Frank Madla

Frank Lloyd Madla, Jr. (January 23, 1937 – November 24, 2006), was for thirty-three years a Democratic member of both the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas State Senate from the south side of San Antonio. Madla died in a house fire in the early morning hours on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day in 2006.

Madla was initially elected to the lower house of the Texas legislature in a San Antonio-based district in 1972. He served for twenty years in the House until he was elected to the District 24, later District 19, state Senate seat, which is geographically large and stretches from San Antonio to as far west as El Paso. (In Texas, state Senate districts are geographically and demographically larger than United States House of Representatives districts.)

In 1985, Texas Monthly, in its biennial feature on the best and worst Texas legislators named Madla to the "Honorable Mention" category, as one of the top twenty legislators for that session.

Among the nearly seven hundred legislative bills which Madla supported that came to fruition was the establishment of the Toyota plant on San Antonio's Far South Side. The first San Antonio-made Toyota Tundra rolled off the assembly line only days before Madla's death. Madla also worked for years to establish a Texas A&M University branch campus, also on the city's South Side. In 2005, the legislature passed a bill that Madla wrote which authorized the creation of the campus. In the special 2006 legislative session dedicated to educational finance matters, Madla persuaded his colleagues to approve $40 million in tuition revenue bonds for the development of the new campus, which was scheduled to be completed in 2009. During the 2005 Legislative session, Madla originally opposed House Joint Resolution 6, which bans same-sex marriage and put Texas's Defense of Marriage laws to a vote, but he changed his mind and voted for it. It became part of the Texas Constitution.

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