One of the first decisions Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare made on his first day in office was to save taxpayers’ money.
“First cost-saving measure for the Tarrant County taxpayers: within minutes of walking into the office, we canceled the Star-Telegram,” O’Hare told The Dallas Express.
O’Hare has represented Tarrant County as the chief political executive since January 2023, replacing Glen Whitley, who did not run for re-election after serving 26 years in the role.
O’Hare previously served as the Tarrant County GOP Chair from 2016-2018 and as mayor of Farmers Branch from 2008-2011.
He was elected as Tarrant County judge on a platform that prioritized cutting taxes, eliminating waste, funding law enforcement, growing the economy, and bringing transparency to county government.
According to O’Hare, his education has helped him tremendously throughout life in evaluating data and information that he encounters daily.
“My law school didn’t try to teach me which political philosophy to follow and who the good guys were and the bad guys were. It taught me how to think,” he told The Dallas Express.
A little over one year into his first term, O’Hare has celebrated several accomplishments and has made several changes in Tarrant County.
O’Hare ended the COVID Emergency Declaration on January 13, 2023.
“I’m sitting there, January of last year. The whole world has moved on from COVID-19, and rightfully so,” O’Hare told DX, explaining his surprise at finding at the time that three of the four boxes on the Tarrant County website were related to COVID information.
In February, the commissioners court voted to end mandatory Unconscious Bias training for Tarrant County employees.
In June, Temptations Cabaret, an adult entertainment club in the county, was shut down due to crime-related problems.
“There was organized crime, sex trafficking, [and] drug trafficking. There have been multiple shootings and murders,” O’Hare told DX. He explained that Temptations was shut down with the county commissioners court’s support in coordination with the sheriff’s office.
When addressing the understaffing of the sheriff’s office, O’Hare said that the sheriff’s academy needs to be remodeled and modernized to help inspire the recruits.
“We will fund a massive renovation of the law enforcement training academy. So we can have the best and the brightest law enforcement in our county.”
In early 2023, O’Hare and county commissioners voted to approve an armored vehicle for the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office.
O’Hare mentioned that he has saved taxpayers’ money and used taxpayer money wisely since taking office, such as reducing the overall budget from 2023 to 2024.
“We reduced [the budget] by over $8 million, and we did it without laying off a single person,” O’Hare told DX.
O’Hare also mentioned how some of the $600 million of American Rescue Plan Act funding from the federal government was directed to social programs such as Mid-Cities Women’s Clinic and Hope Farm.
Mid-Cities Women’s Clinic is a crisis pregnancy center whose website states, “Since 1984, we have provided professional women’s services to more than 79,000 patients making unplanned pregnancy decisions.”
Hope Farm is an organization dedicated to breaking the cycle of fatherlessness by providing positive role models who guide “at-risk boys to become Christ-centered men.” As its website explains, “The staff and volunteers are dedicated to meeting the spiritual, nutritional, academic, emotional, and recreational needs of our boys.”
“If you don’t know how to read by 3rd grade, the statistics show your likelihood of ending up in jail is astronomical,” O’Hare said.
The commissioners court recently voted to eliminate Trinity Metro’s free rides to polling places.
O’Hare said at the time of the vote, “I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls. That is not the responsibility of county governments. It’s not the responsibility of taxpayers, which is where all our money comes from,” reported the Star-Telegram.
One of O’Hare’s significant accomplishments was adopting property tax rates below the “no-new revenue” rate in Tarrant County and adding a homestead exemption for the first time in Tarrant County’s history for both Tarrant County and the John Peter Smith hospital district.
“For the first time in the history of Tarrant, the county adopted a no new revenue tax rate for both the county and JPS [Health Network],” O’Hare told DX.
O’Hare mentioned how he worked to hold the issue-plagued Tarrant Appraisal District (TAD) Board accountable.
“They ran a shop over there that was secretive, hid stuff from the public, lied to the public,” said O’Hare.
Tarrant County had the highest percentage of appraisal protests of any county in Texas, according to O’Hare. He claims that taxpayers were not respected or treated with respect by TAD.
“The chair was recalled to put somebody new, and we took a vote of no confidence on the chief appraiser, Jeff Law, and he immediately resigned,” O’Hare said.
When asked about which county race, in his opinion, is the most important right now, O’Hare said it is the tax assessor’s race.
O’Hare said that change is needed in the tax assessor-collector’s office, as the incumbent, Wendy Burgess, has not worked for taxpayers, and she supported the chief appraiser despite public debacles on which The Dallas Express reported.
“We need a tax assessor who will strongly advocate for the taxpayer. And also one that will push and promote conservative candidates, policies, and values. We are in a battle for the heart and soul of our country. And ground zero is Tarrant County,” said O’Hare.
As reported by The Dallas Express, Burgess recently drew criticism due to the release of an audio recording in which she slurs her words and makes unintelligible comments during a Zoom work meeting in 2020. A resurfaced deleted Facebook post made by Burgess regarding her ex-husband’s usage of “sexual enhancer tablets” has led to further questions about whether she is fit for office.
O’Hare also worked on forming an election integrity task force and told DX that creating the task force was “absolutely [a] move in the right direction.”
The task force has a hotline for residents to report voter fraud, and law enforcement will immediately respond, said O’Hare.
Regarding education, O’Hare said he is in favor of school choice.
“Public schools have gotten so far away from reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history. They have become so indoctrinating in the way they teach,” O’Hare told DX. “People don’t want their kids to be taught this woke CRT garbage. The solution is for all schools to get back to the basics and focus on educating kids.”
The education system has become a “big business,” designed to protect itself and grow instead of helping students and teachers grow, according to O’Hare.
He also told DX that if a pandemic happened again, he would not follow his predecessor’s steps.
“I will never impose mask mandates,” O’Hare told DX. “As long as I’m here, we will promote freedom, liberty, and economic prosperity.”
He opined on why some Republicans change when they take office:
“A lot of Republicans get elected into office with the right ideals, the right goals, the right plans. Then, something about the system institutionalizes them. And so they start looking at it as if they are in a club.”
O’Hare emphasized the importance of following the model of the founding fathers for anyone wanting to serve in a leadership position.
“What the founding fathers intended was for people to go in and sacrificially serve for a limited period.”