Julie Dahlberg is a U.S. Army veteran and former nonprofit director who owns a glass company in La Vernia. She served as a Republican precinct chair and as a delegate to the Republican Party of Texas’ state convention. She’s seeking the GOP nomination to take on state Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Lardeo) in 2026.
Hear from the candidate
1. Please tell voters about yourself.
I am a Christian conservative, U.S. Army veteran, and a nonprofit professional by trade – former executive director of a San Antonio sober living nonprofit, corporate administrator for a large janitorial services company and served in various program and development director roles in charities serving the homeless, disabled, military and veterans. I also have served on the boards of several organizations and founded a charitable ministry in 2024.
I am 54 years old, graduated from high school in Florida, with a focus on business administration, then attended Columbia College at Ft. Leonard Wood while in the military, and further college studies in criminal justice and business administration.
A Texan for 35 years, I have lived in La Vernia for 13 years with my husband Shane, have four adult children and two grandchildren. We own MYCO Glass & Mirror, a local glass company.
2. Briefly describe your top policy priorities.
The top policy priorities of mine, and what I hear most from citizens in our district, are the need for safer communities, credible financial stewardship by eliminating waste, fraud and misuse of our tax dollars, water security, eliminating property taxes, protecting our children, election integrity, education reform and student outcomes. We are all exhausted from reports of the fraud, embezzlement, lack of transparency and accountability in our state agencies, barriers to public information access, wasteful spending and high taxes.
We want to have confidence that our money is spent frugally, that our vote and advocacy actually make a difference and that we will have water, community safety and the ability to afford the American Dream for our families and our children and grandchildren. We can all agree that these critical issues need a cure, but most feel they are helpless to solve them with our government as it stands, both at the state and federal level.
My additional priorities are citizen-led oversight of our government agencies, imposing term limits for all elected positions, equal protection of children in the womb, preserving our liberties, specifically second amendment and medical freedom, health care reform, and environmental health.
3. What would you like to see the legislature do to make Texas cities better places to live? In what ways could state officials work better with local officials?
Strengthen accountability in the law, where laws are enforced, and criminals are being prosecuted and are removed from communities until or unless they can respect law and order, so that families can freely and safely enjoy their communities. Prohibit taxpayer-funded lobbying, so that county and city leaders communicate directly with their legislators about needs of their community members, not lobbyists who often times advocate for policies not in the community’s best interests, from the perspective of the people. State officials could be a better example of encouraging fiscal restraint instead of excessive spending, and could advocate for willing transparency instead of barriers to public information.
4. Texas has taken major steps to reshape its public education system, including allowing taxpayer dollars to fund private school tuition. What do you believe needs to happen to monitor the success of Education Savings Accounts, and to ensure every student still receives a quality education?
I think it’s very unfortunate that many parents have felt they had no choice but to remove their children from public schools to protect them from inappropriate content and ideology that has been introduced in the last several years, that they cannot tolerate influencing their children. It’s reasonable that these families expect to have public funding follow their students and have advocated accordingly, and legislation has followed toward this end.
I don’t necessarily fully agree with how this legislation has been developed, and I believe further legislative development is necessary. Success is going to be measured by the parents’ satisfaction of their children’s education outcomes, as parents are the decision makers in their children’s education. I will be interested to see the outcomes from both standard public school and other school choices and homeschool, and I believe it will be informative at least on the benefit of classic education versus what I believe is cluttered and distracting aspects of standard public education as it stands now.
5. Reducing the burden of property taxes is expected to be a major focus of the next legislative session. Describe your ideas for balancing the needs of a growing state with state leaders’ desire to rein in that major revenue source?
Eliminating property taxes completely, which I strongly support, will require an ambitious effort on the part of the state legislature, school districts and municipalities to sharply reduce spending and not continuously growing the budget.
I believe when we refocus education needs on the priorities of foundational education necessities, high quality teachers, significant increases in teacher pay, reduction in administration pay and spending, remove ancillary, non-education spending, we can fund public schools just fine by being frugal.
