‘This was my mistake’: TAD chief appraiser apologizes for board election error
The Tarrant Appraisal District Board of Directors met Monday to begin their investigation into the 2024 error that resulted in the Tarrant County College having roughly 200 more votes than deserved in the 2024 TAD board election. That election resulted in five directors being put on the nine-member board.
After a two and a half hour closed meeting, the board decided for a third-party investigation. Board member Callie Rigney made a motion to terminate Chief Appraiser Joe Don Bobbitt from the position, but there was no second, and the motion failed.
Rick Barnes, chair of the TAD board, said he expects the investigation to last about a week, but didn’t know who will be conducting the investigation. Barnes said the hope is to have the findings ready by the board’s next meeting on Nov. 12.
He said once the results of the investigation come back, “everything is still on the table,” including the potential termination of Bobbitt.
“The reality, with me, is that I need somebody in that office I know I can trust,” Barnes said. “This is a very high-paid, professional-level job, and we need people that we don’t have to micromanage, that we can trust in the process, and so we’re trying to figure out if that trust is in line. If we feel like we can’t, I will be in the position of saying that we need to look for additional people or a new person.”
Ahead of the executive session, Bobbitt admitted to the board that he should have caught the error. Bobbitt said the issue may have been with incorrectly copying and pasting numbers.
“I do admit that I should have caught it,” Bobbitt told the board. “I was involved in other things. A lot of these processes had kind of already been built, and so I didn’t check that as closely as I should have. To me, there are more important things that I needed to deal with at the time. Granted, looking back, this is a very important issue.”
TAD Board of Director elections start with all taxing entities in the county (school districts, the county and cities) submitting their nominations publicly between Sept. 1 to Oct. 14 to the chief appraiser. The chief appraiser then ensures each of the nominees are in good standing with the property tax code’s requirements. Next, the chief appraiser assembles the ballot and sends it to the taxing entities with information about how many votes they get, determined by how much of the county’s total tax revenue they generate. Votes are made publicly by Dec. 14 at midnight.
Bobbitt said he found out about the issue when Eric Crile, a nominee for the board, emailed him asking why the votes allocated to Tarrant County College changed so drastically from 2024 to 2025. That email was on June 26, 2025. Bobbitt said at the Monday meeting that he didn’t see a way to correct the error.
Crile told the Star-Telegram he found the issue by accident when he was trying to find out how many votes another entity would be allotted in the 2025 TAD election. Bobbitt responded to Crile on June 27, 2025, saying there may have been an error in the 2024 vote allocation spreadsheet.
Bobbitt should have come forward to the board about the error then, Crile said, since it could have been blamed for the error.
“An issue I have is that you’re having discussions with others, and you’re leaving us in the dark,” Rigney said. “We’re the ones with our necks out there, and we’re trying to make this a transparent process.”
In the emailed response to Crile, Bobbitt said he does not believe the results of the 2024 election would have changed had the correct number of votes been allotted to each entity.
Of the directors elected to the board in 2024, Wendy Burgess got the fewest votes with 701. Nominee Vince Puente was runner-up to Burgess with 544 votes.
Bobbitt told the board that the process has been corrected so this will not happen again. Instead of having to copy and paste numbers over from a report, the numbers will automatically populate in the spreadsheet and calculate the votes each entity should have.
George Dobson, a resident who came to the meeting, said he thinks the chief appraiser should have to present the vote allocation report to the boardbefore finalizing it and sending it to the tax entities. This way, the chief appraiser doesn’t go without oversight in creating the ballots, Dobson said.
Bobbitt said he will consider that idea.
“I think that’s a very good idea,” Bobbitt said. “But again, this was my mistake. We should have caught it. I should have brought it to the board. I failed to do so at the time, I didn’t see a way in the tax code to correct the issue. There’s a process for recall, which didn’t seem to apply. But otherwise, to me, the way I read the tax code, I’m in charge of calculating the allocation, and then we’re stuck with it.”
Barnes said his greatest concern is that this is “yet another” instance of TAD not being forthcoming with the public. He said the issue is not that one entity got more votes than they should have.
“It’s the fact that the numbers were wrong across the board,” Barnes said. “If Tarrant County College got too many votes, that means a lot of other organizations, not a lot of other entities, didn’t get enough votes. The whole process was screwed up, up and down.”
Bobbitt said he was hired to fix the computer-aided mass appraisal system and restore public trust.
“I fell in one of those aspects, and I deeply apologize for that error,” Bobbitt said.
This story was originally published November 3, 2025 at 12:01 PM.