Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Heading into election season, leaders in Corpus Christi face a puzzling question: what to do with $235 million from the state of Texas for a seawater desalination plant that was never built. 

This month, officials in the Gulf Coast city declined to pursue the flagship water supply project for the second time in a year over cost concerns. Now Corpus Christi may have to return the money, including $50 million it already spent, plus $72 million in interest.

“That’s going to be a painful experience if the State of Texas calls our notes due,” said City Council member Mark Scott at the Sept. 1 meeting before the vote that rejected the desalination project. “I think we are dangerously close.”

Returning the money would “seriously damage our relationship with state leadership, negatively impact any future loan applications and continue to put downward pressure on our credit ratings,” Scott said in a follow-up statement. 

For almost a decade, city officials in Corpus Christi have debated the desalination project’s location, cost, development model, benefits to residents and potential environmental impacts, even as a regional water shortage grew increasingly likely. State officials in Texas have also pushed to develop seawater desalination plants for nearly 25 years with little to show for their efforts.

Corpus Christi should return the state’s money and lay the project to rest, said City Council member Sylvia Campos, an opponent of the desalination project.

“That is the only way we can finally finish this,” she said. “We need to once and for all kill it and move on.”

Other city leaders say that won’t happen, even if it means reviving the controversial desalination project for another political cycle. The city has requested an extension of its funding agreement with the state, but state leaders haven’t publicly addressed the question, leaving Corpus Christi an uncertain path forward.

“This is very much the first time this has ever happened,” said Perry Fowler, executive director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, a construction and engineering trade coalition. “They’re having to figure out how to unravel what they’re in right now.” 

Fowler said Corpus Christi would be the first party to return funding awarded through the State Water Implementation Fund of Texas, a $2 billion program lawmakers created in 2013.

The office of Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to requests for comment. 

The $235 million that Corpus Christi would have to return represents cash the city has drawn to date through a $757 million financing agreement with the Texas Water Development Board for Corpus Christi’s Inner Harbor seawater desalination plant, which was envisioned to produce millions of gallons of freshwater per day from the Gulf of Mexico. 

“Other projects could already be well underway with this funding,” Fowler said. “It’s just really unfortunate.” 

Plans for the desalination plant in Corpus Christi date back to 2014, when operators of the region’s sprawling refineries and chemical plants formed a special committee to evaluate the feasibility of treating seawater for industrial use. 

Corpus Christi received its first $2.8 million through the SWIFT program in 2017, $11.4 million in 2020 and $211 million in 2024, while its Inner Harbor desalination project became mired in delays, political indecision and steep cost inflation. The state approved Corpus Christi’s application for another $535 million for the Inner Harbor project in 2024, but those funds were never withdrawn.

According to KIII News, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick criticized city leaders during a campaign event last week at Valero’s Corpus Christi refinery—the region’s second-largest water user. “We will send hundreds of millions of dollars to Corpus to help you through this water crisis, but we need a local government that says ‘yes,’” Patrick said. “They’re turning their back on this money.”  

Corpus Christi’s City Council first canceled the Inner Harbor project contract, estimated at $1.2 billion, in a 6-3 vote in 2025, then declined to issue a new contract in a 5-3 vote at its meeting Sept. 1. But the project isn’t dead yet, said Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni, and there are currently no plans to return the loans to the state, a process called defeasance.

“The city is kind of on hold right now,” he said. “There’s no rush to cancel anything. There’s no rush to try to talk about defeasance.”

Every seat on Corpus Christi City Council is up for election in November and a new slate of leaders might view the project differently, Zanoni said. The debate over water supply and desalination is driving the campaign season, he said, especially after the region narrowly avoided a water emergency this year.

“The Inner Harbor desalination project is a foremost policy item to be considered with the new council,” he said.

Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo, an advocate for the project and a candidate for a third term in November, also hasn’t given up. 

“We have invested years in the Inner Harbor desalination project, secured the major environmental permits, and preserved critical infrastructure and financing,” Guajardo said. “We should take advantage of that opportunity and move the project forward.” 

One of the project’s leading opponents, City Council member Gil Hernandez, is also running for mayor. 

Hernandez has challenged the city’s plans over financial concerns since he joined City Council in 2018. In 2020, he cast the only vote against the city’s plan to apply for $222 million from the TWDB 

“We should not have borrowed that money at that point in time,” Hernandez said. “I saw the mistakes that we’ve made, I’m trying my best to correct it.”

He said the city should ask TWDB to apply its funding to other water projects like groundwater. However, he acknowledged that the city made that request to use the funds in other ways in 2025 and the TWDB denied the request. 

“It’s still entirely the choice of the water development board and ultimately the governor to allow us that flexibility,” Hernandez said. “So far there hasn’t been any indication of that flexibility.”

In March this year, as reservoir levels fell below 10 percent, Gov. Abbott said that Corpus Christi had “squandered” its $750 million in state funding commitments.

“Corpus Christi is a victim not because of lack of water, they’re a victim because of lack of ability to make a decision,” Abbott told KXAN News. “We can only give them a little time more before the state of Texas has to take over.”

Following Abbott’s statement, Mayor Guajardo called an emergency meeting to approve the desalination project, but it was repeatedly rescheduled. 

Meanwhile, major rainstorms in May and July refilled the reservoir system well above critical levels before the City Council reconsidered and rejected the project in September.

“We already spent $50 million and basically have nothing to show for it,” said City Council member Roland Barrera, a supporter of the desalination project. “We’re gonna have all these additional costs associated with canceling the project.”

Defeasance of the city’s loans would require it to pay 10 years of interest, some $72 million additional dollars. That’s one reason why the city’s business and industry groups are currently mobilizing in support of local candidates that promise to push the project through.

Also on the ballot this year: a petition put forth by activist groups that would levy millions of dollars in fees on the region’s industrial giants the next time reservoirs drop below 30 percent. 

Meanwhile, as Corpus Christi tries to decide what to do about its longstanding Inner Harbor desalination project, the Nueces River Authority, a small water agency in the city’s hinterlands, is pursuing its own plans for a much larger desalination plant that, if built, could render Corpus Christi’s plans irrelevant.

The Nueces River Authority is working with an Israeli company, IDE Technologies, a global leader in desalination technology, but construction has yet to begin on an island in Corpus Christi Bay and it is unclear whether the project can attract the necessary financing.

Barrera, a City Council member since 2018, has reached his term limit and plans to retire. But his political machine is working as hard as ever, he said, ahead of a high-stakes election.  

“I’ve never seen a more concerted community effort to get, in my opinion, the right people elected, pro-business people,” he said. “We can get back to a point there’s sensible decisions.”

The post Corpus Christi Could Owe Texas $235M for Failed Desalination Plant appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: This story is a collaboration between Truthdig and the Texas Observer.

In the late spring of 2009, Andrew Collins learned that an oil and gas drilling waste landfarm, operated by a Cleburne company called Excel Environmental Services, was to be built right across the street from the home he shared with his wife Minnie on County Road 905 in Joshua, a small city south of Fort Worth.

“We did some digging around and uncovered some of the stuff that would be used and expressed concern,” Collins told Truthdig and the Texas Observer in August.

On June 8 of 2009, his wife Minnie wrote a letter to the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC), the state’s oil and gas regulator, protesting the landfarm’s expected 24-hours-a-day operation, “the increased heavy truck traffic,” and the “lack of monitoring of naturally occurring radioactive material,” including radium and heavy metals including arsenic and lead. 

The couple researched what that would mean for their property—and potentially for their health. Their letter expressed concern that drilling waste, a copious byproduct of oil and gas drilling, to be deposited on acreage adjacent to their home and others in their neighborhood could have “negative effects … on the residential properties of the offset landowners.” The couple also warned that the “accumulation of Radon,” a carcinogenic radioactive gas generated in the decay of other radioactive elements in the waste, would be dangerous if future homes were built on the land.

“All of the documents said that sludge they were putting on the land could come back and hurt people,” said Minnie.

In the days following their protest letter, the couple and Collins’ parents, Vernie and Dollye, who also protested, were visited by an Excel official named Jerry Marsh, as conveyed in the letters. Excel is no longer in business, and a number listed for it on a government website is no longer in service.

“He explained the Railroad Commission was to be overseeing the site and they were going to have inspections out there and everything done the way the Railroad Commission was supposed to do it,” Collins said. “They talked a very good game and convinced me it should be above board.”

Collins withdrew the protest, and so did his parents.  

One month later, Excel received its permit from RRC to operate the landfarm, on a 656-acre site in Johnson County that included the land across the street from Collins’ house. From 2009 to 2015, the operation, referred to in records as the Joshua Land Farm, plowed more than 4 million barrels of drilling waste into the North Texas land. Stacked end to end, these barrels could line the highway from Houston to El Paso, then back, and back again. 

The housing development at sunset in late January (Justin Nobel)

Today, the former landfarm is the site of a development called Silo Mills, which was advertised in an October 2021 press release as offering “affordable quality housing” for the booming Dallas-Fort Worth region and amenities including a resort-style swimming and entertainment complex, playgrounds, trails, and a fishing pond. The crown jewel of the development, according to its website: Pleasant View Elementary School, “open to the young minds of Silo Mills!” 

Pleasant View Elementary School opened in 2023, and hundreds of homes have already been built in the budding development.

Many of the new residents now say they were told nothing about the landfarm that once operated on that property when they purchased their homes. “They never disclosed anything like that when we bought our house,” said Clayton Boley, a homeowner in Silo Mills. “You can just imagine a group of people who have spent a lot of money on houses—then you find out there is an environmental concern.”

Yet public records show at least some of the entities involved in the development had to know about the land’s past: RRC documents reveal the same firm that  profited from that waste operation benefited from its residential development. 

While Excel initially ran day to day operations at the land-farm, RRC records indicate that in 2011 the landfarm’s operating permit was transferred to an entity called Joshua Land Farm, LLC. A 2014 operating agreement for Joshua Land Farm lists Ross Gatlin of Prophet Equity as the manager. Then, in 2021, just six years after the last loads of drilling waste had been dumped, Prophet Equity, in partnership with Terra Manna, a Southlake real estate developer, broke ground on the 840-acre Silo Mills development. The groundbreaking was touted in an October 2021 article published in the Cleburne Times-Review and republished on the Prophet Equity website. 

Gatlin is listed currently as the managing partner at Prophet Equity. He is identified as either the “manager” or “president” of the Joshua Land Farm in various RRC records. And a 2019 application with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), regarding a permit for a wastewater treatment plant the business had applied for after the landfarm ceased operations, lists “Ross Gaitlin [sic]” as the “Chief Executive Officer” of the Joshua Land Farm. 

It’s unclear whether the developers of the former landfarm had a duty under Texas law to tell the new owners—or Godley Independent School District (ISD), which includes the elementary school—about the property’s history as a waste site or about what was buried beneath their properties.

“We are going to have to decline this one,” said Bryan Pope, communications director at the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University, in response to questions on the developer’s obligation to disclose the site’s previous waste history. “Given the delicate nature of the story,” said Pope, “we simply can’t wade into it I’m afraid.” The Texas Real Estate Commission also refused to answer questions on the matter.

Texas law generally requires sellers of residential property to provide buyers with a Seller’s Disclosure Notice, per Section 5.008 in the Texas property code. Sellers are questioned as to whether the property contains “hazardous or toxic waste” or “subsurface structures or pits” or if any condition on the property “materially affects the physical health or safety of an individual.” But the code also lists several exemptions, in which sellers do not have to provide a disclosure notice, and one, Section 5.008 (e)(10), is for developers selling brand new homes. 

“The law is there,” said Alex Hernandez, an Austin-based real estate attorney, “but it is not until the issue goes to court and gets adjudicated that the law is actually decided and whether or not there was a disclosure obligation in this situation can be determined.”

Hernandez continued: “There are protections in the common law for someone who does believe they have been duped or harmed, and in today’s world if it isn’t a direct disclosure, such as a leaky roof … what we see is a lot of this land-use stuff goes into the common law, meaning: Was the advancement of this project without disclosure negligent, fraudulent, or was it a material misrepresentation?”

Prophet Equity did not respond to questions for this story, sent to both their general email and also Gatlin’s personal address. Messages left on the phone number listed for Gatlin at Prophet Equity were not returned. A message left on his personal cellphone, the voicemail greeting on which stated it was him, was not returned.

Emails sent to an account listed on the Silo Mills development’s website and also to Jason Cunningham, a public relations manager working with the Silo Mills development team, have not returned a reply. The RRC has not replied to the question of whether it was legal for a 2,500-home development and elementary school to be built atop an oil and gas drilling waste land-spreading operation, or how many other instances like this exist across the state. 

“The County does not have the authority to regulate land use [at Silo Mills] through zoning or other similar land use controls,” stated Johnson County Judge Christopher Boedeker, via email. “Additionally, oil and gas activities, including disposal, are also controlled by the State of Texas without input from Counties, primarily through the Railroad Commission.”

On February 19, a week after Truthdig and the Observer published a prior story about the landfarm, RRC visited the site but did not take samples. “Upon arrival to location I observed no visible pollution,” stated the inspector. In May, Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) visited the site and “found no radiation above normal background,” said spokesperson Chris Van Deusen.

Godley ISD Superintendent Rich Dear pointed to this testing and visits to school property by radioactivity experts with both the federal Environmental Protection Agency and DSHS: “All testing thus far has been consistent with normal levels of naturally occurring material.” 

Dear said he knew of oil and gas development in the region but was unfamiliar with the practice of spreading oil and gas drilling waste onto farmland. “The school district did not know the site’s history,” said Dear. “We are doing everything that we can to take care of our people—our kids, our teachers, and our community.” 

Details in RRC records obtained by Truthdig and the Observer reveal several reasons for area residents to be alarmed about the buried waste beneath their feet—and the way the landfarm was overseen by the state.

Those records show that, more than a decade ago, Texas regulators raised their own concerns about elevated levels of the toxic heavy metal arsenic on the site and alleged that the landfarm was spreading too much waste over the land, in violation of permits. “It has come to our attention that the referenced facility has been reusing landfarm cells after reaching the maximum capacity without permission from the Technical Permitting,” states a letter the RRC sent Joshua Land Farm in 2012. (“Cells” refer to the different sections of the landfarm, each designated by RRC to receive a certain amount of waste.) 

The agency reminded Joshua that spreading more than 2,000 barrels of waste per acre “without requesting and receiving approval for a permit amendment” was a violation. “Waste reports indicate all cells have exceeded this limitation,” the RRC letter said.

But the RRC did not issue any enforcement violations. Instead, Joshua Land Farm received permit amendments that enabled it to continue to dump more. A November 2014 permit amendment shows that all 12 of the landfarm’s cells had received at least 8,000 barrels of waste per acre, with five cells receiving 16,000 barrels or more and one cell receiving as much as 18,000 barrels per acre—nine times the initial permit limit. The amendment enabled nine of 12 cells to receive an additional 6,000 barrels per acre.

A packet of real estate transaction documents for the Boley family, including the construction contract for the family’s new “Dewberry” style home, makes no mention of the property’s previous history as an oil and gas drilling waste land-farm. 

Legal documents filed with the Johnson County clerk’s office do not explicitly mention that the site had been developed atop an oil and gas drilling waste landfarming operation. However, a general warranty deed, which is a legal document facilitating the transfer of real estate, signed on December 31, 2018, indicates the development site was transferred directly from Joshua Land Farm LLC to a corporate entity called Silo Mills Investment IV LLC. The mailing address listed for both entities is a suite at 1460 Main Street in Southlake, Prophet Equity’s address. 

Records show that the Joshua Land Farm took in some 4,281,151 barrels of waste over six years. Based on federal Department of Energy estimates of what operators pay for waste disposal, this would have yielded fees from $2 million to $171 million. But not everyone associated with the operation benefitted equally from those revenues. 

“It was a cash cow,” said Lee Oldham, a former landfarm dozer operator at the site, in an interview. “The guys who ran the landfarm were well paid and compensated. I started at $25 an hour; they cut me down to $21.” 

Lee Oldham earlier this year at the site where he worked (Justin Nobel)

Oldham believes his health also suffered from that exposure—and he decided to become a whistleblower, as Truthdig and the Observer previously reported.

“Knowing what is happening to my health, and seeing kids and young families on top of this waste, I had to speak up,” he said.

The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex overlies the Barnett Shale, an oil- and gas-rich geological formation that was cracked in the early 2000s using the then-novel intensive drilling method known as fracking. “Get behind the Barnett,” instructed highway billboards, sponsored by Oklahoma-based driller Chesapeake Energy, with some featuring Texas-born actor Tommy Lee Jones.

Many of the nation’s fastest growing suburbs now sprawl around the DFW metro, and concerns about health impacts of oil and gas waste are not new. Since the 1960s, U.S. geologists have suspected that “black shales,” like the Barnett, contain appreciable amounts of uranium, and more recent papers indicate these shales contain other concerning heavy metals such as arsenic and barium. 

Drilling horizontally through the shale to tap its fuel brings broken-up pieces of it to the surface. These drill cuttings, as they are called, together with drilling muds—a slick chemical-infused mixture that provides lubrication and structural support in drilling a well—form the copious stream called drilling waste. Each well drilled produces between 1,000 and 3,500 tons.

“Drilling mud is a witch’s brew of chemicals,” said Blake Scott, president and CEO of Waste Analytics, a Texas-based firm that provides data on drilling waste and oil and gas wells. “There was a tsunami of drilling waste that was being created by drilling unconventional wells in North Texas during the 2000s and 2010s. This was definitely the Wild West, and Johnson County became one of the dumping grounds.” Scott said it’s difficult, without in-depth research, to determine how many Texas drilling waste landfarming operations later became housing developments or elementary school sites.

While residents were not informed of the site’s previous history, after publication of the Truthdig and Observer article and another article by the Barbed Wire in February Silo Mills management informed homeowners that a third-party firm was conducting extensive environmental testing, taking 1,996 samples.

These samples have “definitively confirmed that the Silo Mills community is safe for residential and school occupancy,” states a page on the development’s website labeled “The Facts About Silo Mills.” The page, last updated in May, continues: “100% of samples indicated protective for human health” and radiation “at natural background levels.”

The site further says that carcinogens like benzene and heavy metals like arsenic were below regulatory limits, but data was not provided. The page indicates that the full 745-page report detailing the development’s sampling efforts can be requested; Truthdig and the Observer made this request in August but have yet to receive the report. 

An environmental assessment for the Silo Mills development site was conducted in 2020 by the Southlake-based firm, TBK Environmental LLC, and sent by the developers to the school and homeowners only after Truthdig and the Observer published the article in February. The assessment, provided to Truthdig and the Observer by school officials, stated there were no “significant known or suspect recognized environmental conditions,” but the assessment did not include taking soil samples or testing water—and only involved speaking to a single resident, on the southwest side of the proposed development. That resident indicated, “They were not aware of anything related to environmental concerns present, its just vacant land.” 

TBK spoke with a representative of the Joshua Land Farm LLC, the report indicates, and “they were unaware of any environmental concerns with the land.” The name for the development project, as listed throughout the environmental site assessment, is “Silo Mills – Joshua Land Farms.” The assessment doesn’t mention public documents including complaint letters from local residents and state regulatory records.

RRC files related to the landfarm, received through a records request, reveal that regulators long ago raised concern about levels of arsenic at the landfarm. A 2014 document conveys that Joshua Land Farm LLC had to “conduct an investigation to determine background levels of arsenic in the native soil, due to ongoing concerns about arsenic concentrations found during soil sampling for cell closures.” The landfarm operators took samples from three locations and three soil depths outside the zone of drilling waste application and found that arsenic levels were in the range of what state health officials consider to be two to five times the average background level.

“Arsenic can cause short and long-term health problems, even if you do not feel sick” and “is especially dangerous for children,” a DSHS factsheet reads.

RRC did not issue any violations for high arsenic levels. Instead, it responded by amending the landfarm’s operating permit and nearly tripling the amount of arsenic allowed to be left in the ground upon closure. Taehyun Roh, a toxicologist and arsenic expert at Texas A&M’s School of Public Health who reviewed the relevant RRC documents, said via email that even if the landfarm site had high levels of naturally occurring arsenic, “preventing additional anthropogenic arsenic loading becomes particularly important because health risk ultimately depends on total exposure.” Further, “Meeting the closure requirements for an oil-and-gas waste land-farm does not necessarily answer the separate question of whether the property is appropriate for long-term residential use, particularly for children,” Roh said.

“The acceptance of a higher arsenic threshold level is concerning,” added Scott, with Waste Analytics. “On the surface this seems legal; however I personally believe more background samples should have been taken to confirm the supposed higher background arsenic level.”

For years, Sue Beaton wrote letters to TCEQ and RRC expressing concerns about the landfarm. In the late 1990s, she and her husband and two teenage kids, having recently left the Navy and city life in San Diego, found a pleasant home on Farm-to-Market Road 917, in Johnson County, and prepared for what they thought would be a quiet life in the country.

“I home-schooled the kids, and we did a lot of activities as far as science and nature,” Beaton said in an interview. “They sometimes followed monarch butterflies or caught  crawdads that came out of puddles when it rained.”

Then, in 2009, the Joshua Land Farm ruined their haven, she said. Living on the same road that flanked much of the northern perimeter of the landfarm put her family across the street from its main entrance. Given that prevailing winds regularly blow south to north, they were directly upwind from the waste.

“I can’t even say how many animals we found dead on that property. It was terrible,” said Beaton. “Cats, a lot of dead birds, and a little bit later we noticed no more of the butterflies would come through, and the family dogs kept dying, one of them with tumors all over her.” Beaton added, “They would come in the middle of the night and dump, they were doing it at 2 or 3 in the morning, all hours.”

While dumping in the middle of the night is entirely legal at many commercial landfarms under RRC rules, the complaint conveys what it is like to live next to such an operation.

In February 2018, an RRC inspector finally followed up with a site visit. The resulting report stated that inspectors found “no signs of any pollution or anything on the property that would give cause for concern to human health and safety or the environment.”

Six months later, in opposing a wastewater treatment plant at the same site, Beaton wrote to TCEQ:“The wind blows continuously from that direction across my property ever since the mud farm and the chemicals they used have destroyed my [car’s] paint” and “my pool would never stabilize.” 

When reached by phone in February, Beaton said inspectors had overlooked obvious problems. Beaton also recalled the regular smell of benzene, which has a distinctly toxic sweet-smelling odor and is a carcinogen associated with oil and gas waste. Her son Bernard, now 27, chimed in to recall a regular occurrence in which the wind would pick up “white flakes, like dander” off the landfarm and the material would be “falling from the sky,” like a mysterious snowfall. “I would go inside because I had no idea what it was,” said Bernard. “I saw it as something that could be dangerous and I thought it was probably best not to breathe this stuff in.” 

Beaton said she became particularly concerned when, in the early 2020s, she learned about the hundreds of homes and elementary school that were going to be built on the site. “I questioned with all that dumping whether or not that land was safe,” she said.

Today, Andrew Collins regrets that he withdrew his 2009 protest.

His grandson lives across the street from the Silo Mills development and attended Pleasant View Elementary School for one year. In May, the Barbed Wire reported that at least several kids in the development had been experiencing illnesses, such as dizziness and headaches. 

“He had some health issues, skin, and gastrointestinal issues,” said Collins. “I don’t know if they can be linked to whatever it was in the ground there, but I know his parents were concerned.” 

He continued, “I regret the decision now, based upon what has happened with my grandson.” 

By phone in early September, Superintendent Dear said he trusts the test results that indicate the school site is safe. Still, he believes changes are needed in state rules to prevent future schools from being built unwittingly atop oil and gas waste. 

“The district would recommend legislative or regulatory requirements for mandatory notification when large housing developments or schools are proposed on former oil and gas drilling waste sites,” said Dear. 

“Such notification,” he added, “would help school districts and communities make informed decisions before development occurs.”

The post Did These North Texas Developers Have a Duty to Disclose Oil and Gas Waste History? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Permian Basin Democrats Tim McDaniel and Eli Hilbert took to the road on a Saturday in late August to knock doors in the small towns of Crane and McCamey. On either side of remote stretches of U.S. Route 385, pumpjacks bent their necks in perpetual motion and wind turbines spun slowly in the distance.

They were joined by Holly Taylor, the Democratic candidate for Place 9 on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, on their journey to connect with rural voters. Over the past year, Taylor has been on a mission to visit all 254 counties in the state—an ambitious goal for any statewide candidate, let alone one running for an oft-overlooked judicial slot—putting over 65,000 miles on her campaign car.

It was a serene and sunny morning when we arrived in the oil town of Crane, 30 miles south of Odessa and home to just over 3,000 people. The quiet was interrupted only by a rooster’s crow and barking chihuahuas. Hilbert, McDaniel, and Taylor knocked on doors but were often met by silence or a posted warning: “Texans don’t dial 911.” A handful of residents were eager to see a fresh face and air out their grievances without inviting any negative attention.

“Democrat! That’s like cussing around here,” one local resident told the crew. “I’m probably the only Democrat left.”

It’s those far-flung voters that could shrink the margins between Democrats and Republicans in November, and this year there’s a full slate of candidates running for seats in the Texas Legislature and U.S. Congress who are traveling far and wide with hopes of reinventing the party in the eyes of rural Texans. Dubbed the Texas Challengers, the party claims it’s the first time in modern Texas history that there will be a Democrat in every state and federal race. In West Texas—where Republicans often win at rates around 80-20—that means strengthening the Democratic Party’s rickety infrastructure and taking on politicians who have sunk comfortably into the highest seats of power during their long, often uncontested tenures.

“If you are a Republican and you want to hold public office in this state, you’re going to have to fight us for it,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said in an interview with the Texas Tribune after announcing the full slate of candidates last December. Recent polling also shows that the governor’s race and the senate race could be won or lost by just a few percentage points, and may be the closest Democrats have come to taking statewide office in 30 years. But despite the party’s achievements, it’s still a rough road for candidates in the vast expanse of West Texas where oil and cultural conservatism reigns, big donors are hesitant to invest, and being an open Democrat is ostracized.

“Rural voters are a huge part of the electoral firewall that the GOP maintains in Texas,” Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin told the Texas Observer. “For Democrats to be successful at the top of the ticket, they need Democratic candidates running competitive races down ballot all over the state.”

According to the Texas Politics Project, 61 percent of rural voters said they would vote for Governor Greg Abbott, while only 23 percent said they would vote for his Democratic opponent Gina Hinojosa. Furthermore, 38 percent of rural voters said they did not know or have an opinion of Hinojosa at all. Approval of the Democratic Party as a whole was critically low, with 53 percent of rural voters saying they hold a very unfavorable opinion.

“We do feel a little left out sometimes in the Democratic Party,” Tim McDaniel, president of the Permian Basin Young Democrats, told the Observer during a monthly meeting at their Midland headquarters. Just down the road, the city was celebrating National Petroleum Day with a tailgate, concert, and gala featuring local Republican officials.

Organizers like McDaniel and Hilbert have been fiercely devoted to progressive causes for years in the Permian Basin, an expansive region that contains much of West Texas and reaches into New Mexico, but maintaining a stable Democratic base is made difficult by the transient nature of jobs in the oil industry and the exodus of local Democrats to other parts of the state. “Everyone in this photo doesn’t live here anymore,” said Hilbert, looking back on a photo of a protest from 2022, “and neither does anybody else that I organized with at that time.”

Eli Hilbert and Tim McDaniel from the Permian Basin Young Democrats, in front of the Crane County courthouse, alongside Holly Taylor, the Democratic candidate for Place 9 on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. (Photo by Eden Shamy)

They also said it can be difficult to activate voters when Democrats hardly run for local office, and more prominent candidates frequently fail to make the journey out west. Oftentimes, the best option they have is to vote for “the lesser of the two evils in the Republican primary,” McDaniel said.

Indeed, like Democratic strongholds in places like South Texas, primaries are where most political battles in West Texas take place—most often between more traditional conservative Republicans and hardline right-wingers. This year, the Democrats in Congressional District 11 actually had a contested primary, one of only a few over the past three decades. An unexpected outsider came out on top.

Claire Reynolds lives over 300 miles away from Midland in the Central Texas suburb of Pflugerville, yet the mother and lawyer managed to handily beat West Texas native Pedro “Pete” Ruiz in the March primary. After the Republican gerrymandering of 2025, Reynolds said she woke up to find her home north of Austin had been plucked out of Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett’s district and tacked onto Congressional District 11—which stretches all the way to Odessa and beyond. The Republican incumbent Congressman August Pfluger is an Air Force veteran and San Angelo native. He hasn’t faced a Democratic opponent since he captured the seat in 2020.

Reynolds quit her job at the State Bar of Texas in December of 2025, days before the filing deadline to launch her underdog campaign for Congress. Every week, she drives hundreds of miles across the district to connect with voters and let it be known that there’s an Austin-area Democrat who cares about West Texas. “I’m not the lady from Austin coming down thinking I know more than them,” Reynolds said over a campaign lunch at Dos Compadres in Midland. It was the second-to-last stop on her five-day trek across all 20 counties in the district. “I’m just here to find out what they need in order to thrive.”

That includes protecting jobs in the energy industry, Reynolds reassured voters at the small cluster of tables at the Midland event. “My big problem is that August Pfluger has stock and owns stakes in several oil and gas companies, and I believe that it’s wrong to profit based on the laws that you write,” she said. “I have no interest in hurting oil and gas.”

Kyle Rable is another first-time candidate at the forefront of Democrats’ battle for West Texas. He’s a 30-year-old father, captain in the U.S. Army Reserve, and Texas Tech doctoral candidate also juggling a campaign for Congressional District 19. Rable is the first Democrat since 2020 to run for the district, which covers the South Plains region including Lubbock, Big Springs, and Andrews. After the crushing red wave of 2024, Rable said he looked at his pregnant wife and knew he needed to do more. Before the Democratic Party even launched the Texas Challengers, Rable decided he was going to run.

“I talked to pretty much every candidate that’s now running out in West Texas,” Rable said in an interview. “I told them that if they do it with me, and they’re within my congressional district, that we would do it together. We were able to recruit so many candidates by just the promise that you won’t do this alone.”

Rable considers himself a church-going, gun-toting, dirt road Democrat, and he’s knocked over 2,000 doors since January. He’s been advocating for greater investment in the region because he believes that the Democratic Party has left farmers and West Texans behind. In a speech before the general assembly at the Texas Democratic Convention in June, Rable said that Democrats owed West Texas an apology for failing to fight back against Republicans. He emphasized the importance of West Texas on the national stage, not only politically but for its cotton, cattle, and energy. “West Texas does matter because real people live there, because it feeds, clothes, and fuels this country!” Rable said.

In mid-July, he launched a campaign tour through the South Plains that was attended by nearly every statewide candidate—with the exception of James Talarico for U.S. Senate and Ben Flores for land commissioner. They rallied in Lubbock, Plainview, Big Springs, and Abilene. “I was able to call in favors, bully, and berate until everyone agreed to it,” Rable said.

Reynolds and Rable have tailored their platforms to focus on kitchen table issues with broad appeal: decreasing healthcare costs, protecting workers and farmers, and regulating powerful corporations like those in the data center and artificial intelligence industries.

Drew Landry, a government professor at South Plains College, said the growing controversy around money in politics, data centers, and Flock cameras can help Democrats get “a foot in the door” with rural Texans. Flock cameras stick out like a sore thumb in the vast, flat stretches of West Texas, and data centers have been popping up around the region. Democrats will have to target the 40 percent of rural voters who say they disapprove of how the state’s leaders have handled corruption, and the 44 percent who would strongly oppose a data center being built in their community.

“We do not want these things destroying our land. We don’t want them using up our water,” Rable said. “It’s already hard out here to grow cotton.”

(Courtesy of Rable campaign)

Rable and Reynolds said they have forged strong relationships with fellow first-time candidates, like Shiloh Salazar, a mother and former educator who is the first Democrat to run for House District 72 since 2004. She’s hoping to take down a nearly 20-year incumbent, Republican Drew Darby. They’ve teamed up with other challengers to campaign on the issues of affordability and data centers, such as Riley Rodriquez in Senate District 28 (sprawling across West Texas, held by Republican Charles Perry), and Malik Williams, who is challenging Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows in his Lubbock-based district. Burrows’ last Democratic opponent, in 2020, got 20.7 percent of the vote; Landry, the professor, ran against him as a Dem in 2018, doing only slightly better with 22.7 percent. 

There are some challengers, however, that appear to be little more than a name on a ballot. Ceasar Sanchez in House District 81, from Loving to Ector County, is practically a ghost. He has had no online presence or communication with local Democrats. The Republican incumbent, state Representative Brooks Landgraf, has comfortably held the seat for a decade and was only contested by a Democrat once before in 2018. Sanchez’ nonexistent campaign is indicative that, despite the party’s mass recruitment efforts, some races still fall through the cracks.

“Getting candidates is one thing. Getting them to do something is another,” Landry said. “I have a feeling a lot of them don’t really know what to do, or they don’t know how to ask for help.”

In the neighboring House District 82 resides the longest serving member of the Texas Legislature, Tom Craddick. The 82-year-old Republican, who once held the House speakership, has represented the district covering Midland, Martin, and Dawson counties for 57 years. When nobody would volunteer to run against him,  stepped down from her position as the Democrat’s Midland County Chair to do it herself. (Like Rable, she didn’t need any prodding by the Texas Challengers initiative.) 

Broadrick, a 68-year-old grandmother of six, saw firsthand the state’s transformation from blue to red. Her campaign strategy has been largely community focused, meeting with local women’s clubs, visiting churches, and working at food banks. However, her campaign has hit a snag due to her husband’s health issues, and she is planning to move out of the district to Georgetown, where she can be closer to family. 

Even with the Texas Challengers initiative, candidates and local organizers told the Observer it can often feel like they’re charting a path through deep red, rural Texas on their own. Rable said he always carries a firearm because he has received threats. Taylor said she’s met local Democrats who’ve had their tires slashed. And McDaniel said they were forced to remove the sign from their Ector County headquarters after they were egged. Many have been told they can’t win, and donations would be better spent elsewhere.

One group that has sought to champion the cause of rural Texas Democrats is the 134 PAC, which is dedicated to helping Democrats in the 134 counties west of Interstate 35 get the resources and support they need to be competitive. Ramon Rodriguez is the PAC’s new Big Bend Regional Director, the first of more regional directors to come as the group seeks to expand its reach. He said they work closely with county chairs and candidates on everything from strategizing and providing campaign materials to helping them run for office, including paying filing fees.

“County chairs have this huge list of to-dos from the Texas Democratic Party,” Rodriguez told the Observer, “but we aren’t at that point where they have all the resources they need to get those done.”

State House candidate Diana Luna of Abilene, left; state House candidate Malik Williams of Lubbock, right. (Photos courtesy of Luna and Williams campaigns)

The day after door knocking in Crane and McCamey, the Permian Basin Democrats received a visit from Rodriguez at their Midland headquarters. He delivered signs and other campaign materials all the way from Austin for them to distribute throughout the area. Rodriguez said the PAC was founded in 2020 by former party chairs and leaders with grassroots support from rural Texans.

Still, he said that rural Democrats have to work three times as hard as incumbent Republicans in the region, who have a broad natural base of voters and plenty of financial resources. Congressman Pfluger currently has over $2.8 million cash on hand compared to Reynolds’ $46,790, the latest federal campaign finance reports show.

“You’re going up against a 500 pound gorilla,” Rodriguez said.

Both Reynolds and Rable have sworn off taking money from corporate PACs. Reynolds also said she wants to ban members of Congress from owning or trading stocks like Pfluger has over his six years in office. Pfluger recently supported the Stop Insider Trading Act, which prohibits new purchases of stocks but comes short of banning members from owning or selling their current stocks. Plfuger did not respond to a request for comment. 

Reynolds invited Pfluger to a debate on October 5, hoping to challenge his record on stock trading and data centers. He accepted the challenge, making it the first confirmed debate of any federal candidates in Texas this election cycle.

Democrats in West Texas were all in agreement that it’s not just about winning in November. It’s about changing how Texans see the Democratic Party, recruiting volunteers, and building something for the next generation. Rable believes if Democrats can win in West Texas, they can win anywhere, and Reynolds is hopeful that the Texas Challengers is only the beginning.

“We should have been doing this 20 years ago,” Reynolds said. “The second best time is now.”

The post ‘Up Against a 500-Pound Gorilla’: Can Dems Make Inroads in Deep-Red West Texas? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

When she meets people who are visiting the Rio Grande Valley for the first time, Mollie Wallace—a 31-year-old occupational therapist in McAllen—usually asks whether they’ve gone to the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge yet.

The refuge is a point of pride for Wallace, who was raised in the Valley. She’s come there through multiple phases of her life, calling the 2,000-plus acres of riparian forest and thornscrub on the southern edge of Alamo a formative place for her and generations of local kids.

“I’ve grown older through here, and it’s a fun reference for anyone who’s from the Valley,” she told the Texas Observer on an early September morning, walking toward the refuge’s observation tower. “I love showing it to people who say, ‘There’s nothing to do in the Valley,’ or ‘We don’t have any green spaces.’”

It’s the first time Wallace has visited since surveyors thrust thin wooden stakes, some painted orange, others pink, into the earth along the levee road from east to west, marking where sections of 30-foot-tall steel bollards atop concrete wall will create a physical barrier miles from the Rio Grande, Texas’ border with Mexico. At some point in the future, Santa Ana’s visitors will see the wall before they get to the refuge’s trailheads, which will then only be accessible through a locked gate. Though the wall will not run through the heart of the refuge, it will trap much of it beyond steel. 

Mollie Wallace at Santa Ana on September 15 (Gaige Davila)

The construction—which started in June this year and paused in mid-July because of a lawsuit from the Hidalgo County Irrigation District—is nearly a decade in the making. President Donald Trump’s first administration quietly prepared to build a wall through Santa Ana in 2017, which was condemned by Valley’s congressional leadership, local residents, and beyond. The plan then was for an 18-foot-tall wall to go through the refuge, essentially destroying its function as a wildlife corridor. 

Saving the refuge from wall construction became a coalescing issue in the Rio Grande Valley and across the state. During one protest in August 2017, hundreds of people formed a human chain along the levee road. By the end of that year, CBP was intent on Santa Ana being the start of a 60-mile stretch of new barrier. 

Then, thanks to an effort led by U.S. House Representative Henry Cuellar, language was added to 2018 appropriations legislation shielding Santa Ana—called the “crown jewel” of a federal refuge system belonging to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that runs along the Rio Grande—from wall construction. The following year, additional Valley sites were added to this exemption list. Despite a brief scare when Trump declared a national emergency to shift Defense Department funds into wall building, Santa Ana survived that administration unscathed.

That state of affairs lasted until this past summer, when Congress passed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. As the nation’s attention fixated on the healthcare implications, the act pumped an unprecedented $46.6 billion into border barrier construction, drawing little outcry at the time. This bill—what’s called a reconciliation measure that doesn’t pass through the typical appropriations process—did not reiterate the protections for Santa Ana and other sites including the La Lomita chapel and National Butterfly Center, creating a green light for Trump to ignore the will of Congress as expressed in at least six prior funding measures. 

Contractors erected two short sections of wall in June and July on the western edge of Santa Ana, using what appear to be older bollards. Those bollards, weathered likely from years in storage, end a dozen or so yards from the black-painted bollards built during the first Trump administration. That section of older wall is the same that Trump spoke in front of, and signed, in 2021, in what was his first public appearance after the January 6 insurrection and former President Joe Biden’s election. CBP did not respond to the Observer’s emailed questions on when the bollards were made.

Steel bollards installed in July at Santa Ana (Gaige Davila)

Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat, is now trying to get the Rio Grande Valley sites exempted again through the next bill outlining the Homeland Security budget, he told the Observer in a phone call. This time, he said, neither appropriations nor reconciliation money could be used for border fencing through Santa Ana, La Lomita, or the other sites. He’s hopeful that Congress can get the bill passed before the end of the year.

“They’re trying to beat the clock, in my opinion,” Cuellar said, referring to the GOP. “And the more time the local folks can give us through lawsuits or whatever way to delay it—so we can at least get into December and hopefully have a shot at trying to pass the appropriation bill with this appropriate language—that will pretty much stop them [in] their tracks.”

Santa Ana is not in Cuellar’s current district but rather in Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz’s, which stretches north all the way to Seguin.

“The border construction pause is up to the courts,” her office told the Observer in a statement. “Congresswoman De La Cruz has supported exemptions specifically for the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, and she continues to consult closely with community leaders regarding ongoing construction plans.”

During the Biden administration, De La Cruz voted for the government funding bill for fiscal year 2024 that included the Rio Grande Valley site exemptions. She also voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill, which did not include these protections. (Her electoral opponent, Bobby Pulido, told the Observer in his first public comment on the Santa Ana wall in late July: “I haven’t said anything about it, but I obviously oppose it.”

The last protest over Santa Ana to get any news coverage was in February, as attention to wall building has instead concentrated at Big Bend, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is clearing portions of the West Texas national park for patrol roads and vehicle barriers.  Nearby residents sued the federal government last week to prevent further construction, following months of bipartisan befuddlement over the Trump administration’s border wall plans.

Wallace remembers the greater level of public resistance nearly a decade ago, when she was a student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

“It just kind of felt like what we did mattered,” Wallace said while reminiscing about those protests, which she attended. “I don’t speak for everyone, but I definitely feel like everything I do is like a drop in the bucket. I feel very powerless. But it’s not a good excuse to not show up.”

From atop the refuge’s observation tower, the new wall can be seen. Once the fence is finished, it will make an imposing scar through the north side of this 360-degree view that today shows what this region looked like long before it was called the Rio Grande Valley, filled with hardy, drought-tolerant trees, thorny plants, and tropical flowers.

“I think it represents us so well,” Wallace said of Santa Ana. “So to put a wall through it is just metaphorically and physically and literally such a stab to our entire home.”

Spencer Construction and Royal Concrete, the contractors building the wall through Santa Ana, stopped working in July after the Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2 filed a lawsuit against them, alleging that they were building on irrigation district property; had put debris in the irrigation district’s canal, which abuts the levee; and were trespassing. The canal supplies water from the Rio Grande to several thousand acres of farms and homes, including being the sole provider of water for Pharr, San Juan, and Alamo, according to the lawsuit. 

Two weeks later, in August, the Department of Justice (DOJ) moved the lawsuit into a federal court and requested the case be dismissed, arguing that state trespassing laws did not apply. Federal District Judge Arthur Jones, in McAllen, has yet to rule on the case but has ordered construction paused until October 15.

Scott Nicol, an art professor at South Texas College, has spent years advocating against the government building border wall anywhere in the Rio Grande Valley.

“The Trump administration goes on and on and on and on and on about how there were all these huge number of crossings during the Biden administration,” Nicol said while walking around the Santa Ana fence sections in early September. “That’s after Trump had already built hundreds and hundreds of miles of border walls. You had this huge spike in crossings, but the walls are there, so what the hell did those walls do?” 

Nicol was active in a coalition whose pressure helped push the site exemptions during the first Trump administration. About 12 miles west of Santa Ana, the historic La Lomita chapel will reportedly see the wall run south off of the levee—atop which almost all border fencing in Hidalgo County runs, part of a compromise approach stretching back to the W. Bush administration—and toward the river to accommodate the aged house of worship. Another few miles upriver, the National Butterfly Center, which the levee bisects, presently shows no signs of construction. However, there are placemarker buoys in the bend of the Rio Grande that creates the southern border of the center’s land, signaling that large, orange “waterborne barrier system”—sometimes known by critics as razor buoys—will soon arrive. Significant stretches of Hidalgo County already host finished wall.

“I think it was a lot easier to get people concerned when it was coming, and there was a chance of stopping it,” Nicol said. “I think it becomes difficult, very difficult now, because it’s like, ‘Well, shit, it’s already happened.’”

Birders along the trails of Santa Ana (Gaige Davila)

That’s the fight at hand in Big Bend: trying to stop the bulldozers before a sense of inevitability kicks in. In August, crews and heavy machinery arrived to start constructing what CBP now says are going to be patrol roads and vehicle barriers. But earlier this year, Big Bend was also set to get the same steel bollards making their way through Santa Ana. Bipartisan resistance from Texas congressional and legislative officials, and even Texas Governor Greg Abbott, made CBP change plans. Though CBP assured the public it was not yet constructing its planned vehicle barriers or patrol roads in the area, a New York Times investigation using satellite imagery found that it was.

CBP can legally tear through Big Bend and Santa Ana, protected public lands, in part thanks to the Trump administration’s waiving environmental laws to accelerate barrier construction along the southern border. That legal mechanism was created in 2005 by the Real ID Act, allowing the Department of Homeland Security secretary to waive dozens of environmental laws to “ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads” that make up the southern border.  

On September 14, the Hidalgo County drainage district named the United States as a defendant in its lawsuit against Spencer Construction and Royal Concrete, the wall builders. It’s seeking a permanent injunction, hoping to stop wall construction in the area completely. 

“The harm Plaintiff will suffer is irreparable because damage to irrigation infrastructure, interference with public water management operations, and unauthorized alteration of Plaintiff’s Property cannot be adequately compensated solely through monetary damages,” the filing reads. “Furthermore, the potential disruption or loss of water service to Plaintiff’s customers also cannot be fully compensated by damages. Plaintiff’s customers [sic] loss of water would be catastrophic and cannot be remedied.” 

During the early, muggy mornings of September, a month ahead of when wall construction might resume, birders, hikers, and bikers continued passing through this once-protected wildlife corridor. No one on the levee road paid much attention to the thin wooden stakes, some of which were already broken or taken out of the ground and thrown yards away from their points of origin. 

The levee road is supposedly closed, according to the refuge. Maps for visitors now highlight the road in red to signify this. But people, Border Patrol agents and Alamo Police officers included, quietly pedaled down the caliche and into the trails on their bikes as dawn faded, using the road as if it was not a construction site. Because, for now, it’s not. 

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