State Rep. Pat Curry said “critics are wrong” about Texas schools being underfunded. His opponent, Ashley Bean Thornton, remains one of those critics.
Thornton is challenging the freshman Republican incumbent in House District 56 with an eye to become McLennan County’s first Democrat representing McLennan County since 2010. It’s an uphill battle: Curry won nearly 69% of the vote in 2024 against Democrat Erin Shank.
In the lead-up to election day, KWBU and The Waco Bridge sat down with both candidates.
Here is the transcript, edited lightly for clarity, from our conversation with Democratic challenger, Ashley Bean Thornton.
Molly-Jo Tilton, KWBU: So first, can you tell me a little bit about why you decided to run for House District 56?
Ashley Bean Thornton: I decided to run because I care very passionately about public education, and I feel that our current state leadership is headed in the wrong direction with that. And I cannot think of very many things that are more important to our whole society than having good, strong public schools. I felt I couldn't let that go without at least making an effort to try to help.
MJ T: Texas Republicans say cutting property taxes is a priority in this upcoming session but disagree on how to do it. Governor Abbott wants to eliminate all local school taxes for operations and maintenance and let the state pick up on that cost. What changes do you favor in how to fund public schools, and how would you pay for them?
Well, there's several challenges that have to do with trying to fund public schools. One of the challenges is that a lot of the funding depends on property taxes, and we don't have a way of, backing that up if we get rid of it, I don't think. We have the Rainy Day Fund, which everybody has made a lot of big noise about, "Oh, we've got so much money in the Rainy Day Fund.
Let's just use that for public schools." And that is true right now.
MJ T: But it's decreasing, right?
The Rainy-Day Fund is based a lot on the money that we get from oil and gas, which fluctuates up and down based on a lot of things that we don't control. So like right now, the price of oil is pretty high because of things that are happening in the world that we don't control, and that most people would love for that price to go back down, which would not be that great for our Rainy Day Fund.
The whole reason we have a Rainy-Day Fund is because we were using that money to pay for public schools, and then the Rainy-Day Fund drained, and we didn't have the money to pay for public schools. So, we had to rearrange our whole funding system, and that's why we started it, to stabilize the economy – it’s actually called the Economic Stabilization Fund. So, I am not a fan of depending on the Rainy-Day Fund to be our backup plan for property taxes.
So, we got rid of the income tax several years ago, so we don't have that to fall back on, so we've backed ourself into a little corner as far as how we pay for schools. The main challenge with property taxes, I feel like, is that right now, low income people are getting squeezed by property taxes. For example, when we bought our house, not that we're low income, it cost $60,000. Well, now it's worth $250,000 according to the appraisal. So our property taxes have gone up quite a bit. Well, we're retired, so our income hasn't gone up to keep up with that.
So I think what we ought to do is what several states have done, is they've implemented a thing that they call a circuit breaker, which is basically they take a look at your property taxes and they is your property tax bill taking up too high a percentage of your overall income? And if it is, they either cap it or you can apply for some kind of credit to get that money back. So, what that would do, I think, is take the pressure off people who have gotten caught in that squeeze between appraisals going up and their pay not going up, but also allow us to keep getting the income from property taxes that we need to pay for schools.
MJ T: So that would still allow for some exemptions like on disabled Texans- sure ... or retired individuals.
We’ve voted on all those exemptions, and it's what the people want. I'm retired myself. I'm 65. I love getting that exemption, but I don't necessarily think the exemption should be based on age because there's people who have plenty of money who are older. I know 65-year-olds who are driving Jaguars and living in huge houses, and they could afford to pay their property taxes. Whereas there could be a younger person raising a family who's, much more strapped.
And I would rather see it balanced based on income than on age. Even though I'm old, I still don't think that's the, most logical way to do it to get the money we need and to be fair to people who are paying into it.
Raquel Villatoro, the Waco Bridge: Some Republicans are proposing to limit city and county spending through tighter appraisal caps, spending limits, and a two-thirds vote required for bond elections. Cities say that they are already struggling to pay for basic services. What changes do you want to see on taxation for municipalities?
I just think that is a terrible idea. Why in the world would we trust the people who are further away from our city to make the decisions about what our city needs instead of the very people who are here, who are living it with us, who we can see at the grocery store and tell them what we think?
I just think that I am really surprised to hear that the Republican Party, which has traditionally been the party of local control, is pushing this idea of having the state control what local municipalities can do. Nobody likes to spend their money on taxes. I think that is probably a universal truth, and yet I think we do like the things that we get with our taxes.
By far, the biggest chunk of our local taxes goes to fire and police. Who in the world does not want fire and police? Well, firemen and police people like to get paid. They like to have health insurance. They like to live in houses, too. So what are we gonna do if pay and benefits need to come up, but now we're limited by what the state says? I just think that's outrageous.
Plus the idea that we would have one size fits all for Waco, Midland, Houston, Robinson, all these dramatically different kinds of town, I just think that's outrageous. I don't wanna put words in the governor's mouth, but I feel like that is somehow trying to shift the responsibility for figuring out how we pay for these things that we need onto local people, and it feels like blame shifting to me. It feels like he's standing up there saying, "Well, you guys are wasting money, but we're up here being so frugal," when that's not it at all. They're not dealing with the challenges that the local government has to deal with.
MJ Tilton: So if you were elected, how would you work toward ensuring that local governments are properly funded?
Well, I think that, we have mechanisms in place for local governments to figure out how they're gonna get funded. At the highest level, I guess you could say, the local government gets to present what they want the property rate to be, and they get to present the budget, and they get to say, "This is what we're spending the money on.” And if the people in town don't like it, vote them out. Vote somebody else in.
We have those mechanisms in place. I don't think we need an extra layer of, I'm putting this in quotes, "protection" from the state, from ourselves. we can manage ourselves, thank you very much
MJ Tilton: The legislator also in the last session approved a billion dollars for Texas students to attend private schools or homeschool under the school choice program. But so far the majority of that money has gone to students who were not previously enrolled in public schools. Do you want to continue or expand that program? and if so, what changes would you make, or where do you stand with that?
I believe education is just really the foundation of society. I talk to people all the time who are like, "Well, my kids aren't in school anymore. Why should I be paying for school?" It's not just your kids. It's an educated society. It's every job that we have requires it. And so to me, most of the children in Texas go to public schools.
I do not blame any parent who wants to do whatever that they think is gonna give their kid what they need or give them a little advantage or something like that. Good for you. Go for it. But the responsibility of the state of Texas is building up that foundation for our society, which is public school.
So to me, if I felt like we had everything we needed in public schools, then I might be willing to look and see if we could provide some kind of money for private schools and home schools and whatever, but we don't. We have really important things in public school that I don't feel like we're adequately funding. So, if I have a billion dollars of taxpayer money to spend, I wanna spend it where most of the kids are, which is public schools. So I would definitely not be in favor of expanding that program.
Other places where they have expanded programs like that, the main evidence that comes from that is that it causes people with less income to have poorer schools and people with more income to have better schools. We already have more of that than we need. We need to be investing in helping our schools with a high concentration of economically disadvantaged kids achieve at the same level of our schools that have more moderate concentrations. To me, that's our area of opportunity. If I had a billion dollars to spend, that's what I would spend it on, not on private schools.
R V: Continuing, on that thread of education, during the last legislature, the state set aside funding to incentivize community colleges to get more students on paths to employment. But that fund ran out, and that affected colleges like McLennan Community College, which had to raise taxes to deal with a three point one million state funding shortfall. What do you plan to do about that in the next session?
I was skeptical of this rule about basing, TSTC funding and to some extent MCC funding or all community college funding, on people getting jobs that would allow them to have a self-sufficient wage. I had a lot of skepticism about that. But as I've talked to people at the community colleges and at different places, they seem to be on board with that. I'm starting to see the benefit of that.
So to me, that decision was on the right track. I think they just grossly underestimated how successful our community colleges were gonna be at doing that. But now we know better. So I don't necessarily think that rule needs a huge amount of change, but it just needs to be funded better, and I think most people agree with that. To be fair to my Republican people I think most people agree with that, that just was a mistake. They just underestimated how much, how well the community colleges would do with it. Now they know, so I think... I don't think there'll be much, controversy about funding that more adequately.
MJ T: Turning away from education, to data centers and data center development, including several proposed here in McLennan County. what further regulation is needed, and what would you, fight for and like to see if you were elected?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I wanna separate out the AI issue from the actual data center issue.
To me, there's kinda three balances we have to strike. One balance has to do with what are we okay with AI even doing? How do we feel about it knowing all our health information and all our money information and all these different things? So what's the balance we're gonna strike between how helpful it can be and how scary it is?
MJ T: would you like to see that regulated at the State House?
We have to do we're probably gonna have to have some kind of federal regulation on that. There's already some State House regulation on it, particularly when it comes to deepfakes and things that have to do with kids. I think we're gonna have to, as people learn more about it, we're gonna have to regulate that a little bit more.
I'm not quite as apocalyptic about it as some but I'm not sure we know what we're getting into here. The analogy I make for myself is it's kinda like when the cavemen discovered fire. It's “ooh, fire good, too much fire bad.” I feel like that's the way AI is, too. “Ooh, AI good,” it can do a lot of good things. “Ooh, too much AI, bad.” And so that's one little balance.
Another balance to me that's related to that is how it's gonna affect jobs. So I went to, an AI conference they had here. It was really informative, but one of the things that really struck me was it was mainly about small businesses, and the small business people who were there, were excited about it 'cause they were like, "I can get this AI thing, and it can do a lot of the work that I might've had to hire an admin person, and so I can start my business.
I wouldn't have been able to start my business 'cause I wouldn't have been able to afford a admin person, but now I don't need one. I can use AI, and I can do all this." And I could see the pros and cons of that, obviously. One is, yay, here's this small business that'll hopefully get off the ground, it'll be a big advantage, and maybe hire a bunch of other people down the road. And the other is, oh, what about that person that would've been your admin? Of course, that wasn't a job that existed yet. But anyway, the effect that it has on jobs and what's gonna, how we're gonna balance that out. I don't necessarily think it's gonna erase all jobs, but I think it will change the job world quite a lot.
And then we get to the question you asked, which is about the actual storage facilities. Okay, these are, at the very basic level, these are huge buildings that take up a huge amount of just space. We are making new data every day at an incredibly fast pace. If this is our strategy for dealing with that, we're gonna run out of space before because we're making more and more data every day.
So to me, one of the basic things is if Texas wants to benefit from this, we need to be on the forefront of the research of what is gonna be the next way of storing all this data. Because this way of putting it in giant football stadium or larger sized warehouses is not gonna be sustainable. So I would like to see us invest in what is the next thing gonna be.
With that said, I think of these data centers as being kinda like a the landfill. Nobody wants a landfill next to their house, but we gotta have landfills. So, how do you balance that out? And I think what would've been a better approach. I wasn't sitting there making the decision when it came down the pipe. But I think a better approach would be to identify the places in Texas that can realistically be a good place for these data centers and incentivize the people who are building them toward those places. A place that doesn't have enough water, a place that's already struggling with electricity, a place where people are living right next door, those are not good choices for a place for a data center.
The whole reason communities are attracted to them at all is because of the potential to bring in so much money. Well, if they have that much money, they should not be getting a tax rebate, I don't think, or a tax deferment. They should be paying for their electricity. They should be paying for whatever systems have to be in place to do their water.
R V: Since our last Democratic state representative, Jim Dunham, left office in 2011, Democrats in the county have struggled to compete, in recent years getting only about a third of the vote.What's different this year?
I don't know if anything's different, we're about to find out, right? No, I think, there's obviously a lot of big talk about James Talarico. There's a lot of, the federal politics enters into it a lot. I think the Democrats at least are hoping that'll make a big difference. We've hoped that before, so we'll see if it does.
I did not enter into this race with the idea that, oh, this is gonna be the year. I'm gonna jump on the bandwagon and do it. The way I think about it is I have some things I wanted to say, particularly having to do with education, that I think people ought to listen to, so I'm saying what I have to say, and if that helps me get elected, yay. And if it doesn't, well, I'll keep saying it anyway. But I, it'll be interesting to see if it really does make that big a difference, particularly here. I'll be interested to see.
MJ T: My last question for you. We've heard a lot about what you wanna do, and there's some pretty big goals in there. If you were to be elected, you'd be, one freshman representative, in a currently minority party, in a house of 150. What do you think you actually can accomplish if you were to be elected, and how would you be able to do that?
Well, there's a lot of variables there. It could be that it's not a majority Republican or it's a lot more evenly split than it used to be. That's to me, the ideal situation, and then I could band together with my fellow public school people and, push things forward.
I also feel like there's The power that goes with being in office. That’s just one tool to get the changes that you want made or to build the kind of world that you wanna live in. Like you say, I'd be one among 150. I'd have to use my powers of persuasion to try to convince people to move a little further in the direction I want them to.
But there's also the opportunity to be heard more. So even if I'm not as successful in getting other elected people to do what I want, if I can have a little bit more amplification to talk to voters and people out in the public, I think that counts for something and moves us down the road a little bit. There are things that we can do to move towards some of these things that I care about that don't necessarily require, the state legislature to step in. I think there's a lot of education we can do to help people understand how some of these processes work, so they might vote differently when they have a better understanding of how it works.
So I think there is a lot of communication and things like that you can do. You know, I'm just a candidate now, so for example, my opponent is the incumbent. Well, he gets invited to talk to things because he's the representative, that I don't get to talk to 'cause I'm just like a schmo on the street. But I could use those opportunities to talk about some of these kinds of issues that I believe are important. So I think, might be a long road, but you gotta start walking or you're never gonna get there. So that's kinda how I feel like it, feel about it now.
