A third party will investigate what led to a “significant calculation error” in the fall 2024 election of the Tarrant Appraisal District board of directors.
The board of directors approved the investigation on Monday in a special-called meeting prompted by the discovery of a typo that led to Tarrant County College having more sway over the election than the entity should have.
“I didn’t check that as closely as I should have,” said Joe Don Bobbitt, the TAD’s executive director and chief appraiser, who was responsible for verifying the share of votes divided between taxing entities.
“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,” said Bobbitt, who is hired by the TAD board and not elected.
Each year, the county’s taxing entities — including the county, cities, school districts and others — vote to fill five of the nine-member board seats. Those entities have voting power based on their share of the appraisal district’s taxing revenue. The more tax revenue an entity produces, the more votes it has.
In 2024, Tarrant County College cast 505 votes, about 200 more than it was entitled to. This meant other entities, including Fort Worth and Tarrant County, didn’t have the voting power they should have.
The error went unnoticed by the public until June of this year, when north Fort Worth resident Eric Crile, a current board nominee who tried and failed to win a TAD board seat in 2024, pointed out Tarrant County College’s sudden loss of voting power in the upcoming election.
What does a Tarrant Appraisal District board member do?
The board’s primary duties are to select the chief appraiser, adopt the annual budget and ensure the district follows policies and procedures set by law. The board does not appraise property or make decisions that affect the appraisal records for particular properties. Board members are not paid.
TAD chairman and tax assessor Rick Barnes said he found out about the error in mid-October, when a resident called him as taxing entities were once again starting to plan how to vote in the year’s election.
Explaining the error, Bobbitt said it happened as he copied and pasted the tax revenue of each entity — a standard procedure to verify and distribute the appropriate share of votes. He accidentally gave TCC the tax revenue of the Tarrant Hospital District because the hospital district appeared on the spreadsheet adjacent to TCC. The hospital district lacks voting power in TAD elections.
Barnes said there is “no reason to think” any board members knew or had anything to do with the typo.
Bobbitt repeatedly accepted responsibility for the error over the meeting, taking flak from the board members.
“You’re having discussions with others, and you’re leaving us in the dark,” board member Callie Rigney said. “We’re the ones with our necks out there, and we’re trying to make this a transparent process.”
After 2.5 hours in executive session, Rigney called for Bobbitt’s immediate removal, but her motion was not seconded.
The TAD board is scheduled to meet Nov. 12, where they will discuss further measures to respond to the error.
“We still have more questions and answers about what happened and why and how,” Barnes told the Report. Bobbitt “has a staff out here, 250 people, and we don’t know who was involved in the process.”
Barnes said “everything is still on the table” in terms of how the board will respond to the typo, depending on the results of the investigation.
“The concept of terminating somebody is a big deal, and we don’t just throw that out just for giggles,” he said. “We’ve got to back that up, and we’re not sure we have all the right answers.”
Crile, who spoke during public comment, said he didn’t think the typo ultimately affected the results of the fall 2024 election. The largest vote-getters won the election by wide margins.
Crile estimated the error led to TAD’s 21 school districts losing 118 votes, Fort Worth losing about 30 and Arlington losing 11.
TCC ultimately gave 75 votes to Gloria Peña, 141 to Alan Blaylock and 289 to Wendy Burgess.
The 2024 election put Michael Alfred, Blaylock, Burgess, Fred Campos and Peña on the board.
While state law spells out the election process for appraisal district boards, it does not detail how a board should respond to an error such as this.
As one of TAD’s largest entities, TCC must be one of the first to cast its votes, as mandated by a state law. The law allows smaller entities to decide their votes after seeing how larger ones act, aiming to prevent large entities from “fixing” the election, Barnes said.
“My biggest concern here is that we have yet another situation where the TAD is not forthcoming with the public,” Barnes said. “We have another situation where we have an integrity issue and a dramatic lack of transparency.”
“My question today and always, ‘Do we have a transparency problem today?’” he said.
A year of consequential, controversial decisions
Since January, when last year’s election winners were sworn in, the board of directors’ actions have been consequential.
In March, the board voted 4-4 to keep in place a controversial reappraisal plan that froze residential market values in 2025, switched to a two-year residential appraisal schedule, and established a 5% threshold for raising residential values in the future.
Those reappraisal plan changes, approved in August 2024, were pitched as a way to lessen the property tax burden for residents, but critics warned the changes would only delay tax increases rather than eliminate them. Others criticized the board for not taking into account the impact the reappraisal plan would have on already strapped school districts’ budgets.
The plan doesn’t call for reappraisals until 2027, which puts districts at risk of failing what’s known as the property value study. That study, the results of which will be available next January, governs the complicated school funding formula in Texas. If a school’s local assessed property values are too far off the state’s estimates, it is in danger of losing millions in funding.
School district administrators lamented the plan, saying the potential loss of funding could force cuts to staff, programs and student resources.
In March, four members who were appointed in the fall 2024 election — Campos, Blaylock, Burgess and Peña — supported an amendment to delay the freeze to 2026. Four others, including Barnes and Alfred, struck it down.
The TAD board traditionally was composed exclusively of people appointed by taxing entities, such as cities and school districts. The fall 2024 election followed a major shakeup.
In the May 2024 elections, residents cast votes for the board for the first time following the passing of a state constitutional amendment allowing for such elections.
The board was expanded from five to nine members, including the three elected positions and the tax assessor-collector, the position Barnes now fills.
After Monday’s meeting, the county’s largest taxing entities will divvy out their votes for this year’s election.
Fort Worth City Council is scheduled to vote Tuesday to give all its votes to Wendy Burgess, who also received its votes last year. The council was to vote Oct. 27 but delayed the decision because of the error.
Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org or @shawlings601.
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