County Taxpayers Claim Tax Rollback Petition Valid with Sufficient Signatures

County Judge Saucedo, Maverick County Commissioners, and Mr. Wilson,

On January 9, 2017, the Commissioner’s Court adopted a resolution stating that the rollback petition had 2,067 valid signatures. As per your calculations, the petition was short 99 valid signatures based on 30,964 registered voters.  As per Section 277.0024 of the Election Code, “if the minimum number of signatures required for a petition is determined by a computation applied to the number of registered voters of a particular territory, voters whose names appear on the list of registered voters with the notation “S”(Suspense), or a similar notation, shall be excluded from the computation.” As per the voter roll provided by the Elections Office on December 15, 2016, there were a total of 30,964 registered voter, of which 3,067 were suspense, or S, voters. This means that the total number of required signatures for this petition was 1,953.  With this information, this makes the petition valid.

30,964 registered voters  –  3,067 suspense voters   =  27,897  x  7%   =  1,953 signatures required

Total valid signatures as per Elections Office = 2,067

Also, attached is the original erroneous property tax worksheet and the corrected worksheet as provided by the Maverick County Tax Assessor after withdrawing the request for an Attorney General opinion.  With the correction, Box 48 shows that the rollback rate is $0.456839/$100.  The tax rate approved by the Commissioner’s Court was $0.542309/$100.  As you can see, the adopted tax rate exceeds the rollback rate.

As a taxpayer it pains me to know that taxpayers will now have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an election to correct your “mistake”, when you had the chance to do what was right and fix this almost four months ago. The documents that you unjustly withheld for so long show that you knew as of September 16, 2016 what the correct tax rate was. How do you ever expect us to regain faith in our elected officials when the lies and illegal actions continue? 

Please inform the citizens as to when the rollback election will take place.

Ethelvina I. Felan
Maverick County Taxpayer