Police Veteran Faces Police Critic in Texas House Race in Williamson County

Lucio Valdez (left, pictured in the mid-1990s), faces Rep. James Talarico (right) in HD-52.

Through most of the Obama years and the first two years of the Trump administration, Texas House District 52 was a no-go zone for Democrats.

The legislative district, which contains Round Rock, Hutto, and Taylor, went four times for a Republican from 2010 to 2016, even though rural Republican strongholds in the eastern part of Williamson County had been carved out of the district in the 2010 redistricting cycle.

HD-52 attracted only Republican and Libertarian candidates in 2012 and 2016. A Democrat challenger in 2014, Chris Osborn, walked away with just 38.5% of the votes.

Then came James Talarico in 2018, a former middle school teacher who was just 28 when he declared his candidacy for the legislature. 

In a shoe-leather campaign, he walked 25 mile walk across the district, filming along the way as he met with constituents, supporters, and local officials, including Republicans.

Talarico capitalized on a spirit of discontent over the political process, as well as strong Democrat enthusiasm for U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, who that year mounted an unusually strong challenge to incumbent Senator Ted Cruz.

O’Rourke lost, but the insurgent campaign helped lift Talarico to a narrow win with 51.7% of about 71,000 votes cast — in a county where just two years before Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton 51.3% to 42%.

Map of Texas House District 52
State House District 52

Talarico swept up strong majorities in his hometown of Round Rock, the district’s largest city and the headquarters of Dell Technologies, helping him overcome Republican majorities in rural areas and in the towns of Hutto and Taylor.

Democratic strategists pointed to Talarico’s 2018 win as evidence that suburban parts of Texas were growing more purple, predicting that they would shift increasingly to the Democrats as they urbanized and attracted more out-of-state migrants.

That theory will be put to the test this November as Talarico squares off against Lucio Valdez, 55, a former Hutto City Council member with a long record of military and police service. 

Valdez’s background and campaign rhetoric are casting into stark relief the candidates’ differences on public safety, amplifying a dynamic playing out on the national stage as well.

If elected, Valdez says that public safety would be his top priority. “I do not support defunding the police,” he told Honest Austin. “I support funding them and giving them every possible asset they need to hopefully prevent having to use deadly force in any aspect of their duties.”

Valdez worked for the Galveston Police Department for 21 years while also serving in the U.S. Army Reserve. “I started with a special unit, I was long-range recon for 19 years — airborne infantry. We worked in small five-man teams and we did reconnaissance for high-impact, high-value targets and reporting back information,” he said. “I’ve trained around the world with several different nations to train and get the information we needed.” 

During his years as a reservist and police officer, Valdez held leadership roles as a police instructor, SWAT team leader, and sergeant major.

Following 9/11, he was called up to active duty and worked for a year at West Point as an infantry tactics instructor before moving to the Pentagon for four years. “I also trained along the Texas-Mexican border as we did counter-narcotics operations and counter-human trafficking operations. I did three of those missions,” Valdez said.

This experience leads him to believe that the U.S. needs a tougher border policy. “Our borders are very weak,” he said, citing the power of drug cartels. “You’re not going to stop crime completely but I feel if we secure our borders we can slow it down a lot.”

Valdez moved to Williamson County in 2008 and won election to the Hutto City Council in 2015, while serving his final active-duty posting at Fort Hood. He served one term, didn’t seek reelection, and was medically discharged from the army in 2017 after nearly 34 years of service.

Talarico ‘Opposes Law Enforcement’

In an interview, Valdez called the movement to defund the police “idiotic,” and he accused his opponent of supporting efforts to slash police funding. As evidence of that, he pointed to a $2,500 donation that Talarico made to the Austin Justice Coalition, a group that calls on its followers to “imagine a world without police.” 

Valdez pictured in 1987

Talarico disclosed the $2,500 donation in a June 3 post on Facebook, in which he also called on others to donate to Austin Justice Coalition and included a link to its website. Valdez commented, “It’s obvious that Rep. Talarico stands on the far left and opposes anything law enforcement does to protect the citizens of Williamson County and the citizens of our district.”

Asked his views on defunding the police, Talarico told Honest Austin, “Our system of policing is deeply broken. We must replace it with something new and something better.” 

“As they have throughout our history, the voices in the street—particularly Black voices—are calling us to imagine a different world. We expect protestors to be nonviolent. But what if we expected our government to be nonviolent? What if we stopped bringing a gun to every emergency?” 

Talarico continued, “What if we called a three-digit number to summon highly-trained crisis interventionists to address a problem in our neighborhood? What if we made rehabilitation, reconciliation, and restoration our operating principles?” 

“We need to invest in community-based solutions that cure the societal ills that we ask the police to treat: poverty, homelessness, substance abuse, mental health disorders… We must empower our communities, not police them. Only then will we have true public safety.”

Rep. Talarico with CM Flannigan

Besides donating to the Austin Justice Coalition, Rep. Talarico also made a $50 personal donation to the reelection campaign of Jimmy Flannigan, an Austin City Council member who helped lead the charge to slash $150 million from the city’s police budget. 

Talarico explained that Flannigan, who chairs the Council’s Public Safety Committee, was “a long-time friend of mine and a selfless public servant,” noting that he supported Flannigan’s positions on transportation, affordable housing, and government transparency.

For his part, Valdez argued that Flannigan and the other members of the Austin City Council have undermined public safety by voting to slash police budgets: “The Austin City Council wants to defund the police, do away with the Mounted Patrol, wants to do away with the Bicycle Patrol, wants to do away with all of these entities within the police department. Those are public safety related items that protect the citizens.” 

The City of Austin’s budget, which passed unanimously on Aug. 13, reportedly included deep cuts to APD’s Mounted Patrol, K-9 unit, and other special units, though details are lacking because the approved budget hasn’t yet been published. “It typically takes the budget office anywhere from 4-6 weeks to check, double check, and triple check everything, get it laid out, and published,” said David Green, the city’s media relations manager, in an email.

Referring to a flurry of last-minute budget amendments passed by the council, Green said, “Obviously, with the substantial amendments made this year, it’ll likely be on the longer end of that timeframe before we have a complete and complied budget published. So, I’d say we’re looking at mid-September at the earliest.”

The delay hasn’t stopped Republican critics from turning the budget cuts into a campaign issue.

Contemporary photo of Lucio Valdez

Valdez commented, “The best item to use during a hostile riot situation are mounted officers, because a horse can move a crowd better than anything. Defunding the police is not the answer to a suspected officer using excessive force, if that was the situation that happened.”

However, Valdez declined to commit to supporting a proposal to cap the revenue of cities that slash police budgets, which top Republican state leaders proposed at a press conference after Austin’s budget cuts. Valdez said he would first need to know more about the idea. 

“As a city councilman, I would not appreciate the governor or anybody getting into our business, but in my opinion if the city council or mayor is not taking action to protect the citizens of that community then I think the governor or someone needs to step in and make it safe for the citizens of that community.” 

Asked about the same issue, Talarico said that he would oppose state-level efforts to restrict local discretion on police funding: “It is not the Governor’s or the State House’s place to regulate city budgetary decisions. No one wants the Legislature to be the City Council of Texas.” 

Addressing Abuses of Power 

Talarico and Valdez differ in how they would address concerns raised by Black Lives Matter protesters over instances of police brutality or excessive use of force. 

Valdez points to the need for continual law enforcement training in the “use of force continuum,” and suggests that the public should reserve judgement on controversial incidents.

“Everybody is armchair quarterbacking as to what happened. Little snippets of the actual videos are being shown on social media or on TV… I’m not saying the officers were right, I’m not saying they were wrong. I’m saying we don’t know — because we weren’t there.”

“There’s this thing called due process, which is not being adhered to, or is being applied with prejudice depending on who you are.”

By contrast, Talarico emphasizes the need for more police accountability and racial justice, and he says leaders need to stand with the victims of police abuses. He has been particularly critical of the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office, which faces allegations of aggressively pursuing suspects for the benefit of camera crews filming for the television show Live PD

Javier Ambler

Talarico has called for the resignation of Williamson County Sheriff Robert Chody after the death of Javier Ambler, whom Talarico says was “murdered” by sheriff’s deputies. Ambler, who had a heart condition, died after being tased repeatedly by deputies. They were seeking to arrest him for a minor traffic infraction, and for refusing to pull over during a 22-minute low-speed chase.

Talarico recently participated in a “justice caravan” led by family and friends of Ambler.

Asked about protesters’ concerns over incidents of police violence, Talarico commented, “I share the concerns raised by protestors over incidents of police violence, both as a legislator and as a member of my community. In our own backyard, Javier Ambler was brutally murdered by police while it was filmed for a reality TV show and then covered up.”

The officers who were arresting Ambler do not face any charges, though that could change once a newly elected district attorney, José Garza, takes office in January.

Talarico told Honest Austin that the Williamson County incident isn’t just about police violence but also about government transparency, noting the appearance of a coverup. “The Ambler family was forced to wait an excruciating 15 months before learning the cruel circumstances behind Javier’s death,” he said. “No family should ever experience this immense tragedy and secrecy, especially at the hands of our state-funded police force.”

Talarico added, “I plan to work with criminal justice reform advocates to develop legislation to hold our police forces accountable and ensure greater transparency in law enforcement…including ending qualified immunity, restricting the use of force, and requiring bystander intervention by officers in instances of excessive force.”

In the meantime, Talarico’s opponent has sought to link him to the more violent elements of the recent protest movement, known as antifa. On a recent video forum hosted by the Austin American-Stateman, Valdez pressed Talarico to condemn violence by antifa protesters. Talarico responded, “I am against any organization that promotes violence, whether it is antifa, or whether it is our local sheriff’s department.”

Support for School Funding 

After public safety, Valdez says his second priority if elected would be education, including shoring up the teacher’s retirement system and making health insurance less expensive for retired teachers.

Rep. Talarico backed school finance reform.

“Education is important. My dad was drafted out of the 8th grade, back in 1943. And my mom was blind,” said Valdez, who grew up in El Campo, a town southwest of Houston near the coast. “So my parents didn’t have the education or the ability to sit down with my brothers and sisters and help us with our homework.” 

Despite these challenges, Valdez says he came to prize education and he earned educational and professional credentials through hard work and study. He married a schoolteacher, Bridget, who taught elementary school at Hutto ISD. 

He notes that he is a supporter of education broadly, not just public schools, though he told Honest Austin that he likely would have voted for House Bill 3 (HB 3), the 2019 school finance bill that boosted funding for teachers and public schools throughout the state. 

That would be an area of common ground between Valdez and his opponent, Rep. Talarico, who sits on the House Public Education Committee, and who supported HB 3.

Talarico Holds Fundraising Advantage

Valdez raised $13,671 in the first half of the year, according to a July 15 filing with the Texas Ethics Commission. That’s on top of $7,185 that he raised last year for the Republican primary race, for a total haul of $20,856.

During the same period, Talarico raised nearly $230,000. After taking into account expenses, Valdez had $6,902 in cash at the end of the reporting period on June 30, compared to Talarico’s $130,712.

Talarico’s top donors include: Texas House Majority PAC ($30,000), Texas Trial Lawyers Association PAC ($1,000), Texas Association of Realtors PAC ($2,500), Public Blueprint LLC ($1,000), Adam Loewy ($3,201), Elizabeth Nelson ($1,500), Eileen Lawrence ($1,500), Leadership for Educational Equity-Texas ($1,000), K&L Gates LLP Committee for Good Government ($1,000), House Democratic Campaign Committee ($10,000), End Citizens United ($1,000), Lynne Dobson ($2,581), Chris Turner Campaign ($1,500), Lindsay Billingsley ($2,033), Catharine Bellinger ($1,000), and Andrew Allison ($3,000).

Asked about Talarico’s funding advantage, Valdez conceded that he was the underdog in the race, given Talarico’s incumbency. But he added, “I don’t get into a fight that I don’t plan on winning.”