Seeing Red: A Texas Politics Podcast
Seeing Red: A Texas Politics Podcast is where Texas politics gets the scrutiny it deserves. Hosted by strategist and writer Garrett Fulce, the show features in-depth conversations with lawmakers, activists, and insiders shaping policy in Austin and beyond. Each week, Garrett cuts through the noise with candid interviews and sharp commentary—bringing listeners beyond the talking points to the real mechanics of power in Texas.
Seeing Red: A Texas Politics Podcast
Data Centers Lower the Cost of Living Across Texas (w/ Drew Springer)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Texas just shattered its all-time power demand record during a brutal heat wave — and for the first time in years, ERCOT didn't ask anyone to turn down their AC. Former State Senator Drew Springer joins Garrett to break down exactly why, and what's coming next as data centers and AI reshape the Texas grid.
Drew Springer was in the Texas Senate for Winter Storm Uri and helped write the reforms that followed. Now running Springer Financial Services, he comes back on Seeing Red to explain the post-Uri grid overhaul, the Texas Energy Fund, the fight over massive new 765-kilovolt transmission lines, and why the "Wild Wild West" era of data center growth is about to get its first real guardrails from the Legislature. Garrett also breaks down Gov. Abbott's new affordability push and the fresh trouble brewing for Senate candidate James Talarico.
**Topics discussed:**
- Why ERCOT didn't issue conservation alerts during last week's record heat wave
- What actually caused Winter Storm Uri's grid failure — and the SB3 reforms that followed
- 40,000+ megawatts added to the grid since 2021 — wind, solar, batteries, and gas
- The Texas Energy Fund and the push for more reliable, dispatchable power
- What an "interim charge" is and how the real legislative work gets done between sessions
- The fight over 765-kilovolt transmission lines and rural landowners pushing back
- Why data centers took off with zero regulation — and what guardrails are coming
- AI as a national security issue and why banning data centers outright would be a mistake
- How AI could change opportunity for the next generation of Texans
**Guest:** Drew Springer, former Texas State Representative and State Senator; now runs Springer Financial Services. (Social handle not stated in transcript — producer to fill in.)
**Sources:**
- *NATiVE Solar* — [ERCOT Breaks Demand Record July 2026](https://nativesolar.com/ercot-breaks-demand-record-july-2026/)
- *Houston Public Media* — [ERCOT prepares for record demand during Texas heat wave](https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/infrastructure/2026/07/22/557719/texas-heat-wave-ercot-power-grid-demand/) — July 22, 2026
- *The Texas Tribune* — [ERCOT forecasts energy demand to double in six years](https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/29/texas-ercot-power-grid-record-data-center/) — July 29, 2026
- *KXAN Austin* — [Tanya Tucker testifies, sings at Texas Senate committee hearing on massive power line project](https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/tanya-tucker-testifies-sings-at-texas-senate-committee-hearing-on-massive-power-line-project/)
- *The Texas Tribune* — [Texas must rethink massive transmission lines, lawmakers say](https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/31/texas-transmission-lines-dan-patrick/) — July 31, 2026
- *KERA News* — [Gov. Greg Abbott rolls out initiatives to limit growth in home, car insurance costs](https://www.keranews.org/texas-news/2026-07-16/gov-greg-abbott-rolls-out-initiatives-to-limit-growth-in-home-car-insurance-costs) — July 16, 2026
- *The Federalist* — By Matt Kittle — July 28, 2026 — [Mama's Boy Talarico Appears To Have Broken Texas Election Law](https://thefederalist.com/2026/07/28/exclusive-mamas-boy-talarico-appears-to-have-broken-texas-election-law/)
- *The Texas Tribune* — By Gabby Birenbaum — July 28, 2026 — [Talarico leads Paxton by 5 points in new Texas Senate poll](https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/28/texas-senate-poll-james-talarico-ken-paxton-july-2026/)
Chapters
0:00 Cold open & episode tease
4:36 Welcoming back Drew Springer
6:14 What really caused Uri's grid failure
8:07 Renewables, gas & the new energy mix
9:18 The Texas Energy Fund, explained
11:58 What's an "interim charge"?
13:06 Tanya Tucker sings at the Capitol
14:37 Data centers: Wild West to guardrails
16:52 AI, opportunity & winning the future
18:55 AI is more than chatbots
20:47 The 765-kV lines & the Permian power crunch
21:58 Eminent domain: routes, fairness & the cost of delay
24:34 ERCOT's warning & the severance tax
25:55 Energy Fund + Water Fund: catching up on infrastructure
27:36 Data centers as neighbors: the Childress property tax cut
29:29 The $6 billion incentive math
31:21 Repealing the data center sales tax exemption
32:58 Grayson County: cement plant vs. semiconductors
36:05 Local control & the Death Star Bill
38:37 Life after the lege ($600 a month)
40:07 "Show up at a town hall"
41:45 Solo: Abbott's 5-point property tax plan
49:00 Housing, millennials & why spending cuts matter
52:37 Talarico's residency problem
56:10 Border wall fight in Big Bend
59:55 Reservoirs refill: Corpus Christi's reprieve
Find us at seeingredpodcast.substack.com for full episodes. Follow us on all socials at @theseeingredpod and online at our website Seeing Red Podcast. x.com/gwfulce
This week on Seeing Red, we have former Senator Drew Springer with us to talk about data centers, AI, 765 kilovolt cables, and the power grid, and everything that's going on and has gone on for the past few years on this issue, and talking about what that means in the legislature in the 90th session and on the campaign trail. After that, I dive into Governor Abbott's affordability plan and how that's gonna resonate with everyday Texans. And I jump into the U.S. Senate race to talk a little bit about what Talo Rico kind of trouble he's into after some recent reporting came out about him. So all that, so much more on the other side. You're with seeing red. Well, we are so excited to welcome back to the show a longtime friend of the show and returning guest. That's right, the former state rep state senator, the illustrious Drew Springer. I which you I think you're now running Springer Financial Services. Is that right? You're running a financial services business. Is that right, Drew?
SPEAKER_00That's right. Been running it for a little over a year now, and uh my dad's just now about to turn 82. He still comes into the office, but uh I run the day-to-day operations.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's fantastic. Well, you had a tweet kind of go around Twitter last week when we had a big heat wave come through, and we were really pushing out the the gigawatts of of a power usage that basically said, and I'm gonna summarize it here, but but basically said, we're hitting a record today on how much uh it's of usage all at one time in this state, and we're not getting any notifications from ERCOT. Nothing's happening. The grid is go is doing great, we've stabilized it, and we're moving forward. And it kind of went around because a couple years ago, you know, we were getting notifications when we hit the last record that's saying, hey, we might need to like turn our ACs down. And when it's that hot, no one wants to turn their AC down, and probably no one really is. So I just want to talk to you a little bit about like what were the steps y'all took in the Senate? Because you were still you you you left the Senate a couple years ago. So you were there for the post-URI like reforms. Like, what would what did you do? And like why is the grid more reliable now than it was when we had that big winter storm a few years ago?
SPEAKER_00You know, there's no doubt. I mean, literally, it was like month number two in the Texas Senate, uh, when Storm Uri hit, you know, I was I think I got a whole lot of tractions for doing videos in my attic trying to unthaw pipes and you know, out in the snow and giving grid updates and even asking people to say where their outages were so the electric companies could go and and do what they could to get it back on. But, you know, we we obviously came into that session thinking we were gonna work on different things, and and everybody switched their attention. You know, we did SB3, which really overhauled the way ERCOT and the PUC worked. And I've got to tell you, a lot of it people think it was just lack of generation. It was a lot of stupidity. Former ERCUT employees were turning off and failing to turn off in time power to houses. We turned off the power to the gas plants, gas wells that were feeding the generation companies. So they went off. We didn't change a light bulb in a nuclear power plant, and that caused the whole power plant to go down because it got too cold to keep one of the instruments to be able to monitor the nuclear side of things. So, you know, we really did an awful lot from that and sort of had built on that.
SPEAKER_01We are at a point now where I think we were in like 90 plus. We were using more than 90 plus gigawatts at a time. But the capacity, and the reason why we weren't having any alerts is we had the capacity for an additional like 20 gigawatts or 23 or something a lot of power that could still be used in the grid function. Uh, here's my question: there's a lot of conversation going on about the current energy mix of uh renewable energy and thermal, which is nuclear plus natural gas plus oil and gas. So there's a lot of conversation about the mix of what powers our generation. And then there's also a whole bunch of other conversations downstream of that. Like, what is the current landscape of like what we're trying to build? Like, why are we making a bigger grid, etc.? But also like what how like what is what what's in place for those new generations to come on on board?
SPEAKER_00No, you're you're exactly right. Now, while I said we did a lot of things to improve the processes and be, you know, to where we weren't doing that. The other sign of it is since 2021, we have brought on over 40,000 megawatts. Now, most of that has been wind and solar. Good news is there's a fair chunk of that that is battery. The benefit of batteries, you know, when we've got excess capacity and wind at night, then charge the batteries and release it in the late afternoon, usually when this when the sun starts going down. And so, yeah, that has really helped in the immediate period. But we also have seen much more natural gas starting to come online, or just seeing the first little bit of it. We had a 1.5 megawatt fast-fired gas plant come online. One of the things that, you know, was the lieutenant governor's baby when I was there in 2023 was the Texas Energy Fund, you know, which really addressed the question you really asked is we have to have more reliable power. And we put it to the voters, and they all voted for it. And so we're starting to see that come online. There's been 900 megawatts of that come on. There's 2.2 or 2200 more megawatts that are in the development phase right now under that program. So that's really going to help us. And then we've, and we've got many more in the pipeline, just not even using that fund, just the, you know, the NRGs, the Vestras, the constellation cowpines of the world that are coming out and just building power on their own because they see the market needs them. And I think when we look about five to 10 years down the line, I'm real hopeful that we'll start seeing some of those SMR small nuclear reactors come online as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that'll be fascinating to see. My my curiosity is there's a couple of major fights downstream of this fight that kind of inform how much innovation we need to we need to bring on, but and how much we need to replace. So, you know, there's a few conversations happening. One is you're bringing on new generation to replace aging generation that, you know, it's just things have been producing power for a long time. It's just not going to work that much longer. There are other problems where with reliability when it comes to renewables, and there was a whole incentive structure, but you know, those wind turn binds they break down. Do we replace them? Are there is there a market incentive to replace them? And there's all these other things upstream of the conversation, but downstream is modern consumption of energy, new population, more people moving to Texas all the time. We still have hundreds of moving, if not thousands of moving to people, people moving to Texas every day on top of data centers and other uh power needs. And then there's a secondary question is of moving the power around from generators to where the power is needed. So there's big fights around these large 765 kilovolt wires, which are, you know, move which are part of the grid. It's what moves the electrons around. Like there was some recent fights in the legislature, or fights, little recent discussions in the legislature, because there are interim charges to discuss this. Can you talk a little bit about what an interim charge is and to kind of talk about what's been happening in the Capitol?
SPEAKER_00You know, that's an excellent point. And I think most people don't understand what happens in the interim. And truthfully, bills are passed during session, but the work to come up with what those bills are going to be said, and it's going to be on paper, is done in the interim. And they have these hearings, both in the Senate and the House. So whether it's B and C in the Senate on electricity or state affairs in the House, they're going to be having that and they want input from everybody, not just the PUC, not just the power generators or ERCOT. You know, whoever has a dog in that fight and has something they want to say, they want to hear from it and they want to put that in there. A lot of that Phil King did last session with SB6, which we're seeing a lot of the benefits of that, of being able to handle things while we're doing the this expansion of data centers from that standpoint. So the interim is really where the work is done. And so it is important to know that those legislators don't just work 140 days every other year. They're spending a huge amount of time this summer working on the problems that don't pass, hopefully to make Texas better next session.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, I was I was kind of there was a lot of I tweeted a couple things. There was some fun uh little moments of people talking about stuff at the at those meetings. I know Tanya Tucker got up and sang a song that was against, I guess, wire the the kilovolt wires, and maybe against data centers, I don't know. But there was a bunch of fun stuff coming out of that. The like my question is there's a lot when whenever you have whenever you are at a go to one of these meetings, there's either two vibes. There is no one's there, and it's just people lobbyists who are just seeing the checking in for a status update on what how bill is moving or something's happening, or it's the like complete opposite, and it becomes like a circus environment where you have a bunch of people, usually from just one side, but on some issues you have people from both sides packing in a room to try and get their point across. And there are a lot of people right now who are pushing, pushing, pushing, and are very against data centers. I don't really feel like the public at large really knows the true value of data centers. And you know, I'm trying to share that with folks. But what is your kind of prognostication as a Capital Watcher of what sort of restrictions might be put on data centers and and on these large uh transmission wires?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I look, I there what has happened is the data centers took off so fast it was the wild, wild west. And so no rules were ever put on them. And I think everybody now realizes that. So the problem is, is typically, like you sort of said, is then everybody goes from this the wild, wild west to we just don't want them at all. When reality is probably everybody who showed up at the Capitol got there by using AI to either running one of their apps for the driving app, to make a reservation at a hotel, to book a plane, to ask questions, whether they're asking OpenAI or Grok to understand the issue even better. And so, you know, the so they don't understand that. But that being said, is look, water is valuable in Texas. And I think John McQueenie and several others that I've seen their stuff on are talking closed loop systems, putting those regulations in place, unless maybe they're gonna build it on the coast and have it desell and do their own water from that standpoint. You know, who knows what that's gonna look like? You can talk about setbacks. I mean, nobody wants a building in the country that is sitting on your fence line. We did setbacks for wind towers, that they could be only so close to a neighboring property line. And we did that way after the fact because they were being abused. And so I look for legislation like this. You know, as Abbott says, hey, look, they're not gonna be in rural neighborhoods. You know, nobody's gonna put one right next door to Munster where I live, but they may put it out on my farm, which is five miles away, if there's 3,000 acres and they can put it in the middle of it, and nobody's gonna be disturbed. And so I think we're gonna see legislation more along the lines of coming like that. But it's as as President Trump says, AI is something the United States has to win. China would like nothing else but all the data centers in the world to be in China, to where they can control the flow of information and really, you know, uh cause our security to totally come unraveled. And so uh, you know, that's why I'm a huge supporter. But there's got to be common sense, you know, guardrails. And look, I know both you know the Senate and the House will come up with those, and but they also want everybody's feedback. But just saying no, we want to ban them all together and be like you know, the Democrats in New York in good for the country.
SPEAKER_01No, it's terrible for the country. I mean, data centers, as President Trump has pointed out, are the are one of the key pieces of the backbone to winning the AI fight. But also data centers are just at their core, just computing power. It's chips, it's GPUs, it's CPUs, and it's a big server farm. So it's not just the random access memory and the other types of memory they're using to run the AI engines. It's where we're storing all of our photos in the cloud. If you use any cloud storage, if you use any cloud-based apps, if you use any apps, because the entirety of nearly everything, especially that the government uses, is on AWS. And all those backbones in Azure.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. One of the things that, you know, I think the legislature I always thought of, and I think almost all my colleagues always did, is not what is it for me. I, you know, hey, I want to be able to book my you know, Southwest Airlines flight easier and faster, and so I need more data from there. Yeah, we're thinking, you know, what does it do to future Texas? And sort of almost like we argued during the gun debate that a gun equalizes a 105-pound woman against a 300-pound attacker guy. Well, in the same sense, AI allows every kid in Texas to have the world's knowledge at their fingertips. And they can explore and become anything, they can learn anything that interests them. They can start their own business. You can write a whole business plan with AI for less than $10,000. You can come up with a great idea and do that. Where in the past, if you didn't have connections, if you didn't have lawyers, if you didn't have anything, you couldn't do these. So when we talk about small businesses and education, AI is really going to be what's driving us forward.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think people also misunderstand what even AI is, because a lot of the understanding of what AI is is just what happened when Chat GPT kind of became prominent. And it was large language model chat bots or chat agents or whatever conversations. So people are just like, oh, it came wrong. And those models from a few years ago hallucinated a good bit. It was funny for it to say funny stuff. And it was like, oh, how is this ever going to be a tool? Well, at the at the consumer level now, there are tools from OpenAI and Google and Claude and Anthropics Cloud, where you're able to do a whole bunch of coding. You can create your own like personal apps to do stuff. I've done it. I've fantastic for my workflow and productivity and all sorts of interesting and things for the exact use case you're talking about. As a small business owner, I'm using it to automate a whole bunch of stuff that I wouldn't have time or money to do otherwise. And like the that's just a low-end or a like a kind of low-end enterprise or high-end consumer kind of level. The high-end enterprise folks, your Googles, your Amazons, are doing all sorts of crazy stuff with it. And that's only the stuff we know about. And so at this the highest layer are the national security implications because of what the nation states level folks are doing with it. And it's one of these things where like AI is itself not just a chatbot. And it includes a whole bunch of stuff that's been in practice being used for decades, basically since computing existed. It's just algorithmic or deterministic workflows. And it's just making a lot of the process for making a computer talk to other parts of the computer and do things simpler for people who don't know how to speak in code. And it's incredible the things you're able to do with that sort of technology. And I don't think people really appreciate how much it's fundamentally going to impact productivity. And it's the amount of stuff we're able to work and do, and to the point where like we should see huge GTP growth. But that's a whole tangent for a whole other day. Tell me a little bit more about this, the large kilovolt wires. Now, I know my understanding of it is basically the Permian Basin needs access to both send and receive more power in order for it to turn on more oil and gas drilling, but also a whole host of things. And there's this proposal to send a couple very large a couple of electrical generating cables or transmission cables across the state. And a lot of people are upset because the state's gonna have to use imminent domain to take up a good chunk of land in order to do this. Is that you think that's a fair relay of the land of what it is and what's going on?
SPEAKER_00It is, but I mean, you know, part of that is and look, nobody likes imminent domain. Nobody likes when you build a road, nobody likes when that I when I came into the legislature, it was right after the Crest lines were done. Now the Crestlines were 365 KV. These new 765 KVs have three times the amount of energy that can flow through them. So it needs much less land mass than if we needed the same amount of capacity using the Crestline technology. But I think where a lot of it gets when you build roads or build transmission lines, part of the process is they lay out a bunch of lines or routes that they could go. So there's nine to twelve routes that these 765s are going down. But there are only going to be two to three of them that are actually built. And so a lot of people are thinking it's going to affect them, but that may not be the route that they choose. One of my big concerns when I first got in was are we paying a fair amount on imminent domain? Are we taking advantage of the little widow lady, but yet the multimillionaire ranch owner has lawyers and he gets paid 10x more than her? And so hopefully they'll address that in the in that process. Look, it has to be transparent. But you said one thing. This cannot really be delayed. The more we delay it, the more we hurt our oil and gas industry, which pays 4.5% of the state budget in suffering taxes. It creates tons of jobs. And when we lose, if those data centers aren't built and not built somewhere else, you know, look, it's going to hit everybody's retirement because that means Amazon, NVIDIA, everyone that is in our pension funds or 401ks and in the stock market, you know, they're not going to benefit. And so there is, it needs to be transparent, it needs to be right, but we can't just delay it and say, no, no, no, no, we don't ever want this. And I get it. If you're the one who gets it on your land, I understand. I have a wind tower right across the fence line with me with a flashing red light on our family farm. And, you know, that comes with living in the country.
SPEAKER_01I mean, you don't get to own your view, but your neighbors can purview to do what they want to do with it. I can't, I mean, a couple of things came to mind. I drive around the state a lot. I know you do too. I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff you drive by that's just derelict old, massive agriculture like buildings and grain towers and stuff that are clearly not ever going to be used again. They're up, they're only just going to fall at some point. And yeah, those things like it's never pleasant to just to have that next to your property. Again, there's a there's there's that's that's baked into the the agreement of you don't get to tell your neighbor what to do, so they they can't tell you how you can use yours either. But one of the things that really uh struck to me was like ERCOT, when ERCOT testified of this last week that you know we're good right now. We have nine we had these massive records at 90, we have 110 generation. But within a year, if these these cables aren't built, there's gonna be areas of where the grid where that isn't the case, and we could start to see things having to shut down. And when we're talking about things shutting down, I'm talking about massive oil and gas operations where it takes a while for them to come back up and on. Like it's not a thing where you can just turn the switch and start turn the oil starts pumping again. And that has massive implications for those things you're talking about, the severance tax, which you said makes up about five percent of the budget or four point whatever percent of the budget. That's all several lots of billions of dollars come in from what's just explaining what the severance tax is. It's basically the fee that we the state charges people to take oil out of the ground. Is that fair?
SPEAKER_00That's right. It is there, and it look, it uh helps keep, you know, if we didn't have that tax, then property taxes would have to be higher. And so let's provide this type of amount of services.
SPEAKER_01Well, one one thing we talked about earlier, I want to loop back in. You talked about the Texas, I think you said the energy fund. We've also last in the last constitutional amendment election, we passed the Texas Water Fund. These are two things that were like established because we were having a hard time keeping up with our energy infrastructure and our water infrastructure. Two problems that have been persistent in Texas forever. There's always fights about it. We weren't quite doing enough, and this was a solution that we've decided that we're going to use this as a way to make sure that doesn't fall behind and kind of help us catch up. Nevertheless, we're still trying to catch up. We are far doing doing far better than other states in this regard, which is one of the reasons why data centers are attracted to and other in similar industries like the chip manufacturers are attracted to Texas because we have the power and we have the water that's you know the available from the resources we've we've developed. My thing is I think a lot of politicians see the people who are just kind of vaguely mad or just very mad at a vague idea of a data center, and they're using the data center as the boogeyman to try and blame them for the kicking the can down the road for the past few decades on building out enough grid uh infrastructure or water capacity. And I'm not talking about necessarily in Texas, because like again, we've we've done a lot of stuff in Texas, but also about just politicians nationwide. And I think that it's something that we we need to overcome. We need to have conversations about it like this, because it's the backbone and it's gonna it's what's gonna drive not just our economy but our national security for the next couple decades.
SPEAKER_00Right, you're exactly right. We've got to be investing in Texas. I mean, and and some of the things is you know, great. We we built a fantastic new state park near Mineral Wells and Palo Pinto, and they needed it, and Texas gets that ability. But you know, there's nothing sexy about fixing leaking pipes where 20 to 30 percent of our water goes to, doesn't even get to where it was intended to. But we had to pass that water bill to be able to address things like that to make sure that we we have water when we turn on the tap. Last year we had 1,150 people move into the state of Texas. And so they don't bring their water in roads, is what we always usually say in that regard. But they come here because of low regulations, the availability and reliability of electricity. Trust me, the Urcott grid is better than the rest the other two grids in the nation. And so we don't have those, uh, other than URI, we don't have those rolling brown apps like we see elsewhere in the state. And that's why people want to come here. And they bring good high-paying jobs with them. And I can tell you what, if a data center ends up in a county, I had one that ended up in, I believe it was Childress, you know, it cut the county property tax for everybody massively, even if with a small incentive package, you know, and so it lowers property taxes where these things come into place. They donate money to the local charities, the schools, and everything else. And so they're good citizens. And those are the ones we want to make sure we're bringing up. They're coming here to take advantage of us. I think that's what the legislators putting guardrails around for next time. But we've got to be open for business. We can't be like some of these other Nambi blue states that just want to shut everything down and say, no, no, no. That's not that's not the way Texas is. It's not what started the Texas miracle, and we're gonna keep the Texas miracle going.
SPEAKER_01I mean, you're absolutely right. They are they they I would I would I would make one clarification. They have the ability to lower property taxes if the if the county will go in and and do it. And there are some triggers to make sure that does happen.
SPEAKER_00But it's Paul Bidencourt did that three and a half percent of then we get that cap on them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So so there there is that in there. But I would also point out that like they bring in a ton of jobs from construction, right? And those everyone knows those are those are fairly seasonal, and it takes a couple years, but it takes some time to put those things up. But nevertheless, those are seasonal or temporary jobs. But these large, large data centers that bring in so much tax revenue from property tax, even with the incentives, are still bringing in a tremendous amount. The talking point from the opposition is we missed out on something like $3.5 billion in sales and property tax from incentives. We had brought in an additional $6 billion. So that was $6 billion we never would have gotten. We incentivized them and they brought them here, and this would be now we have an extra six billion. So like we got six billion from it. Like I was, I saw I I looked into this. The amount of projected money from property taxes with the current incentives in three years from now, after the stuff that's projected that's on that's uh in the pipeline to be built is built, is going to be more than what the service tax brings in. Now it's not coming to the same budget, and that's not counting oil and gas as other their own property tax implications that they have to pay. But it is a so it's not apples to apples, but it's a lot of money. It's what's like you said, it's around the in the ballpark of a four or five percent of the whole budget of the state will be coming in from this, like, or at least in the at least the local jurisdictions.
SPEAKER_00And look, we've heard Abbott say and and Burroughs and Lieutenant Governor and others you know that we need to end the exemption on sales tax for the goods that go inside of data centers. 95%, 98% of is not the building, it's the Nvidia chips, it's the racks, it's the Dell computer stuff, it's those things that is really what cost. And they don't pay sales tax. Now, maybe I was forward thinking in 2013 when that bill was passed because I was one of 20 that voted against it for that tax incentive. But I think the the legislator is gonna repeal that, and rightfully so. It was never when that was passed, it was passed because we were trying to attract one to two data centers that were gonna be built in Texas versus being built in Kansas. And so it's time to repeal that one. And look, they're gonna keep coming here because in the in the last 12 years, the rest of the country's become crazy. And they realize Texas is this bastion of freedom where they can they can start one. But you also mentioned they don't build them overnight. The one in Abilene, Starbase, it started in the middle of 2024. It's half online now, and projected the other half will be online by 20 early 2027. And so, you know, you know, those are how long these things take. A lot of construction jobs. I mean, you want to see a restaurant and a small town turn around, put that that many people in there and let them start, you know, eating and and generating revenue, and you'll you'll set those families up for life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, I know, so I hear I do have a question because it's a similar corollary. And there was a fight. So I'm interested on your take on this. Is towards the end of your tenure in in the Senate, there was a fight in Grayson County over a cement batch plant. And if I recall correctly, you were helped with the community outreach against that plant being permitted by TCEQ if for a number of reasons, but a large part was the particulate from the cement plant would end up disrupting the other industries that were there already, primarily the semiconductor and chip manufacturing that was going in for TI and all that other stuff. What makes that type of situation different where you wanted to fight against the cement plant, at least in that in that moment, versus the data centers?
SPEAKER_00Well, look, it's just like you don't want to build a data center in a neighborhood. There's right places and wrong places to build these monstrous things. The state of Texas had just given millions of dollars to both global wafers who builds the wafer that the chip is built on top of at TI. So TI is spending $30 billion in Sherman, Texas, creating thousands of jobs that pay $100,000 a job, where this one cement plant could potentially disrupt that. Global wafer grows the silicon that makes those nanomillimeter wafers. If that thing vibrates because they were blasting or things like that, it could disrupt that and make that whole plant worthless. And they were spending six billion dollars on that. And the one thing I was really excited about global wafers is we don't have that capacity in the United States. It is almost entirely in Taiwan. And so if China ever blocked Taiwan and took that over, or honestly, they don't have to take it over, they can just in three weeks put a blockade on oil and gas, and Taiwan will shut down. If they did that, we need a place in the United States that we can still manufacture the wafers, the chips, to be able to run our military, our cars, our infrastructure, and everything else we do. And so that's why it was important to do it. I appreciate my predecessor, Senator Hugging Booth, picked that up afterwards. He worked with Senator Birdwell, who was the author of the bill, but really a lot of the hard work was really those two gentlemen and Chairman Brook Brooks Landgraff over in the House to pass it. They passed it. Black Mountain is the company. They've now sued saying it uh it's not applicable. So it's in litigation right now. Senator Hugaboo's actually written a letter. This was legislative intent to help the court look at it, as well as he was working on clarification language for next session on that. And the University of Texas is coming out with a study by the end of August that'll also help solidify the stance on that. Why that was really the right thing to do in this case.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, there's there's some nuance to it. I do think there's like a righteous kind of there's a push and pull. And it feels right to want to have as much at the uh local control as possible on issues like this, to kind of kick things to the county commissioners or the cities or whatever else. But then there is also the other pullback, which is we are a state and we have a state economy, and we also have to give businesses a state level kind of understanding of how things can move around, and where they don't have to have a patchwork of different regulations and hoops they have to jump through. So that's always gonna be a push and pull in these fights of where the does the control really need to sit and how it's gonna work.
SPEAKER_00But the legislature, I think in your last session, passed what's called the Death Star bill, which kind of really solidified really solidified the uh it was Speaker Burroughs that really sort of set up that says, you know, you couldn't have different rules for different municipalities for all these, you know, for all the businesses that they're looking, you know, the companies come here because they said, I know I'm in four locations to be able to run my deal. And and and Speaker Burroughs was the carrier of that bill. He understood I filed this, I filed a similar bill in when I was in state affairs in the House. I both love the Senate and House. They're both great institutions on there. And but that's why we have to do that. Yeah, I think, you know, Speaker Burroughs, you know, had just amazing foresight to see that. You know, I've seen him fight on that issues. I mean, you know, when he was chair of Ways and Means and we got our property tax cuts through when we first did those, he was the leader behind those. You know, I saw him fight when he was blackballed and couldn't pass a bill. He found out how to get somebody else to do it, do the work for him to save rural agriculture. And so he's always been doing a great job. And and now what is he doing? He's out there putting everything beside, all the petty fights that we typically have in primaries and and and other races, and he's out there working for every Republican because we know we need every Republican vote. We need every vote this November if we're gonna keep Texas red and and and continue to see things go the the the way we've enjoyed for well over two decades.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. Well, Senator Springer, it's it's always fun to keep calling y'all by your your last title. You know, it helps I get I guess it helps get you in the door into some couple of places. But uh Senator Springer, where can people find your your information? Where they can they find what you're up to these days?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, I'm still somewhat active on X. That's the one I use usually usually utilize the most. I enjoy that. Look, life after the legislature, going from $600 a month. There's still people out there that don't realize that's what everybody in the legislature makes, you know, coming out back into the the world, which our forefathers intended us to. Pass bills and go back and live with the rules and laws that you passed. And I'm blessed to be able to do that. We are raising our now four grandkids since I've left the legislature. We've had two twins, and so we're up to four now. And so we're just enjoying that life and working and staying involved with politics, talking with my friends and guys like you, and and putting tweets out when I see things that we've done in the past and it's coming to pay fruition now, putting those out there as well.
SPEAKER_01Excellent. Well, thank you so much for jumping on to kind of talk about these issues with me. And I hope to get maybe get you to jump back on during the session and talk about what fights are happening then. But thanks for for jumping on with me.
SPEAKER_00Hey, one one last thing. You know, I always told people this. You would be shocked. If you want to affect your Texas government, show up at a town hall. You would be shocked. I represented a million people in the Senate, and I had numerous town halls with only 20 to 30 people there. If you have a question, I always say 30 minutes for QA. You can ask, put your input in, get involved. They really do care. They want to hear from you. So reach out to their offices, send them emails, or show up at a town hall.
SPEAKER_01Well, and when I when I work in some in the legislature's office, like, you know, we do get tons of email. A lot of it's form stuff, but like we get a lot of stuff from constituents, and the members want to know what it says and we'll read it and we'll forward it along and make sure they see it. They want to know what the people are saying and thinking. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. There's a little large, and but kind of to tie that back to the last point, there's a lot of loud people who are against the data centers and the and the and the transmission lines, and they are creating an echo chamber around the folks right now. So they're only ever hearing about it, and the people who are probably going to benefit the most from it, including those people, aren't talking about it enough or at all. So the people just feel like people are against it. But in 10 years, people will be wondering what the hell the hell happened to all my cloud storage or what happened to my apps that I used to use, or all the, you know, whatever else. All right. Well, thank you, Senator Springer, and we'll uh we'll see you next time. Well, that was a great conversation with Senator Springer. I want to thank him again for coming on the show. It's always fun to talk to him and on or off air. He's a he's a consummate, good good guy, and I always love getting to talk to him. I'm glad y'all got to hear his insights. But we're gonna dive in now to what I think is gonna be a big mover over the next few months of the of what drives the conversation. It's gonna be Governor Abbott and his re-election campaign and what he's doing to you know to fight the fight. Now, his opponent is someone that no one's outside of the Capitol has really heard of. She's not running a very good campaign, she's apparently not raising that much money, and she's basically been a non-factor in the campaign, which is unsurprising if you've followed her career in the Capitol. She was a non-factor there as well. And so the governor, nevertheless, is running on his platform why he wants another term and what he wants to focus on the next term. When I was on his campaign, it was a big focus on parents' bill of rights, parent choice, and a lot of that got accomplished with the school choice bill. Now we're gonna be working on, it looks like he's going after property taxes, and he's going after affordability through property taxes, and that's gonna be the cornerstone of this campaign. It's what all the messaging I'm seeing about from the campaign is about. And so the the basic principles of it are this there's a five-point plan, and that where they're gonna, the first thing they're gonna do is they're gonna cap local spending. Local in this case is gonna be cities, counties, and any like district that's a taxing district that's taxing via property taxes. I say schools, but we're gonna get to that later. But be capping those. Their revenue cannot grow more than the population increase plus inflation. So if there's an inflation rate of 3%, it can grow 3%. And whatever that and pop if if you have more people move into your city or into your district, you can account for that. And then beyond that, it can only grow by no more than 3.5%. Which you'd be like, oh, they're gonna be out here like raising up their rates or whatever. This is to kind of capture passive revenue growth. A lot of times you hear about it, these big cities or whatever else, you think my you'll hear about, you know, oh, they pat they cut property taxes, but my property pill still went up. It's like, well, because your evaluation went up. And this type of change impacts that type of thing from occurring where those cuts to property taxes or whatever really eat into, don't get aimed into by evaluations of property changing. So that's that's point number one. The second point comes down to changing the requirement necessary for an election to be successful if you're gonna try and increase property taxes. Right now, it just takes a simple majority. The governor is proposing that there be a two-thirds majority threshold in place for those types of elections to be successful. We'll see how that one goes. I I don't recall whether that requires a constitutional amendment to change that. It may just be in statute. And so that'll be an interesting one to see how they how how that impacts it. But obviously, a lot fewer bonds and Vaders and all the types of these property attacks increase elections would be successful if this were implemented just because you know they would have to have a higher threshold. What if you're in a district that's already has a super high rate? rate and you want to have you know you don't want to be locked in because a lot of times what will happen in this situation is you know districts will push push push to try and get stuff done before new legislation gets passed and then they don't have to worry about it because they got their stuff to the maximum. Well if you can get 15% of a district a city or whatever to sign a petition to well that will trigger a rollback election. That's one of the other that's the point three of what the campaign's trying to do is just give that there be a local option where it's that's a large that's a pretty large burden to get something done via petitions 15%. And so if you are able to organize and get those petitions signed in the requisite amount of time you could trigger a rollback election. Now point four is a little bit in the weeds on how stuff is appraised. Right now there are some appraisal caps that have been put in place and are or are working where certain appraisals can't go up or down and that would be changed. But it would also the the big thing is that properties would only be reevaluated every five years. Right now county appraisal districts have to appraise properties on a yearly basis on a yearly cycle that would change back to a or that would change to a five year cycle. Just to you know keep their property tax bill where it's supposed to be the fifth the fifth point of Government's plan might be the biggest it's getting rid of constitutional it'd be a constitutional amendment to get rid of school MO school property taxes basically to not allowing school districts at all to to use school to property taxes. And part of that plan from earlier that was released already was basically the phasing out of the M and what's called the MO tax rate which is a maintenance and operations rate of of school districts and having that being taken on by the state. So they'd still have the same end up being the same amount of money but instead that money coming from local property owners that money would be coming largely from state coffers with the from and the state would be taking on that responsibility in order to pay for that in order for the state to do that and you know reason like really lower people's property tax rates in the state they're going to have to cut proper cut spending and the state budget where they're with you know in order to pay for that to happen. So that's the it's a pretty audacious plan or it's a pretty it's a pretty daring plan and it has a lot of specifics but like any of this stuff it's going to take the legislative process to really pound out the details and what the final shape will be will be a matter of compromise and moving stuff around and whatever else. But it's going to be this is when government when Governor Abbott wins, assuming he's able to maintain majorities in the House and and the Senate as expected like this will be the main focus of the 90th session is really getting this across the board because it's going to take a lot of work to get all these things changed. And it's you know it's it's worth it and it can make everyone everyday Texans lives a lot better because this is the main tax that's really burdening the kind of people who are just who are younger. Finally figured out how to buy a house or you want to you're looking at whether you're going to buy a house or not one of the big things you have to take into account is what's my property tax bill going to be you know depending on how much your house is worth and how much your bill is it can be a substantial chunk of your monthly payment for your house ends up being your property tax bill. And if you're able to really put a dent into that from the government standpoint, it means more people are able to go and buy a house. And so this is really smart policy. It's really a bold plan to kind of change how this impacts those folks and I think it's worthwhile to pursue and it for no other reason than the fact that the housing market in Texas has been booming in the trying in the Texas triangle which are the major metros in the tech in the state for the past you know two decades and if not longer. And you know in a lot of places we saw that there were major issues with supply coming on board fast enough and then like prices have been getting out of control to a certain extent and a lot of people in my generation have had a hard time which is a millennial kind of the I guess at this point 30 to 45 year olds have had a hard time compared to other generations of getting into the into the homeownership game. And when they have it's just you know it's been it's been a it's been a struggle. Well some interesting things have happened and like one of those being that a lot of supply came on board so Austin was like really spiking up and it's flat it's it's gone back kind of it's gone back down. It's still higher than other places but did not continue up on the on a crazy on trajectory because a lot of rental in a lot of rental units came on like via big apartment complexes but also a lot of housing stock came on in the in the metro and people were able to move into those stocks and a lot of prices have begun began to stabilize and start to drop which is a good thing overall and is something that like the but it's still really high prices. And so when you're looking at like the things that can like really impact people's pocketbooks in Texas we don't have an income tax. You can't just you know give people like you can't do like an earned income credit or a like child deduction or anything like that. Those types of things are harder to give back to people because there's no like mechanism to take money from them in the first place aside from property taxes, which is all done at the local level. So in order to figure out ways in order to actually lower that tax burden you got to figure out ways to cut spending honestly and then to you know as the state you have to figure out ways to inhibit the local bill the local officials' ability to impose new taxes. At the same time you still need to have roads and infrastructure and all these things so these different people these different organizations and these different government entities still need to be able to have some funding in order to to do things and that still costs a lot of money we still have to have taxes but figuring out where those taxes come from and who's actually paying it matters. But as I've written before and as I'll write again you can talk about cutting taxes or getting rid of one type of tax but if you don't talk about cutting spending at the same time you're always going to have problems with the fact that that money still has to come from somewhere in order to for it to happen. And so I do think not only is it a bold plan to talk about how they're going to cut the taxes but also how they're cutting spending and I'm really interested to see the types of plans that come out of this and the types of the things that are going to be coming out of the governor's office and then out of his campaign over the next few months and over the next year. But enough of that for now let's talk a little bit about old James Tallarico well last week we talked about how Ken Paxton was you know having issues because he was wasn't registered to vote at his new house where he's been staying while he's going through the divorce with his with what his wife Senator Angela Paxton and whether or not it was appropriate for him to maintain his voter registration at that house while he fights over it. And you know listen Texas residency laws and where you can vote or run for office are pretty lax in that they basically just there's no real definition for like we'll return to the house or to the residents. It's pretty vague and you know that because there's been a lot of court cases about people not living in the district that never really go anywhere. And so from a legal standpoint Paxon's really not any trouble and shouldn't be most likely but even with how the laws are written now they're they those need to be tightened up but more aggressively or more egregiously than you know Paxson's you know keeping his voter registration in Collin County for a few months while he's fighting his divorce is James Helarico who capital followers not even insiders know that in 20 between 2020 and 2022 after the redistricting from 2020 sorry between 2021 and 2023 during the redistricting process that he was basically put into a 5050 district in his home district in Williamson County. He opted not to run in that 5050 district and instead moved his registration to his mom's house across the county line and ran for the district that was neighboring his old county oh his old district and was much safer. I believe the person who had been in that seat had run for Austin's mayor and that there was an open seat so he's like I'm just gonna go run for that seat because he didn't want to have to deal with a a close seat well a Republican won that his old seat by like four points. Caroline Harris de Villa like won that was a pretty close race but won it very well but if she'd been running against an incumbent like Telarico who knows what happened. But so he abandoned his seat that was definitely winnable for Democrats and lew for a safer seat but he did so by just at the last minute while still representing his other district claiming he'd moved there was I remember there being some consternation at the time about whether or not like he was able to do that he and whether he was vacating his seat in order to do it. I don't remember reporting on that if I think it was ever litigated I doubt anything was ever litigated but so this is a known like thing that had happened. But like that was far more egregious than whatever the hell Paxon's done and how you know this was about who he represents and when he represented them and does he even live still at the place where he claims to live in District 47 I think it's 47 the Flugerville area or if he still lives at the location where he was in Williamson County or if he ended up moving up slowly but surely to his actual district. It's not very far. So that's kind of been percolating on the side and it's finally some some hits at Talla Rico but it was more of a bracketing hit. And I think we've talked about this in the past but it was more of a hit to insulate Paxton from other hits on that issue going forward because now it'll be something where anytime they mention the press mentions that story relating to Paxton they're going to need to mention that story relating to Tellerico as well and so it insulates the you know the impact of that going forward. I will be interested to see if there's any more like this most of the stuff right now is just clips of stuff that Talo Rico said I'm curious to see if there's any more like real like OPA which is more like documents or kind of court records or anything like that that might come out on Talo Rico. I kind of feel like they'd come out by now but you never know. So we're waiting to see how that what that landscape looks like but it looks like the Pax and campaign's fighting back a little bit. So that's it's good to see that coming up. But another fight that's happening is over on our border. Which border that's right the Mexican border but not between who you think it's between the Texas General Office and Land Commissioner Don Buckingham and the Border Patrol or whomever is building the wall effectively my understanding of this as it stands right now the Border Patrol has started to clear some land they didn't have permission to clear from the state I don't know whether or not that's going to end up put where where that's going to go it's probably just them figuring out where the path of a wall through Presidio County. But here's the interesting thing about Presidio County if you look at Texas it's you know whatever else you look over to the west and there's the panhandle and the bottom of that panhandle is the Big Ben region and that is Presidio and Brewster counties. They're massive they're bigger than most than several states they are absolutely huge very few people live there and they live in very concentrated places having been to the Big Bend region and you know drove and driven all over it as you know on a vacation to like be in the big bend it is remarkably desolate when you get outside of the city of Presidio or Lahita or where or Trlingua or the park itself it is spartan it is miles and miles but nothing but miles and miles of cactus and dirt it is relentlessly hot and it is a place that through lots of it are guarded by natural walls of canyons that can go over a thousand foot tall at some points through all the Rio Grande Valley through that that is our border. And so when you ask yourself where we need to prioritize building a wall whether it's the flat sections where people can just walk across in New Mexico or the populated sections like the the valley or near Laredo or other cities along Mexican's the Mexican border makes sense. Around the city of Presidio perhaps some going to towards the park and the the multiple parks maybe there are areas that need it. But there are 100% areas that just don't need it. If you were to someone were to try and cross there even if that was the only place they could easily like just get across it is not easy to get there. There is no infrastructure there's no roads there's nowhere to get there on the Mexican side and if they did across on the American side without being detected they still have to go 80 hundred miles. So the plans of how they're trying to do the ball the wall through there right now are opposed by from the last I checked nearly every Republican and Democrat officeholder from that area because they have not taken into account the local concerns for going through a national park at the treasure that's through mountains and also other stuff like there's they're not looking at it very smart. And so there's a lot of pushback from that area and from anyone who's ever really been out there who's seen it was like yeah why are we doing why are we prioritizing this? We need to be working on other places because you still need to figure it out but that does not need a wall right now. I mean it may need it may not need it at all but there are other places where it can be going and that need to be focused on not that not that area. And so there's a fight brewing right now over how that's going between the land office and the Trump administration and there's likely it might be a lawsuit which would be interesting to see how that plays out and we'll keep an eye on it for you as that issue moves its way forward over the next couple you know however long we're going to close out this week talking about the same story we've talked about a little bit with the flooding. We have some massive increases in the in in the reservoir levels Lake Corpus Christi has gone from 8% now to 60% 60 Choke Canyon I still believe is around 25 to 30% that ends up being about the same amount of water because Lake Corpus Christi is about one third the size of Choke Canyon. Nevertheless that's a lot of water coming in that they did not have a few months ago and so Corpus Christi seems for now to have a little bit of a reprieve again to push that off but if I looked at some other places Canyon Lake went from 60% to 100% full the area the the main reservoirs I've seen up in the Dallas area are 100% full. We have a lot of water in storage right now that's where it's designed to be and you know it looks like we've had some big storms that have started to recharge some areas that were really under I know Lake Travis was over 100 like a lot of things are big lakes and big reservoirs are filling up and so that's a great sign going forward but you know you never know when it's going to stop raining. I remember the big drought of the early two of the early 2010s where we weren't ever sure water if it was ever going to rain. That was a bad one and it really inspired a lot of this it push that we talked about with the interview with Drew. So thank you so much again for Senator Spring for coming on to talk about the energy fund the water fund and all the stuff that we we did this the over the past few sessions and about how all of this stuff plays into one another and like it's you know we end up talking about these issues kind of on a cycle because you know as you build more and more people come you have to get more you have to build more it's a you have to repair and maintain and so having some institutional knowledge about what was happening how that stuff got here is really good to know and I'm really thankful for Senator Springer and all the other guests that have come on the show to kind of talk about it. And I'm excited about the guests that are coming on in the next week and the weeks beyond. So I hope you'll join me. I'll hope you'll subscribe wherever you're listening and until then I'll see you next time. Bye guys
