my engineering degree from Kingsville, and been wanting to be in politics. And I work at Flint Hills Resources, chemical engineer, project manager,

build pipelines and terminals all across the state of Texas. And every year for the past five years, I've been asking them, can I run for office? And they said, no, Denise, I'm sorry, that's a conflict of interest. No, I'm sorry, Nope, nope, nope. And then it wasn't until this fifth and final year that Abel announced his retirement. We got a couple environmentalists on our city council that Flint Hills finally decided, yeah, we're not going to stay on the

sidelines anymore. Like, and I asked again and then they said, we'll think about it. Like, whoa, what? Like, okay, okay, this is farther than I've ever gotten before. A decision went all the way up to our CEO, Jeff Ramsey in Wichita, Kansas, and he essentially said, we constantly complain that our politicians lack the integrity and the business values we hold as a company.

Yet we do not allow our employees the freedom nor the opportunity to run for office. So let this be the start." And oh it was amazing. It was quite a debut and also you know engineer, there's not many engineers in the legislature, most of them are lawyers. Yeah exactly. Do you ever feel like out of place there at all? No I'm enjoying it. This is it's problem solving and a whole different different aspect on the policy side and with laws and things and trying to figure out this six dimensional piece of chess that the Texas house is. But yeah, I was 100% the underdog in my race. We were

very closely watched because Nueces had been trending Republican and it was an open seat yet my office was still 47% and then post-election I mean the whole I thought I was losing the whole entire time and even like the day of people were calling me and they're like so are you gonna win or what's happening and we're like it's gonna be super close like within a hundred. And it was not that at all. And we were extremely surprised. Uh, but on election night in my district, I'm the Western half of Nueces County. So it's Corpus Christi and all the rural towns around it.

So, uh, Robstown, Banketti, Bishop, Agua Dulce, uh, and Driscoll and Ted Cruz on election night got 47%. Donald Trump got 50.2%. He won by 106 votes. And then somehow I scaped away with 55.4%. It was, yeah, it was amazing. Had no idea we were gonna win by such a wide margin. But yeah, we just worked super hard.

And you were lucky you got to avoid the brutal primary, right? I don't think you had a primary challenger. That's correct. And then so once you got to the general election, then all of the the Republican side of focus, especially, you know, Governor Abbott, pumped a ton of money in. And what message did you find resonated the most with your constituents voters? So I'm gonna say two different things. One, I 100% represent my community. So like many or a fifth of my community has never graduated from high school, not even a GED.

from high school, not even a GED. A fifth of my community lives under the poverty line. There's a lot of single-family homes, medium household income, $26,000. I grew up exactly that same way and I think my success in my own career is what really resonated with the families in my community. I had a lot of dads come up to me and say, I want my little girl to be just like you, like you can do it, like I want you to talk to her and my kids. And so that just that resonated a ton. Second half of that, I probably had the best opponent to flip a seat. So my opponent's Almond Ortiz Jr., his dad was a congressman, great congressman, served for two full, quite a while at the federal level, and came up from nothing, built himself kind of like what I'm trying to do here. And his son was not that way, did not, I would say probably didn't embody that same more ethic.

There's like a sense of entitlement about him and that kind of resonated within the community as well. And we tried to push that message out too. So, kind of both things. Great candidate, also great opponent. Funny how it works out like that. What's it been like acclimating to the House? You mentioned 60 chess, but you know what have you learned so far? Oh wow, it is drinking from a fire hose. It is nothing of what I expected. I thought I'd come here and I write great policy and pretty much almost immediately before even setting foot in Austin,

or I came for the caucus vote, right, and freshman orientation, like thrown into this insane speaker's race. And then from there, it's just been there's so much more than I realized that occurs in the Texas House. And I'm just trying to soak it all in and learn as much as I can. And I hope I get reelected so I can implement everything I learned next session.

Well, you mentioned the speakers race and that was the most insane speakers race we've ever seen. I don't think we've, I certainly haven't been part of anything even close to that. It was wild the whole way through. How'd you go about navigating that? So I flipped a seat, right?

I did not know I was one of two people. And I would say the majority of people that won knew they were going to win in their primary knew I'm going to be the representative since March, right? They've had months to kind of meet everyone and do those things. Me and Don McLaughlin, which I would argue he probably knew he was gonna win because it was such a... That district has been moving so far. Correct.

I didn't know till the night of. And almost immediately, with all the congratulation texts I was getting The next question was so who are you voting for for speaker? I was like, whoa, like what like who is that? What's a speaker? like I Didn't know Joe from Adam and and so it was really intense really early on Within two hours of me winning my election was like are you part of the reform group or you're not part of the reform group? Who are you voting for? This person or that person? Why?

You need to do this, you need to do that. And it's like, what is happening? I had no idea. And then I go through freshman orientation, Phelan drops out, Dustin comes in, and yeah, at the end of freshman orientation was the Republican caucus, and it was just like an intense pressure cooker in there, and there's a ton of

personalities coming out all throughout the course of the week, and then text messages going into my district post that vote, and those 45 days from the Republican caucus to swearing in war insane was not, like you said, I didn't have a Republican primary. I'm not used to Republicans fighting me in my district on anything. Like we were lucky to defeat Democrats. We were wanting to flip a seat.

I united all the factions of the Republican Party during my race. I got money from the moderates, the conservatives, the far-right, everyone came together for my race and then all of a sudden for that to blow up in a speaker's race was insane to me. Not something you were expecting. Correct. And having, I think the text messages that were coming out were, Denise is colluding with Democrats to vote in a liberal speaker, right, Dustin Burroughs. And I was just like, I haven't even met a Democrat yet. Like, what? Like, this is insane. Like, I've had zero chance to collude with anybody. I

don't know who anyone is. I haven't even, I've been to Austin that one week and that was it. Like, what's happening here? And then on top of that, I had people, like large donors texting me, like, I mean, we didn't give you money for you not to vote for Cook. And it's like, what? And then I had people fly down and tell me, Denise, like, what is it gonna take for you to flip your vote?

And like, we don't understand why you're not buckling. It's like what the heck is this? Like is every single vote going to be this way? Because again right now I have zero information on anything. I haven't truly met anyone. I don't know what anyone's background is. Like this is, it's a speaker's vote. It's very like a member thing. I don't know how the whole state of Texas got involved in it, but it was just really sad to see how much propaganda was going on. And then it made me just think back on my own life

and try to reflect like, I wonder how many times I've succumbed to propaganda in my own life. Cause I mean, I was reading text messages and seeing the mailers they were sending out in my district, like, whoa, like none of that's accurate. I wonder what I've read that's also not accurate. It also made me pretty upset that I just did this triumphant feat of finally flipping my

district red and then to have organizations come in and try to cause cracks in my Republican foundation in my own party back at home that that was extremely upsetting so. So why did you ultimately vote for Dustin Burroughs then for Speaker Wood? I mean there was no pressure on that side I was getting... So it was the the pressure from the outside driving you the other direction? Yes, correct. 100%. Yeah, I didn't want any part of bending the knee some way just because someone was beating me with the stick. The tactics that they used, I didn't approve of whatsoever. Well, the speaker's race is over.

We did see it bubble up a bit though last week with the motion to vacate. You were one of the entire caucus, except for three members who effectively voted to keep Burroughs as speaker and that that that attempt you know was that an easy easy vote for you? Yeah extremely easy and I want to say one more thing P1 bipartisan support and again with the vacate he again strong bipartisan support the majority of the Republican caucus like you said I

represent a district that is extremely purple Donald Trump 50.2 percent won by 106 votes. Five percent of Democrats voted for me. I need to be very, I am very conscious of what I'm doing in the legislature that actually reflects the values of my district because back home I do represent both Democrats and Republicans and those are actually my voters in the ballot box on that day So yeah, your district was one of a few that had the most movement rights, especially among Hispanics Yeah, it was really prevalent down on the border, but also in Corpus and Nueces County You know, we had another big fight last week over the budget and that was your first budget night which is usually this big

spectacle and it really was this time until 3 a.m. Walk me through that what was that like for you? I had zero idea on what to expect so I read all 393 amendments. There was three of them that directly impacted my district that I knew I did not want those efforts to succeed. But outside of that, it was one of them. Okay. One of them was defunding like NPR broadcasting. We have that at a ton of our universities and at our community college. And then there was two desalinization ones. That actually got in the budget. So I'm still kind of working that.

So are you for or against desalination? Corpus Christi is the first municipal city to have full permits for marine desalinization, sea water, 100% for. We extremely need drought proof water in our area with the amount of growth we have in our industry and I'm against anything that is trying to prevent such things from occurring. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, you went, started to cut you off on that, but you went till the wee hours of the morning,

right? And there was a lot of debate. There was also a lot of standing around, right? Yes. I was exercising at one point with Angie. Doing laps, yeah. I think you said the sergeants told you to stop running around. Yes.

But yeah, any other takeaways on budget fight? I felt like a lot, I was on the Appropriations Committee. So I've been working on the budget for quite a while now. I'm on two subcommittees, 145 and 678. And I guess two things were eye opening to me. So each member already has the chance to submit budget items as a rider through the appropriations process.

I did not submit any amendments on budget night because I got all my items in timely with the rider process. So I was curious to the fact on how people do come to submitting amendments. Is it because they were upset with what happened in Appropriations Committee or other things came up post riders or they're just resubmitting everything? So that was one like large question I had. And then two, yeah, I felt Yeah, I felt like it was almost more policy they were debating, not necessarily appropriations. They were bringing in a lot of, I don't want to say unnecessary, but a lot of different

political fights to the budget where it shouldn't have been that way. And then also the ultimatums like defunding the UT. Like that was kind of like, whoa, what's happening here? I don't want to defund an entire university. So that was quite the showdown. Yeah, what you're referring to is the making general law with a budget rider, right? And that is a point of order that's not allowed

under the budget process. And so we saw a lot of them fail because of that, because they were trying to make law rather than have a policy fight on a bill when you all reach that point, right? They're having it in the budget. I will say, I noticed this too. So I've seen more point of orders now on budget night

than I've seen every day we've been on the floor. I have no idea what point of orders are, right night than I've seen every day we've been on the floor I have no idea what like point of orders are right or what are prevalent ones so I'm learning on more of a policy yeah yes correct so I'm slowly learning but if you notice when when people go up for point of orders you can bring one person to help defend you in the point of order or even the person representing the point of order can be different. On the Republican side it's a lot of my freshman class that's doing it. It's Mitch Little, it's Brent Money, who are some other ones that were up there? My gosh.

Shelly Luther was up there for one of them but that might have been her point of order. Yeah and then Cody Fasut is the main one on the Republican side, but I was thinking it's probably good that they called so many point of orders, so the freshmen that are now representing the freshmen that are now representing our partisan side on them can get more repetitions in. So hopefully later on it helps us out in the long run. That was another thought process I had. Yeah, well watching it play out, it did look like Briscoe Kane and Cody Vasut

were kind of training Mitch Little and money on how to do this. And you could see him walking him through arguments and how to make the arguments. It was pretty fascinating to watch I'd say. Okay so we hit speaker raise, we hit the budgets. This week you will have the fight on public school finance and education savings accounts. Do you know what to expect going into this? Any idea?

This is gonna be a pretty big fight, I think. It's gonna be on Wednesday. I hear there's probably gonna be a ton of amendments. I mean, I'm pretty confident it's gonna pass with the majority of the Republican caucus, more than that has signed off on the original bill as co-author. I'm not quite sure what to expect

because I'm a freshman on what a big bill looks like outside of the budget now. So I don't know how late we'll be there or how contentious or emotional the fights will get, but I look forward to voting for both of those bills. And you are for the Education Saves Accounts. What was your calculus in making that decision? Was it an easy one? Did you have to wrestle with it?

So I was on the school board previously, Tulosa Midway ISD, and we have an amazing school district. We accept tons of transfer students into our school district. Me and my husband started a pack, block walked to get this big bond passed. A large part of that being CTE, where we're training nurses, welders, I need technicians, law enforcement, everything to enter our society today.

Tuloso-Midway can compete with any private school in our area, like without a doubt. Like I was not afraid of students leaving our campus. I 100% believe in the free market. I think there are some schools out there that do need a wake-up call on how their performance is and how they're attending to students. Toloso Midway, not one that I'm worried about. I will say on the flip side of that, I am a foster parent. We recently did do an adoption, so that was exciting,

for my son Ezekiel. But we do respite care cases throughout the years. And like we've had a little girl, seven years old, come in that's had lice in her hair for three straight months. Like her previous foster parents never called that out, none of her caseworkers called it out. Like her teachers, her fellow students, nobody. Like three straight months, lice. Like she had over a thousand when she came to our house. Someone had provided her like a cream ointment because her the back of her neck was all scraped up and scratched and rash from her

scratching it every single day. It's like guys like don't treat like treat the root of the problem not oh like ointment for her neck like what is this like we had to take her to a professional to get it out but like that's that's what's happening in some of our schools is not true oversight or care for the students, just trying to get through the day, on to the next day. And I'm hoping ESAs would help, would truly help out some students like that that are actually falling through all the

Cacks cracks was the feedback on that you've gotten from your district both on the more pub ed side and from the growing Continuously on the conservative right that is opposed to this Yeah They they just at the end of the day They would like it to be a level playing field. When I attended a school board conference last legislative cycle, when it was going through the legislature for one of the first times where it was publicized, it was chaotic. Everyone was like, right, no, this can't happen. Oh my gosh. No, no, no, no.

I attended another school board conference for our region, Coastal Bend region. There's like, I don't know, 30 different school districts from 11 different counties, but this was April of last year, so post primaries. April of last year, so post primaries. So Abbott had already helped flipped so many seats in the primaries that we knew the votes are probably there now, given those wins. And that was probably the most productive meeting I had ever been in with that group of people. And it was school choices going to pass. So we need to identify the appropriate guard rails

that we can live with and hope for the best on the PubEd side and getting the funding that we need for our districts and the initiatives that we care about. So yeah, had a lot of those conversations. One of the biggest things, and I guess I'll say two things here. One, I would love to see enrollment funding versus attendance funding, especially if private schools

are getting that. I would love to see that on the public side. It's probably not gonna get there this session. The second thing that will get there this session, and it is in HB2, insurance, windstorm, property casualty, that's a huge problem in my area. So I'm along the coast. We're a coastal one tier school district. We are paying, my own school district is paying $600 per student for insurance.

Todd Hunter has a district, Port Aransas ISD, paying $2,000 per student for insurance Todd Hunter has a district Port Aransas ISD paying $2,000 per student per insurance that's insane. Is that through TWA or is that private? Policy both. Yeah We we are paying I guess that much more compared to ISDs across the state Todd hunters work extremely hard on the PubEd committee, working with Brad Buckley to get insurance relief into HB2 that will bring a ton of relief to our districts

in my community, in his community, and along the coast. So I believe it's set up now in the committee sub to comparing those coastal tier one school districts with the rest of the state of Texas and then the state reimbursing that difference. Yeah. Humongous relief. When I was on the school board in one year our insurance increased two million dollars. Like we don't have two million dollars just laying around to give. So. Wow. Yeah. So on some other policy priorities of yours and you talked a bit about water. Let's talk more about that.

You know, DSAL seems to be a pretty significant strategy here, but not the only one. Where do you see the water issue going this session? Yeah, so extremely happy with Cody Harris's water bill that we passed out of natural resources, Senator Perry's's water bill that we passed out of Natural Resources, Senator Perry's companion water bill that they're moving through the Senate now, dedicating reoccurring funds to the Water Development Board, and then also on Senator Perry's bill, 80% of that is to new water sources. So that's marine desal, that's

brackish desal, that's produce water, a ton of things happening around the state of Texas. We have the water, we just need to get it to the right places. Corpus Christi, we are in dire need, dire need. So I believe our water cliff has moved now, but initially, August of of this year Corpus Christi was going to hit stage four drought. Stage four means the city was going to turn to the refineries to big users to industry and say we're going to need you to reduce your water usage. They've already reduced a ton over the years through technology efficiencies, reusing as reuse as much as they can, but then to drop another 10 to 30 percent on them

like my own where I work we were talking about shutting units down like we that cannot happen like we've supplied all the jet fuel to DFW. Like planes will stop flying if we hit stage four in Corpus Christi. Cheniere provides LNG to Europe. Like the economy, we're billions and billions and billions of dollars support of Corpus Christi to Texas. Yes, to Texas, to the nation,

and we reflect the global economy as well. And when we hit stage four like it was gonna be horrendous and so the city has done a great job working on short-term water relief from increasing the capacity of our Mary Roads pipeline to drilling wells along the Nueces River to try to replenish those reservoirs and then now marine desal. On top of that, I forgot where I was going with this. Yeah, water's big in Corpus, I'm excited for the bills, I hope we get funding for the projects

that are happening in Corpus because it is extremely expensive. And then that's very scary for the the ratepayers of Corpus Christi. $750 million dollar plant that we're building that is drought resistant that will help our local economy and bring more jobs but at the end of the day someone has to pay that bill and so we're hoping for as much as much relief as possible that I hope the Senate bill and House bill would bring to us The other side of the water issue is fixing exists existing infrastructure, right?

Yes, Houston is a big contributor when I talked through This water issue in Corpus Christi during the Appropriations Committee Mono de ala from Houston came to me after all the testimony. And he said, Denise, there's enough leaky pipes in Houston to feed Corpus Christi all year long. Like, give me money for my leaky pipes. I was like, but that's not going to come immediately, didn't you hear about my water cliff?

Like, I need it now. But yeah, I think they had a rider for like half a billion to fix leaky pipes in their area which isn't saying yeah Corpus Christi I will say we do a very good job at maintaining our leaky pipes as soon as we hear of one we fix it pretty much that day or that week we're kind of running around a zero to one average currently. Okay. What other policy issues do you care about a lot?

If I leave this session with the minimum amount of bills passed, I would hope for two of them. One of them being a big tax issues that is happening in my community. So two years ago, we had an appraiser from Alaska come down and appraise our refineries. He appraised them not off of the assets they have, but the profit they make. So their appraisals went from $2 billion to $12 billion. And humongous increase as is their right. They protested that amount and sued that put the school districts including the one I was on the school board

for the Community College in the county in a very precarious situation. They their hands were tied by the law to write their budgets off of the 12 billion even though they knew they were never going to get it. Our county almost went bankrupt because of it and they're still dealing with issues to this day from that incident. But my bill would allow those local jurisdictions to write budgets based off of the uncontested value, something that's realistic.

And then at the end of the day, win or lose a court case, they may get additional funding, which is amazing. We had pretty much all those organizations in our community come down and testify on behalf of it, pass through raise it means unanimously. I think we may be on the calendar for this Wednesday right before the school choice bill, but we'll see

Yeah, that would be my first bill out of the house Yes, before and then you'll have the whole fights over the school stuff correct And then the second bill if I only passed to this would be the second one I would want passed is Bill, if I only pass two, this would be the second one I would want passed, is any criminal convicted of trafficking kids in Texas should never be eligible for parole. Right now you can serve half of your sentence, which is about 12 years, and then get out on parole and you're not really rehabilitated, but more emboldened to, yeah I can do this, to do this in like 12 years wasn't that much and just repeat offenders of trafficking our most precious kids in society. And so we have that bill, it's in corrections now, we did our hearing last week, hopefully it's voted out this week and we can move forward with it, but it we have bipartisan support on the bill, have 76 co-authors, and yeah it overwhelmingly resonated within my community, Republican and Democrat, I believe that was one of the key issues on how we got a lot of crossover voters in my election

So does that tie into the bail reform issue at all? Or is it? It's not bail reform So I'm gonna say no, but Abbot did specifically mention no parole for child traffickers during his state of the state Which I was like, oh, that's amazing Yeah, so now you have an Abbot blessed bill. Yes no parole for child traffickers during his state of the state, which I was like, Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. So now you have an Abbott blessed bill. Yes.

Um, well, representative Villalobos, anything else you want to say on the podcast and any other issues you want to touch on? Not really. I, I'm extremely honored to be here in the Texas house. It's a privilege every day driving up to the Capitol and then going down parking underneath the Capitol. That's super cool. I feel like a spy. But yeah, I just want to do good policy and bring back big things for my community. For me it's community first up here. It's higher than party and and I want to do what's best for Corpus

Christi every single day and yeah I'm really grateful to be serving. And then last thing I'll say is my husband listens to the weekly roundup every single week because he's working a turnaround at Exxon so this is how he stays informed of what's happening. Well we appreciate his listenership and hopefully he listens to this one. I would hope so. Well Representative Villalobos, thank you for joining today. Yeah, thank you so much.