Someone in our church that is going to be running
for a state house uh position.
So not a federal, uh not uh Congress in a
federal government, but here uh in Texas, and they want
they're running for a state house Texas seat that will
be our area.
And so I wanted to bring him up here and
talk about it.
But before you come up, um just so you know,
their household has a Democrat and a Republican in it,
and they still really love each other.
They don't always agree, you know.
But uh what I want I wanted to bring Dale
up.
So, Dale Frey, why don't you come up with everybody?
Let's give him a hand.
I wanted Dale to be able to come up to
be able to kind of talk to us about uh
this question, you know, how do we how much is
too much?
How do we get involved?
What do we do?
How do we balance some of this stuff?
And Dale is we've gotten to know each other, so
he's running as a Democrat for for the position.
And uh I wanted him to talk to you about
how this happened for him, because it's not his first
career choice.
Uh and so why don't you give us your story
a little bit and tell us uh what's going on?
So welcome.
Sure, sure.
Uh so hi, uh my name's Dale Frey.
I'm running sorry.
Just want to make sure you can hear me.
They gotcha.
All right.
Uh yeah, so I'm running for the Texas State House
of Representatives for HD here a little bit.
106, which is basically this area here and also northeast
Denton County.
And uh there's a lot of reasons I'm running for
office, but probably one of them that's more personal to
me is uh our healthcare system.
So uh I did that 23ME exam, that blood exam
thing out of curiosity.
I never thought that thing would come back and tell
me that I'm genetically unable to get Alzheimer's when I
get older.
That was a huge shock to me.
I eventually figured out it runs on both sides of
my family.
And I find this out right around the same time
that I meet a woman named Kenneth Kenneth owns her
own LLC.
She is a healthcare provider, particularly for assisted living, so
she takes care of people with Alzheimer's and dementia and
things like that.
And she's ranting to me the other day.
She says, Dale, I'm about to go out of business
unless I drop my Medicaid recipi.ents because Medicaid is not
the rates for Medicaid has not been adjusted since long
before the pandemic and inflation
It's just killing the sector.
So this is something that just it really irks me
a lot, especially that we live in Texas.
It's one of the few states in the country that
has not opted into the Medicaid expansion program.
For those of you who don't know, the Medicaid expansion
program is something that we pay money into from our
federal taxes, and only certain states gets that money back,
and it's not us.
So we are spending money and paying for medical programs
in California and in New Jersey, but not back here.
So I mean, I it is insane to think that
we're not opted into this, and I believe that we
absolutely should.
Now this is something that really affects people's families.
I've seen it firsthand.
My father in law, Leander's dad, when he was battling
cancer in his later years, I mean, it was real
hard to put him through all those treatments and pay
for it given the very little money that comes out
of Medicaid alone without Medicaid expansion.
And it's also that he made such little money as
a retired school teacher because school teachers do not make
enough money here in Texas.
They are not supported the way that they should be.
And especially in retirement, they just do not make Jack
Squad.
I've seen it, man.
It's real bad.
So I believe that we need better leadership in uh
Austin to support our medical programs and our school teachers.
And that's sort of those are things that are personal
to me.
And Dale, what's cool is as God's burdened you
with this, he's shown you this is a way for
you to be able to walk and work that out.
And you know, so we need people who are passionate
about Christ in our system, in the system, and fighting
for things.
The thing is, how many of you knew that about
our tax dollars with that leads to my next
question for Dale is how do we find out about
this information about stuff that's going on, especially here locally?
Oh, yeah.
So if you want to learn about things locally, uh,
here's what I do.
Um, Fox News and CNN, those are both national level
stuff, and they're also very, very partisan.
Uh local news tends to not be so partisan.
So what I really like is I believe it's called
K V U E.
Let me make sure I get I sometimes slip up
those acronyms.
K V U E.
If you look that up on YouTube, uh they are
a local news station to Austin, Texas.
So you will see local Austin news stories in there,
but they also cover the Capitol pretty well.
They will tell you about the general ongoings that's happening
in the Austin uh legislature.
Another one is uh the Texas Tribune.
I like Texas uh the Texas Tribune a lot because
they're a nonprofit organization.
Um they're they're really well-rounded.
Uh I know that some people consider them to actually
be a stepping stone to NPR, because they had quite
a few people uh leave the Texas Tribune to work
for uh NPR, the National Public Radio in Washington, DC.
And uh aside from that, I mean I I also
probably I don't know how many of you guys use
Reddit, but there is uh a subreddit called Texas Politics.
And uh what I like about Reddit is that uh
it's basically a collection of news articles where people get
to vote upon which article they think people should be
looking at more.
So the problem with Reddit sometimes is like you're not
always gonna see the latest stuff immediately because people need
to vote for a news article to be pushed up
in the feed.
But I like that because it's not based on some
algorithm, it's based upon the community voting for what they
believe is the most important.
So those are those are three things that I follow
for local politics here.
Another thing you can do is take Dale out to
lunch and ask him because he'll let you know stuff.
Honestly, that's it.
Because there's a lot of things that if we understood
what was happening, we'd be fired up about it and
want to do something.
But it's difficult.
And part of the responsibility, I believe, for us as
living in this country where so many, like we celebrate
Veterans Day.
Uh and we have this system because people have paid
a price so that we can be involved in it.
And when we don't know what's happening and we aren't
engaging, I feel like we're not living up to the
responsibility that we have as a citizen.
Not our rights.
Most of us like to claim our rights, not our
responsibilities.
And uh, you know, uh many of you know that
I was on the Republican side when I was in
politics when I was younger, and so there's probably things
that you and I would disagree with, but uh I
so appreciate those who have a passion uh and are
following Christ uh because it will allow the rest of
the body to be able to know and understand what's
going on.
So another thing that you can always do is please
talk to Dale, and I know that that he would
be happy to be able to do stuff.
And so as we're going through this, um, well, I'll
get to that in a second.
So the last question is so when we find out
something like this with our taxes, what can we do
really to make a difference?
What are our options?
Sure, sure.
So there's there's several things you can do if you
want to get involved in your local communities.
Um, if you want to get involved with your local
communities, there are several clubs uh where you can meet
like uh like minded people.
For example, uh there's the Denton County Democratic Party, and
there's also the Denton County Republican Party, and they basically
have events where you can go meet them.
And typically at those events, sometimes you'll find uh candidates
or state house representatives uh there as well, where you
can actually sometimes meet your local representative.
Um, usually not so much during the regular session, because
they're all gonna be in Austin, but around this time
here, as soon as this special session ends, then you'll
typically see them around.
I know for the Frisco Democratic Club, for example, I
need to make a point to always show up to
those because I'm a candidate and I need to make
sure that people can meet me and talk to with
me.
Um another thing, too, if if uh if you're willing
to, uh you can always become something called a precinct
chair.
So I've been a precinct chair for about a year
now.
And you the both the RNC and the DNC, obviously,
those are the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National
Committee, those are obviously countrywide entities, but they also do
have their own state-level entities and they also have their
own county-level entities.
And those county-level entities will allow you to become part
of the RNC or the DNC if you want to.
All you gotta do is sign up, it's completely free.
Uh they will give you access to something called the
van system, that's the voter action network.
And what that is is a system where you can
uh look up people's voting records, and with that, you
can basically try to figure out all right, which house
do I want to walk up to and knock on
the door for, or who do I want to call
up.
If you just want to make sure that people in
your local neighborhood are getting out to the uh the
polls to vote for, whichever way that you want to
influence them.
Um when I say that, but I don't know if
you know this or not, but your voting record is
public.
Not who you not who you vote for, but whether
or not you voted is public.
And in the primaries in Texas, you can only choose
to vote for either the Republican ballot in the primary
or the Democratic uh ballot in the primary.
And that information is information that you can get from
the party.
And that's usually what we use in order to do
phone banking when we try to call people uh in
your area or people's houses and knock on their doors
and say, hey, make sure that you know this is
an election coming on because a lot of people sometimes
don't know.
For example, if for the uh Collin College Board, we
had a runoff election, and a lot of people don't
even know that runoff elections are even happening because sometimes
they don't happen and sometimes they do.
Depends if there's a runoff.
So those are things you can do if you want
to get involved more locally.
That's what I've been.
I've been a precinct chair for about a year.
And you can also, if you uh if you want
to talk directly to your state house rep, you can.
You can go to house.texas.gov.
you Um
if click on there's at the top bar, there's an
area called members.
And if you click on members, you can find your
local state house rep and directly from their profile page
there, it will give you their email.
You can actually email them through the website.
So if you want to contact your state house rep,
you can do it through there.
Um helps them go through all the emails that they
get because they can get a lot of messages, but
it will be something that is uh being seen by
that representative and or their team.
So uh you said a couple of things that uh
we didn't talk about, but I want to talk about
uh so you heard that the parties track a whole
bunch of information about you just now, right?
So sometimes uh in elections, especially if you're faced with
candidates on both major parties that um you're
not happy with.