A typo is at the forefront of an issue at the Tarrant Appraisal District.

A special meeting was called Nov. 3 by TAD Chair Rick Barnes, who is also Tarrant County’s tax assessor-collector, regarding a vote misallocation in the 2024 entity election.

A four-hour meeting ended with the board voting to hire an independent third-party to investigate any irregularities surrounding the 2024 and 2025 elections.

A motion was made to terminate Chief Appraiser Joe Don Bobbitt, but without a second, that motion died. Bobbit is hired by the TAD board and is not an elected official.

The meeting closed with board member Fred Campos making a motion to discuss the issue at the regularly scheduled Nov. 12 meeting.

What happened?

Barnes issued a public statement Oct. 23 after finding out that Tarrant County College received an improper amount of votes for the 2024 election.

Each year Tarrant County's taxing entities vote to fill five of the nine TAD board of directors seats. The taxing entities are made up of towns, cities, school districts and a junior college and the county. There is a total of 5,000 votes possible split between these taxing entities.

The entities with the most votes last election cycle were the city of Fort Worth with 660 and Fort Worth ISD with 536. Tarrant County College has 505 votes, and the Tarrant County commissioners were awarded 498 votes, according to previous Community Impact reporting.

Each taxing entity had a vote tally determined by the percentage of taxes imposed, according to TAD.

Eric Crile, a candidate last year who failed to earn a board spot, discovered an error in June. A firefighter for the city of Dallas, Crile chose to run again for the TAD board and noticed the taxable value for the Tarrant County Hospital District, or JPS Health, was pasted in the cell for Tarrant County College.

He brought the issue to Tarrant County College’s board of regents and also emailed Bobbitt.

Crile is running for one of the two open seats this election and noticed the miscue while exploring the tax code and noticed the Tarrant Regional Water District could vote. While reviewing the previous election results, he saw the large difference in voting totals for the college.

Tarrant County College had 307 votes during the 2023 election, according to the TAD website.

“I didn’t check that as closely as I should have,” Bobbitt said. “To me, there were more important things that I needed to deal with at the time. Granted, looking back, this is a very important issue.”

The background

The election last fall had five director spots on the board, with voting held from Oct. 15 to Dec. 15, with only the taxing entities voting. The public elected three board members in the spring of 2024, according to previous reporting.

The five spots included two one-year terms and three three-year terms.

Wendy Burgess and Mike Alfred won one-year spots, while Gloria Peña, Fred Campos and Alan Blaylock got three-year terms. All of those terms started Jan. 1, 2025.

Blaylock, the Fort Worth City Council District 10 representative, and Peña were re-elected.

Campos, Alfred and Burgess were new to the board. Burgess was on the board previously in a nonvoting role because of her previous job as the Tarrant County tax assessor-collector. She lost in the primary to Barnes.

Bobbitt said even with the error, based on the correct number of votes, the election results did not change.

According to TAD data, Burgess had 289 votes from Tarrant County College. Blaylock got 141, and Peña had 75.

However, Tarrant County College would’ve gotten 324 votes if the correct taxable value had been entered.

“It's not about Tarrant County College, and it's not about who got votes and who didn't and whether what affected the election,” Barnes said. “It’s the fact that the numbers were wrong across the board. If Tarrant County College got too many votes, that means a lot of other organizations or entities didn't get enough votes. It's like the whole process was screwed up and down.”

Tax advocate and Realtor Chandler Crouch noted that Burgess got 57.2% of the vote for Tarrant County. If the right votes were allocated, she would’ve gotten 177 votes instead of 289.

Even with that change, she would’ve still won the final spot with 588 votes, ahead of former board Chair Vince Puente, who had 571 votes.

“The larger entities vote first, so a lot of people change how they vote based on where the larger entities are,” said voter-elected board member Callie Rigney, a former Colleyville City Council member.

A closer look

During the Fort Worth City Council meeting Oct. 28, the council voted to table the voting on the TAD board members.

The board spots for Burgess and Alfred expire Dec. 31. The two candidates who are selected will serve a four-year term, starting Jan. 1, 2026, according to the TAD website.

Campos, a Grapevine native, expressed concerns for the voting power of larger entities. Between Fort Worth ISD and the city of Fort Worth, there are more than 1,100 of the 5,000 votes.

According to the voting numbers, 41 cities combined for 1,272 votes for the TAD entity-chosen board of directors. The city of Fort Worth has nearly half of those votes.

“I will tell you that, in my review of the entire process, this is probably the greatest racket in the history of Texas when it comes to elections,” Barnes said.

Sayeda Syed, a Colleyville resident, ran for a board spot in 2024. She spoke at the meeting and pointed out that 21 school districts lost 118 votes due to the miscalculation.

She added that the city of Fort Worth lost 29, Arlington lost 11, and Colleyville lost two votes.

“You know, these two votes [for Colleyville] are very crucial for small entities,” she said. “But here, people care about big entities, not worried about what's going on in the small entities. People got the benefit out of the mistake made because of the copying and pasting of the values.”

Put in perspective

The voting miscalculation is another situation at TAD that has come up in recent years.

That list includes:

• The director of information systems at TAD suggested “creating a false narrative that distances the truth from the media," before being fired, according to previous reporting.
• Former TAD Executive Director and Chief Appraiser Jeff Law resigned Sept. 6, 2022.
• A ransomware attack occurred in March 2024.
• Sensitive data of "less than 300 residents" was posted online after not paying a $700,000 ransom.
• The reappraisal system moved from every year to every two years, which drew criticism from school districts and cities.

“I ran for this position really to restore public trust," Rigney said before her motion to fire Bobbitt. "I just can't sit by and endorse some of the actions that have happened and not take any kind of action at all. There needs to be some accountability here.”