We are excited about the grassroots. We care about local candidates and local issues. We believe that the most important issues and the places that really matter are the men and women that are running for local offices. Today I’m joined with the city council candidate from Cedar Park, Texas, just north of Austin, Dorian Chavez.


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Jonathan Schober:
Today I’m joined with the City Council candidate from Cedar Park, Texas, just north of Austin, Dorian Chavez. Dorian, welcome to the show.

Dorian Chavez:
Hey Jon, thanks for having me.

Jonathan Schober:
Glad that you’re here. So Dorian, very quickly, let’s just talk, why did you decide to run for City Council?

Dorian Chavez:
So this is my second time. I was actually on Council last year and was voted off and I’m here again. And both times that I ran, it was for similar reasons. I’m not a very public person. I don’t like being in the public eye and I don’t like doing interviews sometimes. Guess it’s just not my thing, but the first time I ran, I was asked to run by some people and I was like, “Absolutely not. Don’t want to do it. It’s not my thing.” I’ve always been very involved in the community, volunteered, ran, I don’t mind managing and running things for the city and doing things, that’s great. I love doing that, doing stuff with the school’s, awesome. Ran the carnival at the local school, not a big thing, but when the Council question came up, I was like, “Eh, not really.”

Jonathan Schober:
Not really. I have other more important, funner things to do with my life.

Dorian Chavez:
Yeah. And actually, before I ran the first time, somebody put that bug in my ear and I was like, “Well, I don’t even know what council is. I don’t know what they do.” So I actually went a year or two before I ran the first time, I went to a couple of Council meetings and sat in and I was like, “Wow, this is really boring.” And also I just didn’t like the fact that you’re sitting up here and you’re talking to that… It just this wasn’t my thing. I went to two or three and I was like, “I’m not doing it.” But I was always very involved in news and what’s going on in the world and how badly things were going. And I was always pressuring people, tell them, “Well you can’t just sit here and complain about it. You got to do something, get involved, do whatever.”

So anyways, this was thrown on my plate and I was like, “Nope, don’t want to do it.” But then I found out what that candidate at the time was running for. They wanted to support abortion clinics in the city and they weren’t calling them abortion clinics. They were calling them what, all women-

Jonathan Schober:
Yeah. Women’s health. It’s amazing. The only women’s health the left cares about is the killing of unborn when women and men.

Dorian Chavez:
Right. So they were pushing that. And it was a whole group of them. They called themselves the Hashtag Better Together group. And they were this slate of candidates and two existing Council women that were on the Council [inaudible 00:03:57]. And so they were for the sanctuary cities, they were for the abortion clinics. They were for bringing the homeless into Cedar Park. And I was just sitting there like, “We can’t let happen.” And the thing was is that that candidate was going to be running unopposed. So we were just going to give it to them. So I told my person, I was like, they had some other people to interview. And I told them, “Look, if you can’t find somebody, I will do it.”

Jonathan Schober:
Yeah.

Dorian Chavez:
But I tell you, I know nothing about politics. You hear things about people being controlled and muzzled and all that. I’m like, “If I get in, I’m going to do what I want to do, what I think is right.” And they’re like, “That’s fine. That’s fine. You can do that.” And then long story short, I got thrown in and I ran and I won.

Jonathan Schober:
Awesome.

Dorian Chavez:
And the second time around, similar story. I got off Council and I was like, “All right, I did what I could.” I wasn’t butt hurt because I lost. I was out funded seven to one and I was like, “Well they ran a better campaign than me.” And then other things, I could talk about the rest later. So that happened, whatever. This second time comes around and the same thing’s happening. We have three very radical opponents to us three that are running now, the three conservatives that were running and they were part of these radical groups, like Indivisible. And now they’re going by different name because they’ve gotten such negative publicity. Two of them are Democrat Socialists of America, and the other one is still a part of this radical group. And I was just like, again, this is happening again. They’re running unopposed. And so I didn’t know if you knew this, but my wife and I actually are running now.

Jonathan Schober:
I saw that and I do apologize because I did see the two last names and I didn’t want to make an assumption. So what’s it like running with your wife?

Dorian Chavez:
It’s good. Her and I are very equally yoked, I guess you could say. So I don’t think you’ll see too much bickering on the dais if we get on. I don’t know, there might be a couple-

Jonathan Schober:
Do we need some marriage counseling after each City Council meeting? Is that what we need?

Dorian Chavez:
Yeah. I think we’ll be good. Some people joked around about that, but we are pretty like-minded, so we’re yoked. So either way. We waited till the last day, in the last hour to file. Because we were hoping somebody else was going to come and we could support them and we can help campaign with them, whatever. But that didn’t happen. So myself and my wife and the gentlemen, Colin Klein, he’s the other candidate, we all spoke and he had already filed a day or two before us. He was set that he was going to run, which is great. He’s really good guy. But we waited until the last day because we were hoping somebody would show up, but they didn’t, so similar to the first time I ran.

Jonathan Schober:
So now that you’re campaigning and you’re going out and you’re knocking on doors, what are the issues that really matter to people? What questions are they asking you about?

Dorian Chavez:
I’ve talked about this to other people. There’s four main things that always come up. It’s typically property taxes, it’s traffic, and then things that are not totally in our purview, but we are related, is the pornography that’s going on, that’s getting pushed in the local schools, and the homeless issue.

Jonathan Schober:
Hold on just a second, because I think people that are outside of Austin, outside of this area, I don’t know if they realize what’s happening in Austin and it’s like a cancer because it’s growing to Pflugerville and Lander and to your city, Cedar Park. Why don’t you describe what has happened since Austin started to defund the police and open camping? What does that actually mean and look like on the streets of Cedar Park?

Dorian Chavez:
Right now we’re still somewhat safe in Cedar Park because we don’t allow the public camping and all that stuff. Although we are seeing stuff at some of the local markets, you got people out there performing. They’re doing street performing and they’re asking for money and it’s some stuff you’ve just never seen in Cedar Park, but what happened lately that’s really gotten people riled up is that Austin under the cover of darkness, went to try and buy this hotel that’s right on our border. And they’re going to turn it into this homeless hotel I guess he said. They spent like nine and a half million dollars to house 80 people. And so I’ve been involved in supporting that the hotel owner that lives next to that, because they’re ruining the area and the other businesses.

So that homeless question came up to some of the Council members on a recent Town Hall. And some of them took the cowardly way out and they just don’t want to address it. They’d just like, “Well, it’s Austin business. I don’t want to get involved. It doesn’t concern Cedar Park.” But it very much concerns Cedar Park. And now I even know even more now that it concerns us, because our citizens are concerned. It comes up almost every door I hit and I have a conversation with somebody. They’re asking me specifically, “What do you think about the homeless hotel on our border?” And I’m totally against it. We all have compassion for the homeless. We all want to help them out. But what Austin is doing, and a lot of these other blue cities that are doing is that they’re enabling the problem. They’re giving them freebies. They’re giving them a place to live. They’re not really showing them how to fish. They’re not teaching them how to fish, they’re just giving them a fish.

Jonathan Schober:
They’re not helping. They’re enabling. I’ll just say it, it’s cruel what the Austin City Council and these guys are doing, because they’re allowing people to live in these conditions and they’re not creating an environment where they actually get the help they need.

Dorian Chavez:
That’s right. And people are very concerned about that, because like I said, it comes up quite often.

Jonathan Schober:
Tell us a little bit about election dates. When does early voting start? When’s the actual election day? And I know this was going to be specific to Cedar Park, but the municipal elections are all tied into these calendars. So even if you’re not in Cedar Park, you need to be paying attention to these dates. What are the dates?

Dorian Chavez:
So April 19th through the 27th is early election and May 1st is election day.

Jonathan Schober:
Excellent.

Dorian Chavez:
Just to touch on something. We’ve been pushing a lot of people to go to the May 1st Election Day voting. And that’s just advice from different attorneys dealing with this election lawsuit here in the County. They’re just saying let’s try and push everybody to Election Day because it gives any bad players less of an opportunity to manipulate anything with the votes sitting around there for a week in the early voting.

Jonathan Schober:
What a concept, have an Election Day. That’s crazy talk. How can you imagine such terrible talk?

Dorian Chavez:
Very radical.

Jonathan Schober:
Radicals. No, it’s great advice. If you can show up on Election Day, May 1st. Well, hey, we’re going to take a break, but when we come back, I want to ask you, what is it that keeps you up at night?

You’re listening to The Elephant Herd. We’ll be right back.

Pastor Vic:
Promises, God’s promises. He makes them and he keeps them. John 15:16 is our promise today. Here’s what Jesus said. You’ve not chosen me. I’ve chosen you and ordained you that you should go and bring forth fruit and that your fruit should remain, that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you. Wow. What a tremendous promise. You’re chosen, not just that you chose him, he chose you. And not only that, he’s ordained you that would be very, very, very fruitful. And in so doing, then you can ask the Father anything, and he does it for you. John 15:16, what a winner. Remember, God keeps his promises.

From the Capitol of the Lone Star State. Welcome back to The Elephant Herd.

Jonathan Schober:
We’ve been talking with City Council candidate, Dorian Chavez in Cedar Park, Texas. Dorian, thanks again for being on the show. What I want to know is what is it that keeps you up at night?

Dorian Chavez:
So overall, I’ll tell you, I sleep pretty good at night, but I’m going to break this up into two things, my personal life and maybe what’s going on now with campaigning. So personal life, I’m trying to figure out when I’m going to plant my organic vegetable garden, because campaigning has kept me so busy. I just haven’t been able to focus on my garden. That’s a big thing. I love doing that on the side.

Jonathan Schober:
Love it.

Dorian Chavez:
Yeah. For something more related to what we’re talking about now, it’s really just, are the people going to take a stand? Are they going to get involved? Because the only way we’re going to win here is if people just stop fearing so much and they start standing. They need to take a stand. They need to take action. They need to get involved, whether it’s your local politics or with your schools or your churches. That’s probably one of the things I think about quite often as well.

Jonathan Schober:
I think that’s so true. And going back to your interview, you talked about when you started to think about running for City Council, you were showing up at the meetings, you get involved. And I just want to land on that. Maybe you have not been actively engaged in politics, but because of what you’ve seen in the last several years, you recognize that the only thing that’s needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. So if you’re one of those good men, you need to do something. If you’re one of those good women, you need to do something. And maybe it just starts by looking at every single candidate in your local races, your City Council races, your independent school district races. Those are coming up in the next couple of weeks. Maybe your do something is to do your due diligence and make sure that you go to the polls and make sure that you bring at least three people with you to the polls.

Dorian Chavez:
May I throw my website out there because-[.

Jonathan Schober:
Absolutely.

Dorian Chavez:
It’s www.dorianchavez.com. Again, please support any way you can, whether it’s contributions or volunteering. We need all the help, exposure, share my website, do whatever you can, but get involved please.

Jonathan Schober:
Absolutely. Dorianchavez.com

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