In the general election on November 3, 2026, voters in the greater Katy area will have the opportunity to choose their representative for Texas House of Representatives District 132. Incumbent Mike Schofield (Republican) is facing newcomer Sara McGee (Democrat) in the race for the office. Earlier this spring, The Katy Times provided a questionnaire to both candidates, allowing several weeks for their responses, which are shown below. As the incumbent, Schofield will give his responses to each question first.

*Briefly describe your background and your qualifications to represent the greater Katy area in the Texas house.

SCHOFIELD: Prior to running for the House, I worked directly with the legislature for six sessions for then-Governor Rick Perry. I saw first-hand that we need legislators who are more interested in finding solutions for problems in our growing state than in making noise on social media. As a result of my experience, I have a thorough understanding of how Texas government really works. In my five terms representing our area in the House I have learned how to put that knowledge to work to serve our community. For example, I wrote the law that stops Harris County from cutting off our neighborhoods’ police patrol contracts with the sheriff and constable. Too often, government acts as if it is more entitled to your money than you are, and knows how you should live better than you do. I know that you don’t exist to serve the government, your government exists to serve you. To that end, I wrote the constitutional amendment to ensure that you won’t ever have to pay a Texas income tax, and have worked diligently to cap the amount local governments can raise your property taxes.

MCGEE: I was born in Texas and have lived in this district since I was 3 years old. I grew up here, went to Katy ISD schools, raised my children here, and built my career here. I have spent the last 22 years in healthcare, and I currently serve as the Director of Radiology at a hospital in the Houston area. This brings a particularly strong knowledge base around healthcare policy, how it has shaped out current healthcare landscape, and how that landscape can be improved. I have spent several years focused on the intrusion of school vouchers into the state and how their proliferation will be incredibly detrimental for public education systems in Katy and throughout the state. Since announcing my campaign 18 months ago, I have had the opportunity to meet with current legislators and industry experts around everything from energy and public safety planning to expanding access to sidewalks and parks.

*What are your plans for your first 100 days in office and what top priority bills do you plan to introduce?

SCHOFIELD: I will continue to fight to protect our neighborhoods (and your ability to afford to continue to live here) by filing bills to lower our property taxes, protect us from crime by requiring that violent criminals remain in jail, and to ensure that data centers don’t harm our quality of life by requiring them to be built far away from residential areas, mandating that they build their own plants to provide all the electricity they need and limit the amount of water they can use, so they don’t use so much water that

they hurt the ability of the rest of us to have the water we need or cause our water bills to rise. This can include requiring them to create their own desalination capability or to convert to air cooling rather than water as that technology develops.

MCGEE: House District 132 is a swing district. If given the opportunity to serve, my very first move would be to reach out to the voters for whom I was not their first choice. It is important to me that the citizens of Katy and Cypress know that, while I am a Democrat, I do not plan to govern strictly along party lines if there is something that does or does not make sense for our district. Top priority bills in the legislature will be focused on public education funding, true property tax relief and reform so homeowners are no longer facing an oversized burden for local services, and calling to access federal dollars for the expansion of affordable healthcare in our communities. I have also earmarked bills filed in previous sessions that focus on safety and protection for victims and survivors of domestic violence.

*Describe how you will support adequate education funding for Texas public schools.

SCHOFIELD: In Texas, as in most states, the amount of funding a school district receives is based on the number of students the district educates. The current legislature provided an additional $8.5 billion to Texas schools, including $4.2 billion for pay raises for teachers and support staff. Over the coming decade, the biggest challenge for school budgets is going to be the steep decline in birth rates. Fewer births leads directly to fewer students in the schools, which leads to fewer dollars of funding. The school districts in HD 132 won’t see a decline for quite a few years (in fact, Katy and Waller will continue to grow as more people move here), but other districts like the Houston and Austin ISDs have already experienced large enrollment drops. While those districts learn to administer their funds more efficiently as they educate fewer students, Katy, Waller, and Cy-Fair ISDs are likely to continue to receive funding similar to what they have been used to for the foreseeable future.

MCGEE: When people hear “increased funding,” they tend to hear “increased taxes.” But Texas is not broke -- our resources are being purposely mismanaged. We ended the last session with a $24 billion budget surplus, and we are currently sitting on a $30 billion “rainy day” fund. It is important that voters understand that adequately supporting public education does not have to come at the expense of middle-class taxpayers who are already squeezed to the brink. To start, we have to immediately end the voucher program and pass a Texas Constitutional Amendment forbidding the use of public tax dollars for services that operate for profit. If alternate educational institutions wish to operate in Texas and offer students opportunities outside of traditional public schooling, that should be permitted, but it needs to be clear that to access public tax dollars, these will be non-profit institutions. Next, we have to bring our teacher salaries up to 10% above the national average. Third, with healthcare costs rising to the point where they have all but erased the most recent teacher raises, it is time to allow educators, both current and retired, to access the same healthcare plan as other State of Texas employees. Fourth, supporting ALL educational staff should also be important. It is time to examine the salaries of paraprofessionals, librarians, bus drivers and all other educational support staff positions. And lastly, immediately end unfunded mandates. If the Texas Legislature passes a bill that increases costs to local districts, the state needs to attached funding to that bill. This has been a backdoor method of kneecapping our ISDs for years. It needs to stop.

*Describe how you will hold TxDOT accountable for timely completion of badly-needed mobility initiatives (such as the overdue completion of FM 1463) and how you will help TxDOT secure funding for other projects important to the Katy area, such as the widening of FM 529.

SCHOFIELD: I have already been working to secure funding for FM 529, which is still in the planning stages and won’t actually be funded until it is ready to be built, which likely will be in at least two to three years. In the meantime, I have been working with our local elected officials to ensure that turn lanes and other traffic alleviation is provided near Freeman High School, which now has many times more traffic than before the schools opened. While FM 1463 is not in the district I represent, I have expressed to TxDOT’s district engineer that it is imperative that FM 1463 finally be finished before the I-10 widening project begins, or the traffic in the area will be even more of a mess than it has been during the FM 1463 construction. That is unacceptable.

MCGEE: I would request that TxDOT provide regular written updates covering progress, timelines, and any delays. Prior to starting a project, and periodically throughout the process, TxDOT officials should be expected to hold public town halls to provide updates and allow residents to ask questions. Dashboards should be made publicly available so residents can track progress and receive updates in real time. For future project funding, I have decades of experience making the case for an allotment of limited funding to meet the needs of my department. The same would apply here. This district needs a representative who has the foresight to monitor and predict current and future population growth and needs and to use this data to make the case for why our projects should be funded. Fact and need based competitive bidding is something that I am particularly skilled at.

*Describe your strategy for strengthening the electricity grid in the state, with special attention to the development of data centers and potential location of battery energy storage systems in the Katy area, such as the Ochoa project.

SCHOFIELD: While it is important for the United States to have an adequate supply of data centers to avoid relying on China and Russia for storage of our private information, it is vital that the construction and operation of data centers not be allowed to infringe on our neighborhoods or to monopolize our water and power, which would drive up Texans’ electric bills and exhaust our water supply. Local governments must be given the authority to prevent the location of gigantic, noisy data centers near residential neighborhoods. The Texas legislature also must pass a law requiring data centers to produce their own electricity so they don’t impact the grid, and to limit the amount of water they can use in cooling the plant. Similarly, any battery facilities that involve heavy metals must be sited away from homes and schools, to avoid contamination from the heavy metals. If we elect thoughtful legislators, we can balance our need for high-tech industry with intelligent controls over where they are built and how they function.

MCGEE: Weatherization, diversification and accountability. We can no longer pretend that Texas is not an extreme weather state and shrug our shoulders when the power fails. Electric providers in this state absolutely must be held to higher performance standards; for instance, by using a percentage of up/downtime measurement, and face large penalties when those standards are not met. Secondly, we have to continue to diversify our energy portfolio. We can no longer have the attitude that all

renewables are bad renewables or all fossil fuels are bad fossil fuels. Deploy oil and natural gas where it makes sense, wind and solar when it makes sense, and continue to look into other energy resources such as nuclear to support continued growth. Lastly, We should evaluate all data center and battery storage projects for a thorough review. It is unclear whether or not the current Texas government was fully aware of the incredible drain on natural resources that data centers bring. I believe these concerns were potentially overlooked in a haphazard effort to win some sort of tech war at the expense of our state. What has become clear in a relatively short amount of time is the incredible amounts of power and water required to run these data centers, and thus far, there have been no public protection measures put in place. As the electric companies scramble to build out their infrastructure to bring on these massive energy draining facilities, they have proceeded to immediately pass the cost onto consumers to pay for the upgrades, which is why we have seen our electric bills rise, and also why they are scrambling to implement alternatives - such as the Ochoa project – not to support a growing population, but a growing technology need. To be clear, we do not NEED data centers in Texas. They need US. They drain everything around them and offer little to no employment opportunities. They are a net negative to our state. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have the expansive land in Texas to accommodate them, but not without protections. Want to build a data center? Great. Find land that is a regulated distance away from existing communities. Build your own power supply and a desalination plant to support your water needs. Have a net positive or, at the very least, neutral effect on our existing population and then we can talk.

*What else should readers of the Katy Times know about you, your candidacy and your plans for District 132?

SCHOFIELD: As your representative in the legislature, I am keenly aware every day that I serve as the only voice we have in the Texas House of Representatives. Although the 200,000 of us who live in House District 132 can’t agree on every issue, we can agree that we need a government that prioritizes our public safety and provides the necessary infrastructure, then gets out of the way and lets Texans built the future each of us envisions for our families. I am committed to continuing to work to ensure that your state government knows that it exists to serve you, and not the other way around.

MCGEE: I am not a politician, I am your neighbor. I am 45 years old and never in a million years did I expect to run for office. If elected, this is the only office that I ever plan to seek. I am here asking for your vote because the current representative who holds this office has long given up on even attempting to be accountable to the constituents he is elected to serve. I want to change that. I want to be an involved, responsive and be a truly representative voice in Austin for our community. I plan to hold quarterly town halls, always return emails and phone calls, and send out community surveys ahead of votes on large issues so I can ensure that our community and our needs are being accurately represented. I cannot promise that we will agree on everything, but I promise I will always listen, learn, and respond to our evolving needs in this district.