Representative Ray Lopez was elected to the Texas Legislature in 2019 to serve HD 125, which encompasses much of San Antonio’s West and Northwest Sides. Lopez discussed his background in politics and why he got involved, emergency preparedness in Texas, the Texas Military and the border, threats from foreign nations and organizations, and more with Lone Star Standard. This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Lone Star Standard: What are some of your proudest moments working in local government?
Lopez: What we tried to do was identify what the city could do, to take a little bit of treasure that it was willing to commit, and invest it where it would make the best impact. We pulled together an extensive committee, with local leaders, educational leaders, business leaders, and others. As an organization, we worked for about 6 months and we talked about the issues, investigated them, got all kinds of reports on where we might best spend our time. We talked about high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy rates, repeating teen pregnancy rates, all of those things that are creating a bad environment for kids to be successful. At the end of the day, we wound up coming to the conclusion unanimously that if we could improve reading proficiency at the third grade level, we would be able to make the best impact on our kids and assure some level of increased success. So, we started down that path. We realized quickly that you really can’t start with third grade programs. We really needed to start early on. And, so here in San Antonio, we created an organization to achieve these goals.
Lone Star Standard: What issues were you focused on as Vice Chairman of Defense and Veterans Affairs?
Lopez: In this past session, as Vice Chairman, I was in a position to not only move my own bills forward, but to look at all the bills that were coming out of the legislative offices of all my colleagues and try to pick an choose the ones that I agreed with whole heartedly that I thought would make the best impact in Defense and Veterans Affairs. I was able to work with many of my colleagues to get many bills passed. Most of those bills dealt with, or at least the ones that I sponsored, were in recognition of the high suicide rates among veterans and try to give it the attention that it deserves. We declared September 22nd as Veteran Suicide Prevention Awareness Day, to kind of get more information out there. But that doesn’t stop suicides. First, we need to become aware of in to figure out what is causing these veterans to commit suicide at a really high rate. It was not acceptable. We made a lot of inroads into that. We created policies to provide veterans with resources and to provide outreach directly to them. Oftentimes, you know, veterans will recognize that other veterans are relatively hardheaded and they won’t reach out and try to get help. So, we knew we needed to go directly to them. Many of them are unhoused. So, we now go to where they are and offer them services to try to make that link. We’ve been successful in doing that. The suicide rate is dropping and we are in a position now to try to give them some level of hope by providing them jobs and job opportunities, housing opportunities, and then being able to get veterans benefits that are available.
Lone Star Standard: What is your view of what the state of Texas can do about the border?
Lopez: I want us to be able to have a plan in place that is crafted by the people who are responsible for implementing. That’s the Generals. We have a handful of Generals that are responsible for the entire state of Texas that would know exactly how they can best support their troops. And we need to engage in that discussion. I hope that we’re able to craft some legislation that allows us to have that level of discussion in the next session, tactically, that Defense and Veterans Affairs certainly could initiate the discussion. We could also initiate discussion and make recommendations on how to address it. But, it will still have to get passed in the House, the Senate, and signed by the Governor. And I can tell you that the Governor probably would not sign something that he’s not fully supportive of, as he is very much committed to Operation Lone Star even though there’s a lot of issues around it. In my view, there definitely is a better way. I would hope that somehow or another we would get away from the red and blue issues of immigration and think about red, white, and blue issues of immigration. There was a bipartisan bill at the federal level that provided a path forward on immigration but politics got in the way. It never got a vote on the floor. I’m hopeful that the debate continues.
Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-24-ray-lopez
