OPINION: Appraisal District Needs Honest People on Board of Directors

This article is written by Martin Farris, candidate for Tom Green County Appraisal District Board of Directors.

Early voting is already underway for the Nov. 3 election, and this year voters will be electing three of the members of the Board of Directors for the Tom Green County Appraisal District for the first time.

Why does this matter to you?

While the BOD handles mostly mundane matters like setting the CAD’s budget and financial policies, it also handles two very important personnel functions that affect every voter, which I will go into in detail below after covering some background information.

The BOD in counties with a population over 75,000 in Texas are composed of nine members. Prior to May 2024, all the members were appointed by the taxing units except one position that is reserved for the elected Tax Assessor-Collector.

During the 2023 Legislative session the Legislature made major changes to the property tax code, which included changing how Appraisal Review Board members are selected and the composition of appraisal district boards of directors.

Previously, ARB members in Tom Green County were selected by one of the District Court judges. That’s how I came to be a member of the 2023-24 TGCAD ARB. Now the ARB members are selected by the BOD of the appraisal district. As part of the compromise for that change it was agreed one-third of the BOD would be directly elected by the voters.

The first election where that could have occurred was the May 2024 election, but checking the election results reveals nobody ran for the positions that year. When that occurs, the members are appointed by the taxing entities, so for the last two years you have had an ARB handpicked by members selected by the taxing entities. Nobody looking out for the interests of the taxpayers. Keep that in mind when the incumbents ask you to “reelect” them.

This year, eight candidates filed for the three positions — the three incumbents who were appointed in May 2024 and five outsiders. Since then, two have withdrawn, leaving six candidates running for three positions.

Place 1 has incumbent Walter Holik facing off against Lyleann McClelland. Place 2 has incumbent Basil El Masri being challenged by Martin Farris (myself) and Mary Casper. Place 3, after one candidate withdrew, has incumbent Dwain Grider running unopposed.

The first function the BOD performs that will directly impact you as a voter is the selection of the members of the ARB. The ARB hears your protests and can adjust the market value of your property. The members attend training every year that among many other things instructs them that the burden of proof in those hearings is on the CAD, and if they fail to meet their burden, the protest must be determined in favor of the taxpayer.

Apparently only two of us who started in 2023 actually paid attention during that training in
2023 and 2024, and our reward was to be the only two members to not be reappointed to
the 2025 ARB.

The members who were reappointed to my recollection have never made a motion to set a
market value at an amount the CAD hadn’t already agreed to after listening to the taxpayer
describe the condition of their property even in cases where the CAD had fallen
dramatically short of meeting its burden of proof, but continued to insist on a higher value
than the taxpayer.

In the interest of not turning this into a book, I will give just one of many examples. A
taxpayer came in protesting the market value of her property, which had been raised from
approx. $156K to well over $800K. The CAD had no comparable sales to support their
valuation. They were basing it completely on cost of construction minus depreciation,
which has nothing to do with what a property will sell for, especially the property in that
hearing that is subject to many unique circumstances rarely encountered in San Angelo.

The taxpayer had mountains of evidence indicating a much lower value including a
professionally prepared appraisal utilizing comparable sales, but most compelling in my
mind was the fact she had been attempting to sell the property for years at the value she
was requesting (low $200K, I don’t recall the exact amount) without a single showing of the
property, let alone an offer.

Sorry, but if your house sits on the market for several years without even a showing, it’s not
worth what you’re trying to sell it for. It’s just not. She still hasn’t sold it more than two years
later, though it doesn’t appear to be listed at the moment.

After listening to all this, my fellow board member made a motion to set the value at the
$800K+ amount the CAD had originally noticed. I declined to second the motion, killing it. I
then made the motion that we leave the value at the prior year value, and the motion
passed. He’s still serving, I’m not. Your current BOD is doing a bang-up job.

Unless the BOD appoints people who are going to actually apply what they are taught and
what the ARB Manual states, you’re wasting your time having an ARB hearing. You will get
the same result meeting with one of the appraisers informally and showing them the
condition of your home, because that’s all the ARB members are going to sign off on anyway,
even though most of them served with me when I on numerous occasions pointed out the
GIGO aspect of the sales comparison analysis the CAD uses in hearings.

Which brings us to the second function the BOD performs that will directly impact you as a
voter. The BOD hires (and fires) the Chief Appraiser.

The TGCAD as currently operated seems more interested in “winning” than fairly,
accurately and properly valuing properties as of Jan. 1 of the tax year in question, even
if that means introducing “evidence” into hearings that they either know is false or haven’t
bothered to verify the truth of, concealing evidence that is adverse to their position and/or
denying the findings of other state agencies with jurisdiction over the matters in question.

Apparently the current board is comfortable with their Chief Appraiser and legal counsel
behaving like a prosecutor who finds a video clip of someone besides the defendant they
are prosecuting committing the crime, pretending they never saw it, hiding it from the other
side, and continuing to prosecute the defendant anyway. I believe most people find that
behavior offensive and unacceptable.

Couple the ethical lapses with a concerning lack of knowledge about properly identifying
and valuing impaired properties, which results in valuations that are often 4 to 5 times the market
value required by the Tax Code for those properties, some other appraisal issues such as
land values that are a bad joke (for instance R102117 is 17.021 acres of river frontage for
$146,380 vs R50333 which is 18 acres across the street from it with no river frontage in the
same subdivision for $243K) or sales comparison adjustments based on the CAD’s own
unreliable data and land values, and one can only conclude the current board
is either negligent or complicit in what is going on.

I personally think the TGCAD should be more concerned with fairly valuing your property
than proving they are right by disregarding accepted appraisal practices and literal
mountains of evidence, including their own, that proves they are wrong.

I participated in a hearing recently where the CAD presented evidence showing an issue
with a property would cost several $100K to address, but stated that a buyer would ignore
the cost because having the issue resolved would increase the value of the property. They
had just spent over an hour arguing the issue has no effect on the value of the property, and
that was actually the least of the problems with the case the CAD presented. The ARB
rubber stamped the CAD’s market value in the case anyway.

The BOD sets the tone for how the CAD is run through its choice of Chief Appraiser, and
you can elect people who won’t tolerate the CAD treating property owners unfairly through
your choice of directors.

What doesn’t the BOD do? Well, it’s not going to reduce your property taxes or even the
appraisals of properties county wide.

First of all, the CAD could decide to cut market values across the board by 50%, and your
property taxes likely wouldn’t change one penny. The taxing entities would increase their
tax rates to generate the same revenue on the lower values. If you don’t like how much property tax you are paying; elect school board members, county commissioners and city
council members who will cut the budgets of those entities or elect state senators and
representatives who will replace the property tax with something else.

Second, the CAD is required to appraise properties for what they are worth. The
Comptroller monitors them to ensure they do. The BOD through its choices of Chief
Appraiser and ARB members ensures that you individually are treated fairly and your
property appraised correctly.

When you vote in the next couple of weeks, you will decide two of the nine people who will serve
on that BOD. Vote and choose someone who understands the job, the problems that need
to be addressed and the solutions to them.

Martin Farris has lived in Tom Green County since 1996, is the owner of Dream Home
Funding, a local mortgage company, former member of the TGCAD ARB 2023-24 and
candidate for Place 2, Tom Green County Appraisal District Board of Directors.