Welcome to Texas Talk.

I'm Gilbert Garcia, metro columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

On this show, we bring you in-depth one on one conversations with some of the most fascinating figures in Texas politics, sports, culture and business.

Whether as a civil rights attorney for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a San Antonio City councilman, or over the past eight years as a state representative, Diego Bernal has battled against inequities in our society.

That's meant guiding the passage of San Antonio's not discrimination ordinance, passing a bill enabling schools to get leftover food to hungry kids.

Fighting for more public education funding and working to get air conditioning units in public housing.

On tonight's show, we're not talking about this year's acrimonious legislative session.

His biggest concerns about the state and his future goals.

Let's get started.

Diego, thanks for being in Texas.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

As we speak, you and the other state representatives are on a break.

The House adjourned one day into a 30 day special session for a past property tax relief.

That was it.

And the Senate is basically in a position where it's like a take it or leave it proposition.

Right.

You've got House Speaker Dade feeling and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick both want property tax relief.

But there doesn't seem to be any resolution right now between their plans.

Right.

I mean, what do you expecting to see happen?

I mean, part of it is theater, right?

Somebody wants to be the winner.

And I think the the measure is wrong.

I think the measure should be and I think we should go in reverse.

People do need property tax relief the way that we the way that we tax people's property is burdensome, especially in areas like mine, the center city, where it's gentrifying very quickly.

And by that I mean people are getting taxed out of homes they otherwise own.

That's how I use the term before people get upset.

But property tax relief has it's a parallel conversation with school finance because most of our property taxes go towards funding schools.

And so if you're going to give people relief, you have to do that in a way that also makes sure that not only do you keep schools whole, but you give them what they need for the students and the teachers and faculty to succeed.

And so right now, I think we're just having a who's going to win?

Who's the winner?

Sort of theater competition.

What we need to do is say, how do we best take care of schools and provide relief that homeowners and maybe business owners, maybe renters, that they're harder to get to?

We should certainly try.

I think the way that relief is experienced is more important than who the winner is.

Sure.

And I think we're we're in a who's the winner conversation that we need to get past that.

The House, the plan passed by the House, which is favored by Governor Greg Abbott, is a compression only plan.

Right.

Which essentially allows school districts to lower their property tax rate and then the state fills in the rest.

In the Senate, Dan Patrick favors a plan that would include compression, but he also wants a $100,000 homestead exemption.

Right now, the thing about this, that and this kind of gets to what you're talking about is that you've had Governor talking about wanting to end property taxes in Texas, which sounds great, but I'm thinking as a long term policy does what's going to happen to school funding and does this mean that we have astronomical sales tax rates?

It could.

I think that I think that starting off with the slogan without the actual nuts and bolts is always a mistake.

Right.

I think I think, again, I think where we should start very calmly in a very sober way, we should talk.

We should start with how do we reduce poverty, taxes, the experience that people have with property taxes in a way that doesn't hurt schools.

In fact, can we do this in a way where people's experiences property taxes is improved and at the same time schools are improved, outcomes are better, teacher pay goes up, or it feels like a binary choice and it doesn't have to be.

So one thing I will say about compression I want to give some credit here before I'd give presentations to neighborhoods and I'd have a PowerPoint and say, Look, you're you the the public.

You're shouldering more than 50% of the money that goes in the public schools locally.

And then the state's doing the rest compression at least gets the state to 50 or beyond 50% of what's in that model.

If this was the model, right.

Yeah, it would.

Right now with let's I'm making the numbers up, but let's say it's 40, 60 and the plan, the compression plan kind of inverts it so that it's 6040 takes some of the burden away.

Right.

Take some of the burden away.

But if you're if you're a principal, if you're a teacher in the bottle's the same size, then we've only taken care of half of it.

So I want to give credit for assuming more of the responsibility.

Right.

You know, you're not a Disneyland dad anymore.

You're paying your fair share.

You're doing better.

But at the same time, the bottle has to get bigger.

And so I think it's it's it's premature to do one without the other.

Right now, we're just having one conversation.

So, yes, they're fighting over which one we should do.

But I just don't think you should divorce it from the conversation of the experience of schools either.

We entered this legislative session with nearly a $33 billion surplus.

Yeah, there was reason to hope that we might see a major boost in school funding, that we might see raises for active teachers, and that hasn't happened.

I mean, we still don't know what's gonna happen the rest of the year.

But how disappointed are you with with how that's been handled?

That's been that's been really tough.

Every every budget has some really good pieces.

They always do.

And this one has some really good pieces.

But every budget also has some big challenges and some letdowns.

And for me, and for a lot of us, including in our delegation, I think the letdown was the the teacher pay.

We've been talking about it so much.

They had just gone through COVID, they just gone through post-COVID.

They're having a really, really hard time inflation hit us harder and it hit people who weren't making a whole lot of money even harder because, you know, their salaries didn't go up well.

Everything else around them got expensive.

So here are people that we say are heroes, which we recognize them as heroes.

We we talked about them like they were first responders.

And yet they got nothing from us and we had the money to do it.

So the only excuse there is the only reason there is, is that as a legislature, we must just have not wanted to.

And I think that that's tough.

Now, the argument is, well, there's some school funding increase in districts can use that money on teacher raises if they want to.

You know, not really.

Like that's not necessarily that's not necessarily the case.

And the bills that would ensure that that happened, they all died.

So we didn't do that.

And that made it very hard to support that budget because of that, even though there are some good things, considering how much money we have, it was just I couldn't do it.

Well, you had a bill that was dealing with teacher retention because, I mean, there's this is a major problem in this.

Right.

And you would offer guess tuition help for students if they would pledge to spend a certain amount of time teaching.

Yeah.

And also trying to keep people who are already teaching.

That's right.

What kind of reception did you get from your colleagues in that?

Well, well, I mean, there's plenty of my colleagues liked it, but the bill didn't get a hearing.

And the the governor and other leadership decided that they were going to try to do teacher retention a different way.

But those those measures didn't pan out at all.

They essentially did nothing.

And then my bill never got a hearing.

Maybe I'll get another crack at it.

I'll try it again.

But I am.

It's satisfying to know that we did a COLA for retired teachers and a 13th check.

And so that's something we took care of kind of I mean, it's not great, but it's better.

You know, my line of work where I'm at better is is better, is better because there's today and tomorrow is better than we'll take that.

But we didn't do anything for active teachers.

And so my bill didn't go anywhere and teacher pay didn't go anywhere.

And that it's just it's hard if you go and talk to teachers and I'm not disparaging anybody.

You can talk to groups and associations.

You can even talk to superintendents and principals.

But talk to a teacher.

Don't talk to a representative for them.

Don't get the 30,000, go get the classroom level perspective and you talk to a teacher and you will soon understand what they're dealing with and what we should have done and the tremendous gap between those two things.

Now, it seems that the governor is determined to get a school voucher bill passed this year.

It's a very divisive issue.

It's something that that Republicans in Texas have been trying to do for years and years.

Are you expecting a special session later this year?

And what's the time for people saying they're going to be like in the fall?

Yeah, you know, you always hear in the in that building, it's just a it's a rumor mill, so you never know.

I heard September.

The reason for September is because then teachers are teaching and they can't show up.

I don't know if that's true or not, so I'm spreading it.

But I don't.

I don't believe everything is something I heard.

I don't.

I don't see how it passes.

I don't know what gets us there.

Now.

I'm sure there might.

The house is probably the biggest challenge for it to pass.

The House is the biggest challenge.

But not not by a slim margin.

This is not a three or four person flip.

I mean, you've got a pretty significant delta between passing it and not so I don't know how he does it and I don't know if he wants for his own reputation to continue to call us back and take a left or right to lose over and over again.

Well, that's what I'm wondering.

Like, is it would he be so persistent on this that he would just keep calling y'all back and tell people bore down?

Well, the way this works is if if someone doesn't get what they want, who's in any position of power or persuasion?

Right.

This happens with the big conservative PACs as well as they start threatening reps with support or money or funding competitors.

So we'll see if any of that works.

I also think that maybe maybe there's some package that you put together that becomes a deal that some people can't resist.

I don't know what that is.

I've heard a few rumors about that, but I don't know how that works.

But I will say this.

One of the packages I've heard of, which would be a tremendous increase in funding, let's say, for students receiving special education services in exchange for some sort of voucher, either a limited voucher or a grand voucher.

What they're essentially saying is that these kids are there.

They're negotiating pieces.

They're trading books.

Right.

You're negotiating the welfare and well-being and education of students we know need it in exchange for something you want.

And as you said, we have the money to do it.

Now, without this piece, you're not going to.

We've decided not to, because this whatever this is, is more important to you than just giving them not what they want, but what they deserve.

Right?

So, for example, for students receiving special education services where there was a report that said that we're deficient about $2 billion a year, $4 billion a biennium, sounds like a lot, but not when you've got a $33 billion billion deficit.

I mean, surplus.

I'm sorry.

So you could, but you're not.

So the idea that you would trade it still turns my stomach, right?

It haunts me because it's something you can do, but you won't.

It's just it's a sometimes the building is a tough place to be.

Well, a few weeks ago, just before the end of the regular session, the Texas House did something that was a rare and huge step of impeaching a statewide elected official, Attorney General Ken Paxton.

And this was really rooted in an investigation that the House General investigative Committee had been had begun after he settled a whistleblower case for 3.3 million with the idea that the state was going to pick up the tab and that had led to this investigation.

There are allegations of bribery, obstruction of justice.

A lot of it's rooted in his relationship with a donor that Paul, like most of the members of the Democratic caucus, you voted for impeachment.

What was the process you went through in making that decision when you read what they presented?

It's it's compelling.

And remember, impeachment.

What that really means is you're on the bench now, but there's a full trial that happens in the Senate.

So that's the first of two steps.

So the fact that was bipartisan, the fact that it was Republican led and, you know, in that building, we can be very religious about our parties to a fault.

And to watch Republicans and majority of Republicans on that committee decide not only to impeach, but to present impeachment documents to the rest of us for a floor vote was compelling.

Reading the documents themselves, they're compelling and also knowing that there's a whole other half of the process where the facts and Paxton himself are going to be vetted and the people there's a there's a group of a larger group of House members who are essentially the prosecuting attorneys in that process, seeing who that group is and their willingness to do it.

That's what gave me the confidence to do.

Any idea what's going to happen in the Senate?

I don't.

I mean, and that's one of those strange things, is I really thought I knew in the most cynical way.

I thought I knew what was going to happen.

And now I actually don't, which is a nice place to be, because normally the end is predetermined, you know what's going to happen, and this time you don't.

I welcome that.

When you look at this year's session, you talked about school funding.

Apart from that, what do you see as the biggest missed opportunity?

I'm wondering, I know you've been on social media talking about gun reform and what you see as the failures to deal with that, especially in light of what happened, the mass shooting in Nevada last year.

I think that what's happening more and more is that the legislature is moving away from the lived reality of Texans in general.

Right.

So here you have these families in Nevada who've gone through the worst the worst thing that any person can go through on the planet.

I can't think of anything worse.

And as soon as it happened, some people in the legislature dug in their heels already saying, we're not going to do a thing.

And we didn't we didn't really try until the very end.

And by by the very end, it was almost performative.

And I'm glad that we did it.

I'm glad that we finally that that committee finally took a vote to move that bill.

But it was too late for that for anything to happen with it.

And I just sort of feel like that those people, the well, the families, everybody but them in particular deserve at least real deliberation.

The least that issue deserves its moment in the daylight on the floor as we try to figure out what to do.

And that just didn't happen.

So school funding certainly.

But also, look, if you talk to any CPD officer, they will tell you that after constituent, after constitutional Kerry, things are worse here and everywhere else too.

And so we're not responding to that at all.

We're just we're focusing on all these silly things about the way we think the world should be.

And we're not trying to solve people's real everyday problems.

So I think that's the missed opportunity for any Republicans you talk to willing to acknowledge that homeless Kerry has not has had an effect that they didn't intend.

They'll say it privately and some will say it publicly.

But I think that what has to happen is a is an open debate right.

Where they get a bill of some sort, doesn't have to be ban air fifteens.

It can be something smaller to them, more reasonable, granular, even, or just get it to the floor and let us hash it out.

And that's just hasn't really happened.

So much of your work has been about closing equity gaps.

And I'm thinking back to 2017, when you passed the bill that allowed schools to have pantries to save food because so much you had been visiting schools and found that they were throwing out so much like packaged food that kids, you know, you had kids going home hungry and and there was so much was getting wasted.

And as I remember it, this was like the byproduct of you visiting every school in your district and then writing a report when you know it's been a few years.

But in talking to people, you've got you got the kind of perspective that not too many people get.

I would mention that too many of your colleagues get a side from that.

That one issue which you would you addressed.

What are some of the things that you found out?

I mean, the things that you didn't you didn't know about until you had that experience?

I think I think part of it is that there there's sort of a combination of things that you can do at a school that will guarantee or get as close to a guaranteed of success as you as you can.

It's not all easy and it's somewhat controversial, but there's a program called ACE in Dallas.

A lot of people don't like Ace, but what Ace does is they took their poor schools.

These are schools sort of like my middle school to for you.

It's across from the projects.

All the kids are economically disadvantaged, poor.

They said, All right, we're going to give you we're going to put in this school the best teacher that we can find for these kids, not the teacher, can get the best star scores, but the best teacher to connect with these kids.

We're going to reduce class sizes.

We're going to give you extra mental health support, a social worker, extra counselor.

We're going to focus on restorative discipline.

And they did all those things.

It cost about 12, 1400 dollars more per kid to do that.

And as a result of that, those kids in those schools start to outperform the wealthiest areas of Dallas.

And what I liked about it is it didn't import other kids.

They didn't change the student body, didn't curate the student body.

It was the same kids, right.

The same kids getting what they need to overcome some of these challenges.

Right.

To keep the things around them sort of at bay.

But you give them good teachers and good resources and smaller class sizes and a building that's that's clean and functions and good materials.

And you gave them the social emotional support they need so they can deal with the life stuff and then be students.

And it worked.

Now there's some controversy over all the elements, but what I'm saying is there's not it's not a mystery like everything else.

It's not a mystery.

It's whether or not we want to do it.

Are we willing to do it?

Do we have the political will to do it?

I think that's what I keep holding on to.

I've tried to pass elements of Ace and different parts of the budget and bills and with not as much success, but what I've learned is and you hear this from the superintendent, Super Woods, who's not there anymore, but you hear this a lot, which is talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not.

And so if you try to fill the opportunity gap, then students perform.

So that's my big takeaway, is that all these teachers care, the kids are smart, They have different challenges.

If you're not willing to fix what's happening outside the school, then you have to fix you have to help the school deal with those things so that the kids can can learn.

I'm reminded of Julian Castro.

I think he wrote in his book that when he went to Stanford and probably Harvard Law School, too, that he was realizing what these people are very smart, but they're really not smarter than the people I went to school with in the public school district in San Antonio.

They've had more opportunity.

In fact, that's how Julian and I connected.

We, you know, after we started communicating again and working while I was in at Michigan, they were at they were at Stanford and Harvard.

And I was at Michigan.

But one of the things we connected on as we were a little bit older was, did you think these these kids are smart, but they're not smarter than the kids that we went to at or that I went to?

We all three of us also wanted to know where they're not smarter than our friends.

They sort of had different experiences and different things laid out in front of them.

And so you come back and you're looking around and saying, This is not a dumb city.

You never thought that, but it's certainly an underachieving city.

And by that it's because people don't have the same opportunity.

And I'm not running around saying whose fault it is.

I'm just saying if you give people, students, kids what they need, they rise to the occasion.

Now, you went to for middle school with the Astros and I think Jefferson High School, too, Right.

What what memories do you have of them or do you remember meeting them?

Yeah, I remember.

They're a little bit older, maybe a couple of years.

Yeah, a couple of years.

You know, they were very straitlaced, right?

Buttoned up, nice hair, sure.

But good guys.

Right.

And also, they were so strikingly similar looking.

When you're a kid, you don't forget.

Right?

They weren't just twins.

They mean they looked the same.

So that was a little bit odd.

But they were nice guys.

And I think that what people get wrong about them is that they think that they've been plotting this political life since then, and that's not really the case at the time.

This is the early nineties, mid nineties, San Antonio was the for you and Jeff.

There were rough places, not the roughest but rough enough.

But we also never saw people fail forward bright people.

It was it felt like you were living in a one strike environment where you messed up one time and everything was over.

You failed the test, you got a DUI, you know, you're in some gang fight, you know, were involved in some fight in a party or there's a shooting, whatever it might be.

At the time, it felt like you can mess up once you were done.

And what I saw were two guys who were focused on getting to college and they weren't going to let anything interfere with that.

So they weren't focused on politics.

They're focused on getting an education outside of San Antonio, then coming back.

Now, in 2013, we run the city council.

You led the charge in the passage of the nondiscrimination ordinance in San Antonio, which extended civil rights protections to members of the LGBTQ community.

It was one of the most contentious battles I can remember.

I wasn't ready for it to be like that.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, it was.

I think it's surprising people how intense it got.

When you look back on that.

We're about close to ten years now.

And what do you see as the legacy of that?

Look, I'm not going to pretend that the policy itself had a tremendous effect, but it's it's it's a symbol, right?

It lets the city know and the rest of the world know that San Antonio was a welcoming place, that we value all of the people who live here.

And if there is some sort of infraction that we have some sort of system designed to address that, I think that means a lot to people economically.

I think it means that we're open for business and people never make this connection.

But when I retailer was mayors, when we got the Final Four and one of the things that the NCAA was looking at was who has the policies that best reflect the values of the NCAA?

And San Antonio had just passed the NDAA and that was one of the reasons why they chose us.

And so it's not only it's good for people, the business argument is important, but it's secondary, right?

Sure.

There's a good there's a good business argument, but the legacy of it is that it just shows that we embrace not people coming in, Sure.

But our own neighbors right now.

Texas, like a lot of red states right now, has there's seems to be a kind of crusade when it comes to LGBTQ issues restricting drag shows.

We don't see gay bill when it comes to schools, you know, banning gender affirming care insurance, gender kids, preventing transgender athletes from competing in college sports.

This isn't a new phenomenon.

It seems to have really intensified.

And do you have any sense of why at this moment in history that there's so much going on with this?

Every time your other policies are failing, you need a boogeyman or a vulnerable group to pick on, to distract people and to make them angry.

And that's what has happened.

You know, if it's not the LGBTQ community, it's immigrants.

There's always a distraction, a group that should be feared or disdained.

And what's interesting to me about that is that, you know, a lot of people think I'm some liberal crusader.

Fine, right?

But what I really am is So he just thinks you should leave people the hell alone.

Leave alone.

It's not your business.

Let them do the thing.

Let them do their life, which is almost a libertarian impulse.

Right?

Right.

So it's not it's not that I think that any one group should be elevated, right?

I don't think anyone's a hero to sort of by birth.

But I do think that people should be left alone.

And this is the opposite.

This is well, let's bother people.

Let's let's punish them.

Let's turn them into villains because people don't understand them as well.

They don't have life experience with them, will tell them lies about them to get them to believe they're a certain way.

And then it distracts folks from these other things that are happening, right, Like school finance teacher pay, common sense gun regulation because the line is drawn over here, us versus those people, which you got a few seconds left, but we had seen some people, some of your colleagues just in Rodrigues.

You know, we had to turn back to sit to local government, you know, commissioners court in their cases because it could be a frustrating place.

It is.

I know it just got a little bit time, but is this is this something that you do have you ever given a thought to?

I actually think about it a lot.

I love being on city council.

I love being able to focus on on my community and and see things happen.

Time will tell.

There's always there's always that consideration.

But you need you need to be able to answer the question why?

That's easy for me.

But as you know, I've got a young kid, she's five and you know what life looks like for her.

And we'll just we'll just have to see.

But I'm always thinking about it.

All right.

Diego Bernal, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thanks, man.

That's all for this edition of Texas Talk.

Thanks for watching.

If you have any thoughts or questions you want to share with us, please email us at Texas, talk at klrn.org We'll be back next month with a new guest.

Until then, take care.