2025 Kyle mayor race: Who are the candidates?

KYLE, Texas - Four people are running to be the next mayor of Kyle. 

This comes after Kyle’s longest-serving mayor announced his resignation about three months ago.

Who are the candidates for Kyle mayor?

What we know:

Kyle, Texas, started as a small railroad town and is developing into a thriving, growing community with heritage and a sense of charm.

The candidates are:

• Robert Rizo, the current District 2 City Council Member
• Donny Wills, retired military, and currently a general contractor
• Yvonne Flores-Cale, a paralegal and previously the District 2 City Council representative
• Andrea Villescaz, nurse and mother of 6

Villescaz did not respond to multiple attempts to schedule an interview, so her answers to the following questions are not included.

Why you should care:

Election day is November 4. 

To find your polling location, click here.

Interviews with the candidates

What they're saying:

Thoughts on Kyle, Texas?

Rizo: "When you come into Kyle, you feel welcome. And I am hoping we can bottle that up and preserve it and continue that for the next generation of families."

Wills: "It's because of the people here that give that sense of family, to get that sense of feeling in the small town."

Flores-Cale: "It was a simple, just a simple place, and then as it started to develop, I was like that doesn't make sense. I mean I'm not a city engineer or a city manager, but I can look at things as a resident and be like I don't really like that."

Dig deeper:

Rizo said he wants to preserve greenspaces and revitalize the downtown area.

"I feel like it's dying, I feel it's being boarded up," Rizo said. "We're hoping to expand it and bring in some really good retail, creating these incubators that can probably help nurture small business, some mom-and-pop businesses into the city."

Wills said he wants the city to have better communication with residents.

"It comes down to educating everybody on why things need to happen and, with that there, it won't be so much of, in my mind, it won't be so much like this big, giant controversial thing when more people understand what's going on and why, and they have input into it, that their input and their opinions were helped influence the decision of how this town is going to go."

Flores-Cale said she wants to build trust with residents so they don’t have to spend money on unnecessary things.

"Just because a city does something, doesn’t mean that it’s legal," Flores-Cale said.

The candidates FOX 7 spoke to have similar priorities, infrastructure and water supply.

Kyle is facing challenges because of persistent drought and rapid population growth. The city has been buying water rights from San Marcos for years to try to keep up with the demand.

The candidates have different solutions to this problem.

"We can control how our water is used. Commercial uses a lot of water. Some of these big water features around here that they've implemented use a lot of water. We can kind of dial those things back so that we don't have residents that have to essentially ration out their water or worry about their water bill going astronomically high," Wills said.

"We're looking at aquifer storage as something that we're exploring right now, making sure if we're getting 2.4 million gallons of water a day, that we are not losing that water. We're storing it for the hot summer months," Rizo said. "There's a desal plant that the Port Authority of Corpus Christi is working on, the Port Authority out there, not Corpus Christi, and if that comes online, they're going to run a line to San Antonio and probably out towards Kyle, Texas as well."

"With our city's budget, and we don't want to price people out, we need to look for a different source other than desalinization because it got up to 1.2 billion for a town that sits next to an ocean and I can't even imagine what it would cost to pipe water here from probably Corpus Christi which is the closest ocean to us," Flores-Cale said. "I would like to advocate with the state. Assist these smaller cities in figuring out ways to get us water."

How do you plan to work with other council members to make sure that constituents' voices are heard and things are getting done?

What they're saying:

Rizo: "I'm always out volunteering and helping. That helps me reach out to people, meet them at their level, and get their feedback. It's important for me to make sure that I'm talking to people, especially as I'm walking the block right now, addressing their concerns. It's really important. But I believe that a good leader lifts their fellow council members, allows them to speak, allows everybody to have an opinion and move together as a council."

Wills: "I want to be tried as a mayor. I want to try to be as open and approachable as possible. I want do more like informal meet and greets throughout the end of my tenure and sit there and just listen to citizens and have them bring me the things, and we can work with a solution together on finding these problems. I want to do a better social media where there's more information being pushed out to the citizens."

Flores-Cale: "I don't think I'm going to have a hard time discussing with the residence their needs and their wants. I mean, there's a lot of people, and you can't give everybody what they want, but I think finding a consensus is going to be important. As far as the council goes, it's hard to say. You know, we have four seats up this election, and so I don't know what that's going to look like. I think historically I've been able to work with council members, you know, being able to listen."

Why should someone vote for you?

What they're saying:

Rizo: "I care about the city of Kyle. I was born and raised here and every decision I make on the dais is always going to be one that I have to live with the rest of my life because I'm not going anywhere, and I hope to earn your vote on November 4th."

Wills: "I'm not a politician. I'm a businessman. I look at something that has an issue and I need to solve it. I can't be bought. I don't play the political left and right games of Democrat versus Republican and red versus blue. I don't play those games. I don’t have anyone with puppet strings over the top of me telling me how to make my decisions. There's 60,000 people here to help me make my decision. Those are who I'm going to listen to."

Flores-Cale: "Maybe some people like the growth, maybe some like the traffic, maybe some like having high bills. I can't say for sure. So I always say, if you want to know why you should for me, we need to have a conversation. I think the most important thing for me about this election is for people not to be divided. Political parties, political advances, self-interest. I really want this election to be about people doing their homework, figuring out where people stand, where they have stood."

KyleTexas PoliticsElection