The four Democratic candidates running for their party’s nomination in the District 27 race for state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr.’s old seat listed the district’s assets along with their qualifications and ideas to meet its challenges during a candidates’ forum Wednesday night at the VentureX shared working space in Brownsville.
Sara Stapleton-Barrera, who narrowly lost to Lucio two years ago, District 37 State Rep. Alex Dominguez, Morgan La Mantia, a lawyer and businesswoman, and Harlingen businessman Salomon Torres are running in the March 1 Democratic primary for the right to face the Republican nominee for the seat in the November general election. Lucio is not seeking re-election after serving since 1991.
Brownsville businessman Michael J. Limas moderated the forum, which was coordinated by FuturoRGV, a citizens organization that promotes quality of life issues including government and elections.
The candidates introduced themselves and responded to a question asking them to list the district’s greatest asset apart from its people, and it greatest challenge.
Stapleton-Barrera said the district has a great location here on the U.S.-Mexico border. “Nowhere else can you live this life where you’re exposed to this amount of culture” and the opportunity to become leaders in environmental education, Stapleton-Barrera said. The area’s greatest challenge is the stigma casting the border region as somehow unsafe, particularly in campaign ads by Gov. Greg Abbott, she said.
Dominguez pointed to the district being home to five modes of transportation: its deepwater sea port, roads, railroads and airports, and now with SpaceX, its brand new space port.
“What concerns me the most is the lack of affordable healthcare for some people,” he said, adding that many people go to Mexico for prescription drugs or to see a dentist or doctor, “but let’s face it, we should not have to leave our country to get affordable quality healthcare.”
La Mantia said the question acknowledged “that our greatest asset is our people and our next-greatest asset is the one that supports our people, our public school system from K-12 all the way through our institutions of higher learning,” she said, casting her story as a South Texas story. “My grandfather didn’t finish high school but he understood the importance of education and when he started the STARS program he put a college education within reach for 17,000 students.
“Today you see industries growing all around us from SpaceX to modern agriculture and they need a workforce that is trained,” she said. “Our greatest challenge is related to our greatest asset. It involves increasing investment into public schools and into salaries to our public school teachers.”
Torres said the district’s best asset is individuals like himself who were migrant farm workers starting with little but who became successful professionally in various sectors of the economy and in their family lives.
“There is a concern that I’m going to be working on as your state senator. It’s actually a statewide problem and it arises from the double trauma we’ve all experienced because of the COVID and the freeze that happened 12 months ago. How are we going to be prepared healthwise to withstand another crisis? It could be electrical transmission lines. It could be forces on the coast. It could be flooding situations in our local communities. There are many challenges that we should be working on in a proactive way, not in a reactive way as our state has been doing,” he said.
The candidates responded to a series of questions, asking them to state their qualifications for office, state their positions on issues including the restrictive abortion rights law passed by the Legislature last session and to say whether they would support the eventual nominee in the event that they themselves don’t win nomination.
All said that they would have voted against the bill limiting access to abortion, with Dominguez saying he actually voted against it as a member of the House.
All also said they would support and campaign for the eventual nominee.
The forum can be livestreamed in its entirety through March 1 at Facebook.com/FuturoRGV and viewed at futurorgv.org
Two of three candidates in the Texas Senate District 27 Republican primary race took part in a forum hosted by the citizen group Futuro RGV on Jan. 19. Read that story here:
