Races to elect three new members to the Bexar Appraisal District’s board earlier this year flew under the radar for most voters. Now, weeks after they were sworn in, their power to affect the next property tax season is finally coming into focus.

The state added elected appraisal board positions in the state’s largest counties during the last legislative session — part of a larger property tax overhaul that voters approved in November — but even candidates running for the seats weren’t sure what power they’d have on a board’s the role has historically been administrative.

Last month that changed when the appraisal district in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, approved major changes to the way residential properties are appraised — reducing the frequency from annually to once every two years and capping the amount residential valuations can be increased at 5%.

Activists in Bexar County are now pushing for similar changes to the appraisal process here as a means to help homeowners, while municipal governments and school districts are warning that such a move could majorly disrupt their revenue forecasting and reduce the tax base for future budgets.

The average property in Bexar County rose in value by just 2.4% this year, but skyrocketed by 16% in 2023 and 28% in 2022.

“The taxpayers have needed relief for a long, long time … and we have an example in Tarrant County that has shown us that a board of directors was open to change,” said Susan Bayne, community outreach liaison for the local activist group InfuseSA, whose husband, Mel Bayne, ran unsuccessfully for the Bexar Appraisal District’s board this year.

“We want to advocate before the board [in Bexar County] to ask for the same kind of decisions here,” she said.

Members of the Bexar Appraisal District’s board of directors will hold their next meeting on Aug. 20 to discuss the county’s appraisal policies — including proposals like the ones approved in Tarrant County — and vote on policies to cover the next two years the following month.

Thanks to the changes the Republican-led legislature enacted last year that board now includes three elected members, as well as five members appointed by the county’s various taxing entities. The county tax assessor-collector also serves on the board, and is now a voting member under the state’s changes.

“I think it’s fantastic [what Tarrant County has done],” said Robert Bruce, the founder of Boerne Stage Airfield and a conservative activist who emerged from a June runoff to win a seat on the Bexar Appraisal District’s board. “We’re going to try and emulate it here, one way or another.”

Bruce said he met with the Bexar Appraisal District’s board chair Dave Gannon and Chief Appraiser Rogelio Sandoval, who agreed to discuss the ideas as part of the appraisal plan at this month’s meeting.

“Unlike the Tarrant Appraisal District… our board meetings are all public,” Gannon told the San Antonio Report. “We will have a spirited debate.”

Appraisal board power

Across the state’s major metro areas the new elected appraisal board positions drew varied levels of political interest. But most candidates agreed while campaigning that they didn’t expect to have much true power.

“The spirit of Senate Bill 2 was to get elected members on the board, but none of us could really promise to change the way that things are done because those things are regulated by the state of Texas,” said Naomi Elizabeth Miller, a longtime aide to former Texas Speaker Joe Straus who was elected to represent Place 1 on the Bexar Appraisal District’s board.

In Tarrant County, however, conservative County Judge Tim O’Hare took a major role in promoting his preferred candidates, and the group campaigned on specific plans to enact less frequent appraisals and capping valuation growth.

Now other county appraisal boards are being pushed to do the same, with little information about the potential long-term impacts.

“As far as those recommendations, if they came before us… I’d have to see how that would affect the way we do business here in Bexar County and how it would affect taxpayers,” Miller said.

It’s unclear what appetite exists for such changes among the board members who represent the taxing entities.

School districts in North Texas have been sounding the alarm about the impact that Tarrant County’s changes could have on their already strained budgets, and local governments in Bexar County have taken notice.

Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia (D4), who represents San Antonio on the appraisal district board, said in an interview Wednesday that she alerted the city manager and chief financial officer about the issue shortly after Tarrant County adopted its policies.

“If you’re only appraising every two or three years, that means the money we project every year, we wouldn’t be able to do that,” Rocha Garcia told the San Antonio Report. “That affects, ultimately, city services, so I have the [city’s] legal team right now looking into it.”

Tax Assessor-Collector Albert Uresti, whose position on the board is set by state statute, told the San Antonio Report he liked the idea of less frequent appraisals.

“One of the major complaints that we get about the appraisal district is that people go and they protest their property values to get it reduced, and then they have to go back the next year again,” he said. “I think every other year resolves a lot of that burden on the taxpayers.”