We go over Election Day questions and where to keep up with election coverage in Texas for the March 2026 primaries.
LUBBOCK, Texas — Read R. F. “Bob” Achgill’s Republican primary candidate questionnaire for the Texas Governor race.
Note: The USA TODAY Network only edited the response to comply with journalistic standards and did not change any responses.
Current occupation: World Literacy Research.
Age: 67.
Q: Texas has experienced significant population growth and economic expansion. How would you manage this growth while addressing infrastructure needs, water resources, and quality of life for Texans?
A: Texas’ population growth and economic expansion are not inherently problems — they become problems when shared resources are captured by private interests without transparency, consent, or accountability. Texas’ most immediate crisis is not climate ideology; it is water security, water quality, grid stability, and infrastructure risk driven by policy decisions that favor monopolies over families and rural communities.
Water- and power-hungry data centers are being green-lit with little regard for aquifer depletion, farmland loss, or rising electricity costs for Texans. At the same time, HB 24-49 allows “treated” fracking wastewater to be dumped on farmland and near rivers, putting agriculture, ranching, and downstream communities one spill away from irreversible damage. Growth that poisons land, prices families out of homes, and destabilizes thegrid is not prosperity — it is deferred collapse.
Managing growth requires engineering discipline, not press releases. Infrastructure must be sized to reality, not wishful projections. If industrial users materially raise power prices, stress water supplies, or threaten farmland, they must be required to fully fund mitigation — or be halted. Texans should not subsidize private profit through depletedaquifers, higher utility bills, or contaminated soil.
Water transferred across county lines should be subject to a tax designed to replenish impacted aquifers and finance desalination infrastructure sourcing water from the Gulf of Mexico.
Quality of life begins with families being able to afford homes, food, and power. Institutional investors competing with families for housing drive prices up and stability down. Doubling homestead exemptions and limiting speculative capture of housing stock returns neighborhoods to families, not funds.
Texas historically treated oil as a shared resource that benefited citizens. Today, water, energy, data, and infrastructure must be governed with the same seriousness. Growth must serve Texans — not the other way around.
Q: How do your platforms and approach to governing Texas differ from other candidates in your party’s primary?
A: Impose a targeted tax on water used by heavy industry or transferred across county lines, with revenues dedicated to replenishing depleted aquifers through desalinated water sourced from the Gulf of Mexico.
Rescind the 2012 Space Tourism Law and grant exclusive authority over space operations to a Texas wealth fund modeled after Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. All profits, access control, and financial proceeds from the Texas spaceport would be equally owned and democratically governed by voting U.S. citizens who are Texas residents. Projected revenues currently estimated in the trillions of dollars.
Repeal HB 25-49, which grants immunity for dumping “treated” fracking wastewater into Texas rivers and onto farmland.
Address housing affordability not by reducing property taxes, but by empowering local governments to expand homestead exemptions in order to better regulate the balance between owner-occupied and investor-owned housing.
Establish a $50,000 reward for locating and securing the conviction of trafficked persons, funded through fines levied on those convicted of trafficking.
Support employer-sponsored policies that provide parents one paid day off per month to participate in their children’s schools.
Prioritize literacy, critical thinking, and human formation over AI-driven instruction. I will ensure ADA enforcement by establishing voluntary, parent-directed community literacy spaces in public schools, grounded in the science that language deprivation permanently destroys developing neurons, so families and communities can provide the continuous language input deaf children need — including Bible-based literacy primers if families choose — withoutschool endorsement. The deaf have waited over six millennia for full inclusion, and more than three decades since the passage of the ADA in 1990 for its promise to be fully realized.
“In those days the deaf will hear the words of the book” — Isaiah 29:18
Q: Property taxes and the cost of living are major concerns for Texas families. What role should the governor play in addressing these issues, and what specific actions would you take?
A: Property taxes and the cost of living are crushing Texas families not because Texans are failing, but because government has allowed monopolies and institutional investors to capture essentials families depend on. Housing is no longer priced for families — it is priced for funds. Energy costs are rising not from scarcity, but from policy decisions that subsidize industrial users while shifting long-term risk onto citizens.
The governor’s role is not to micromanage markets, but to stop rigging them. When institutional investors compete with families for homes, affordability collapses. The solution is straightforward: Kick Wall Street off Home Street.
Broadly reducing property taxes is the wrong way to address housing affordability. Across[1]the-board property tax cuts disproportionately benefit institutional and non-family buyers by lowering the carrying costs of large housing portfolios. This gives hedge funds and large investors a competitive edge, enabling them to outbid families and absorb more of the housing supply.
Increasing homestead exemptions is the only constitutional way to protect families. Homestead exemptions shield owner-occupied homes while leaving institutional and non-family properties fully taxed. As speculative buyers exit the market, competition eases, prices fall, and housing returns to its proper role — as shelter, not a financial assetto investors.
Property taxes rise when appraisals inflate artificially. That inflation is driven by speculative pressure, not organic family demand. Tax caps without addressing root causes simply delay the pain.
Cost of living is also driven by energy and infrastructure policy. Data centers and industrial users that materially raise power prices should not be approved without fully funding grid stabilization. Texans should not subsidize private profit through higher utility bills. Affordability is not a slogan — it is math. Families cannot outbid hedge funds. I choose families.
Q: Texas has faced challenges with its power grid, natural disasters, and emergency management. How would you ensure Texas is prepared for future crises, and what reforms, if any, are needed?
A: Texas’ growing infrastructure and emergency risks are being compounded by uncommercially proven Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) and resource-intensive data centers being pushed onto towns through newly created commissions and development authorities designed to fast-track communities as testing grounds. Theseprojects are too often advanced through closed-door negotiations and Non-Disclosure Agreements, even though the Texas Open Meetings Act requires transparency to the public regarding resources that directly affect land value, water security, grid stability, public safety, and quality of life.
Once billion-dollar projects are embedded in a town, the city often loses the ability to self govern. Decisions that once belonged to citizens and locally elected officials become subordinated to protecting the project, the investment, and the outside interests behind it.
SMRs are not commercially proven and should be first tested far away from the public.
NDAs do not override state law. Executive sessions cannot lawfully be used to give away a community’s future to outside interests engaged in resource extraction.
As governor, I will go to bat for citizens. Texans will be equipped to legally challenge and roll back secret agreements involving resource-intensive data centers, SMRs, or any other extraction projects approved without lawful transparency. When deals are forced back into the open, communities regain consent, leverage, and control.Emergency preparedness begins with lawful governance and proven infrastructure — not secrecy, risk transfer.
Q: The Texas-Mexico border presents complex challenges involving security, trade, immigration, and local communities. As governor, how would you approach border policy within your constitutional authority?
A: As governor, I would implement a voluntary, incentive-based return program paired with strict employer enforcement and literacy-linked compliance, designed as a win-win-win for migrants, Texas, and migrants’ home countries. The policy targets the two root drivers of illegal immigration: illegal labor demand and lack of literacy-based opportunity.
Migrants who voluntarily return to Mexico, Guatemala, or El Salvador, etc. would receive a cost-of-living-indexed benefit set at local poverty levels, delivered monthly in their home country. Averaged across those countries, the value equals about $100 per person per month, or approximately $8,300 over seven years — far less than Texas’s long-term costs for K-12 education and uncompensated healthcare. By comparison per student taxpayer-burden inside Texas is $12,800 each year.
To prevent gang extortion, benefits would not be paid as predictable cash. Instead, value would be randomly delivered as discounts at approved staple point-of-sale locations — food, medicine, fuel, and utilities — using biometric verification at purchase, eliminating visibility and seizure risk.
A portion of each month’s benefit would be unlocked only through verified literacy participation. Adults and children engage with free bilingual His Hands Reader literacy videos (or equivalent), with screen-time verification. Children learn Spanish and English simultaneously, improving reintegration and long-term earnings. Global evidence shows5-9 percent income gains per effective year of education.
To shut down illegal labor demand, Texas would open a one-time employer forgiveness window, followed by strict enforcement and whistleblower incentives tied to the conviction of top-tier decision-makers.
This approach reduces taxpayer burden, dismantles illegal hiring networks, weakens criminal exploitation, restores labor-market integrity, and operates fully within Texas’s constitution.
Q: What is your philosophy on the balance between state and local government authority? Are there areas where you believe the state should have more control, or where local governments should have more freedom?
A: The proper balance between state and local authority begins with a simple principle: decisions should be made as close to the people affected as possible — unless those decisions violate law, transparency, or fundamental rights.
Local governments lose legitimacy when they negotiate plain-sight resource decisions — water use, land value, energy infrastructure, data centers, or uncommercially proven Small Modular Nuclear Reactors — behind closed doors. The Texas Open Meetings Act exists to prevent this. The state should establish a whistleblower mechanism to identify and address transparency violations when local governments conceal information that affects the public. Government officials shall be prohibited from entering into non-disclosure agreements or development deals that concern matters affecting the public they were elected to represent. Upon identification by a whistleblower, the discovery of such agreements shall, as a matter of course, require the state to void or roll back any contracts executed under conditions of secrecy using executive sessions.
Once billion-dollar projects are embedded in a town, the city often loses the ability to self-govern. Emergency planning, zoning, utility policy, and even law-enforcement priorities become subordinate to protecting the project rather than serving citizens.
The state’s role is not to centralize power, but to restore lawful self-governance by enforcing transparency, protecting property rights, and stopping policies that transfer long-term risk onto families and rural communities.True federalism is accountability at every level.
Q: Texas has a strong economy but also faces challenges with healthcare access, poverty, and inequality. What role should the state government play in addressing these issues?
A: Texas has a strong economy, yet rising healthcare costs, chronic illnesses, and poverty continues to burden families. The problem is not a lack of spending, it is systemic market failure, where access to care is restricted not by science, but by incentives.
Medicaid and Medicare should remain, but Texas must address areas where markets do not function at all. Just as Texas invests in roads, water, and power infrastructure, Texas can fund FDA-grade research for proven, non-patentable treatments where no private incentive exists. Reverse T3 is a strong pilot example — biologically real, widely linked to chronic illness, and a potential root contributor to decades of rising disease.
Healthcare inequality is worsened by centralized control and surveillance. Medical decisions belong to patients and physicians — not government databases.
Poverty is not solved by dependency. It is worsened when policies divide children from their biological parents, suppress wages, and allow monopolies to raise the cost of housing, energy, and food. Families supported by both parents have better long-term outcomes and reduce reliance on state services.
The state’s role is to remove barriers — not expand bureaucracy. Healthcare reform must be grounded in truth, science, and human dignity.
For more information on policies, visit Achill’s website.
Mateo Rosiles is a reporter for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and USA TODAY Network in Texas. Got a news tip for him? Email him: [email protected].
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