Tarrant County’s volunteer historical commission gained five new members in early July, just weeks after County Judge Tim O’Hare attracted scrutiny for derailing a project meant to recognize local LGBTQ history.
Republican Commissioner Matt Krause appointed four Republicans: Anne Gebhart, Tammy Nakamura, Mona Puente and Thomas Schlueter. Democratic Commissioner Alisa Simmons appointed one Democrat, Marisela Aramino.
The five-member commissioners court voted unanimously to approve the new members without commenting on the appointments.
Krause told the Fort Worth Report “there was a lot of discussion” regarding the LGBTQ history project and, during the course of that discussion, he reviewed the county historical commission’s makeup and saw there were four at-large seats that needed new appointments. He said each county commissioner gets to appoint three members to the 19-member historical commission, and the remaining four seats are considered at-large.
Krause’s appointments were to fill the vacant at-large seats on the commission. Although recent controversy prompted his review of the commission’s members, Krause said he would have made the same appointments three months ago, had he been aware of vacancies.
“These four people weren’t picked in response to that. These four people weren’t picked because of, necessarily, their stances on that issue,” Krause said. “They were picked because they’re all people that I know, that I’ve worked with for a long time in politics, and each of them I know have a passion for history and want to work hard for Tarrant County.”
The July 1 appointments came after the Fort Worth Report reported June 12 that O’Hare wrote a letter to the Texas Historical Commission chair, John Nau, asking that the commission rescind its approval of an application for a state historical marker to recognize LGBTQ history in Fort Worth. In the May 2025 letter, O’Hare wrote that the application did not follow the county historical commission’s “proper and thorough approval process” — an assertion denied by the county commissioner chair who oversaw the application.
The historical marker would have commemorated Fort Worth’s Jennings Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood in the Near Southside as the center of Fort Worth’s LGBTQ community. It was set to be located at the site of the Rainbow Lounge, an LGBTQ bar raided by members of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission and Fort Worth police in 2009 and widely seen since as a local LGBTQ landmark.
Applications for state historical markers, which may commemorate various topics in Texas history, must be reviewed by a county’s historical commission before getting submitted to the Texas Historical Commission for approval. A county’s historical commission acts as a branch of the state commission, rather than of county government.
The LGBTQ historical marker application originated from city of Fort Worth staff and was reviewed by the county commission before getting final approval from the state commission in July 2024, according to documents previously obtained by the Report.
Simmons told the Report her appointment of Aramino to the commission was not in response to the controversy over the historical marker but to fill a seat that had been vacant for several months.
“I had a vacancy on the historical commission, and I filled the vacancy,” Simmons said. “I identified someone who had the time and interest to fulfill the obligations of an appointee to the historical commission. That’s it.”
Aramino is one of the three paid Tarrant County Democratic Party staff members who were laid off in April as the result of a “strategic decision” to restructure the party. She also serves as a Democratic precinct chair.
Nakamura was a Grapevine-Colleyville ISD board member but narrowly lost her reelection campaign in May, despite garnering endorsements from the Tarrant County Republican Party, local Republican activist groups and prominent Republican PACs. She was one of several Republican-backed candidates to lose their election bids for local nonpartisan offices in a campaign season marked by heavy partisanship.
Schlueter is the pastor of KingdomGate, a “strategic house of prayer” in Arlington and serves in leadership roles for prayer networks across the state.
Gebhart and Puente are Republican precinct chairs, volunteers who work on the grassroots level to mobilize voters within their party. Gebhart is also a co-founder and the director of Heart of Texas, a regional homeschooling organization.
As of July 9, the commission’s other members are not publicly listed on the county’s website about the commission.
The county commission meets six times per year, on the fourth Wednesday of January, March, May, July, September and November, according to the website. Commission meetings are held at 200 Taylor St.
Krause said he’s hopeful that his commission appointees will look at future projects from “a proper historical framework, from a conservative worldview,” regardless of the nature of each project.
“I would only want to put people on that board who followed along the same kind of ideological lines that I have,” Krause said.
The Fort Worth historical marker would have been the second historical marker in Texas to recognize LGBTQ history, in addition to a marker in Dallas erected in 2018.
Fort Worth City Council member Elizabeth Beck, who represents the Near Southside, and LGBTQ community leaders previously told the Report they intend to resubmit an application for the historical marker.
Cecilia Lenzen is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at cecilia.lenzen@fortworthreport.org.
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This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
