State Rep. Ken King will be the lone voice representing truly rural Texas when the next Legislative session starts he told a crowd of citizens and students last Tuesday at Clarendon College’s Bairfield Activity Center.
King said his House District 88 is the last remaining rural district in Texas as it has no single community of more than 100,000 people. The district snakes across Panhandle and down into the South Plains from Hemphill County in the northeast to Andrews County in the southwest.
“My job is to remind everyone that rural Texas Matters,” King said. “Elon Musk can build all the cars he wants in Austin, but without fuel, food, and fiber provided by rural Texas, he can’t exist.”
High on King’s list of things coming up in the next session is education funding.
“There’s nothing more dangerous than an uneducated population,” King said, noting that 75 percent of the state budget goes to public education.
King said the last session of the Legislature saw a “horrible fight” over the voucher plan supported by Governor Greg Abbott.
“Abbott polls 90 percent favorable on border security, and that’s why people keep voting for him,” King said.
When rural Republicans defeated the governor’s school voucher plan, King said Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, who is invested in TikTok and the private school industry, gave the governor a billion dollars to campaign against those fellow Republicans in the primaries.
“I’m one of the few that survived,” King said. “A lot of the rural Republicans who were good for places like Clarendon College aren’t coming back in the next session.”
King said there will be a voucher system approved in the next session because he will be the only Republican against it. He hopes that after that is in place, the state will start helping public education again.
“We’ve got to quit all the negative and start building up teachers again,” King said. “Texas has done a lot to ruin that profession.”
King also warned of the dangers of social media.
“Please, turn off the Hate Book,” he said. “That thing is just destroying us and spreading misinformation.”
Other upcoming priorities will be further enhancement of border security. He said crossings are dropping, but he also noted that “you don’t have border problems three months before a presidential election.”
“There’s lots of politics going on right now,” he said.
Water will continue to be a big issue in Texas, King said, but his biggest focus outside of public education will be improving the state’s response to wildfires.
“This is an area where policy needs to win over politics because people’s lives and property are at stake,” King said.
King said there will be opportunities for Panhandle representatives to work with hurricane area representatives to improve emergency management measures. He also hopes to get state-owned wildfire-fighting aircraft purchased with at least some of them station in the Panhandle. Currently, the state contracts those services from out of state providers or from the federal government. The process to activate those out of state resources takes days, and there’s not a clear chain of command that takes care of that process.
As always, King encouraged people to vote and said a people who don’t vote get the government they deserve. He also said if Donald Trump wins, it is likely that some state officials – like Gov. Abbott or Attorney General Ken Paxton – may go to Washington to serve in his administration.
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