I Finally Got the Documents
The Software Setting Your Property Taxes Is Broken, and They Knew.
Citizen Journalism
They wanted $3,000 to keep these pages hidden. Here is some of what is inside of them, why I believe my own government is defrauding us, and why it is finally time for all of us to stand together.
By Travis Spencer
I am an activist. I did not go looking for that title, several fights handed it to me. A year ago I asked my appraisal district a simple question about the value of my own home, and what I uncovered is bigger than my home and bigger than me. My own government seems to be defrauding the people it is sworn to serve, and lying to us about it.
For asking the question, the chairman of the appraisal review board was cited for assault, I was banned from a public building, and I was handed a bill for over three thousand dollars to see the very records that prove it. Let me sit with you a moment, the way I would at my own kitchen table, because what I am about to show you belongs to you too. It is about the software that decides what your home is worth, the single number that sets your tax bill, and what the people in charge of it already knew.
I will not tell you this has been the hardest year of my life, because it has not. But it has been hard in a way I never saw coming. There is a specific, lonely kind of hard that comes from watching the institution you pay for, the one that is supposed to answer to you, look you in the eye and lie. There is a particular ache in being told you are imagining something while you are holding the proof in your own two hands.
And I am holding the proof now. Not rumors, not hunches. Emails, support tickets, and signed letters from inside the district itself. In their own words, the value the county certified did not match the county’s own model. Seventy eight homes wrong in a single year, from a single search. The tax rolls out of balance for five years running. Notices mailed to families with the wrong numbers printed on them. And a quiet conversation, in writing, about whether to tell anyone at all.
So I am not writing this to vent, and I am not asking for sympathy. I am writing it to wake people up. One homeowner with a camera can be banned, assaulted, and buried in paperwork. A thousand neighbors standing shoulder to shoulder cannot. This was never only my fight. It is yours, it is your neighbor’s, and the moment enough of us see the truth at the same time, this ends. Let me show you what I found. Then let us stand up together.
How we got here, in thirty seconds
On July 15, 2025, I walked into an Appraisal Review Board hearing in Conroe with a camera, exactly the way the law allows. By the end of that day the ARB Chairman had been cited in connection with an assault, and I, the man with the camera, was banned from a public building. Their own attorney later admitted in writing that in years of records, I am the only member of the public they have ever banned. The official got cited. The taxpayer got walked out. That is where this began. It is nowhere near where it ends.
The $3,000 wall
So I did the most ordinary, most powerful thing a Texan can do. I asked. Under the Public Information Act, I asked for the error logs and the bug reports for the software that values every home in this county.
Nine of my requests sailed past the legal deadline in total silence. I had to file nine separate complaints with the Texas Attorney General just to get a reply. And when they finally answered, they did not send the records. They sent a price tag. Roughly $3,000, to read public records about my own home, software and how its valued.
Three thousand dollars to keep the next pages in the dark. They spent more than $600,000 a year of your money on this software. Now let me show you what it produces, and what they were willing to charge me to hide. Read it slowly. You paid for all of it.
Your value was never real
For years they have told every one of us that the number on our notice is the careful, professional result of a mass appraisal model. Their own internal records tell a very different story. This is an MCAD employee writing to the software company, in plain English:
An MCAD staff member to the software vendor. Homes were certified in 2024 with a market area factor of 100 percent when the real figure was far higher. The model showed one home should have been at 195 percent. And there is no revision history to even check whether the number was altered. No audit trail, on the value of your home.
Read that again, because the whole scandal is sitting in one paragraph. The value the county certified did not match the county’s own model. It was off by ninety five points on a single factor. And there is no revision history, no trail, no way to prove what the number was or who touched it.
If they can be that wrong, with no record of why, then the number on your notice is not a fact. It is a guess wearing a suit.
And it was never just one house:
The same employee, days later. One comparison pulled 78 accounts that certified at a factor of 1.0 and had to be corrected to a higher percentage. Seventy eight homes, in a single year, surfaced by a single query.
And then they had to decide whether to tell you
This is the part that took the wind out of me. Once they found the broken values, the leadership of this district sat down and weighed a choice. Not whether to fix it. Whether to tell you.
An MCAD director to other district leaders, March 2026. The choice on the table: send corrected notices to the property owners, or quietly apply a flat value to drag the accounts back to the certified number. Below it, the vendor explains the cause. The market area setting had been turned off on those accounts and then turned back on. A switch, flipped by hand.
A switch, flipped by hand, that moved the worth of people’s homes. And when it was caught, the first instinct in that room was not, let us make this right and tell the owners. It was, let us discuss whether to paper over it.
The notice in your mailbox may have been wrong
Maybe you are thinking, that is their internal mess, my notice was fine. I hope it was. But their own ticket, number 123468, says otherwise:
The vendor to MCAD, June 2025. The live screen was correct, but the generated notices showed wrong data for the previous year. The version they kept was right. The version they mailed to the property owner was wrong. The resolution, in their words: for now consider it resolved.
The copy they kept was correct. The copy they sent you was not. And they closed the ticket.
The whole roll does not even add up
This is not me, a guy with a camera, making a claim. This is the Montgomery County Tax Office, in writing:
From the head of the Montgomery County Tax Office. After loading a roll correction, the certified files were off in value for tax years 2023 to 2025, and off in parcel count for tax years 2021 to 2025. Five straight years where the rolls did not reconcile. Read the banner at the bottom. The highest level of accountability.
Five straight years. The rolls that set everyone’s taxes did not balance.
A mountain of bugs, and a quiet all clear
The market area bug, the broken notices, the balancing crisis, those are a few rows in a much longer list. This is a single page of MCAD’s own bug ticket log:
One page of the internal ticket history. Read the subject lines. Discrepancy between correct data and incorrect appraisal notice output. Integrity Check Validator. Consolidated Tickets, Integrity Checks, Possible False Positives. The very tools meant to catch bad numbers were themselves logged as unreliable.
When the integrity checks that are supposed to guard your value are themselves written up as throwing false positives, you are not looking at a glitch. You are looking at a system nobody fully trusts, stamping numbers that decide how much you owe.
The one word that is never there
Run your eye back over every page. In all that talk of corrections and balancing and bugs, one thing is missing. Any honest reckoning with the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice. USPAP is not a nicety. Texas law requires mass appraisal to follow it. It is the conscience of the entire profession. When the rulebook for honesty is the one thing nobody will mention, that silence is the loudest page in the whole file.
So what were they doing with their time instead?
Not fixing this. They were busy with me. Among the records they produced was this:
A paid researcher in Granbury combed through my Facebook and emailed this district, calling my lawsuit bogus and hoping the chairman could use it in a defamation case against me. They forwarded it straight to their lawyer. While the software miscertified homes, they were building a file on the homeowner asking about it?
That is the choice this whole story comes down to. They had the time and the money to investigate a homeowner with a camera. They did not use it to tell seventy eight families their values were wrong.
What this has cost, and why I still have hope
I will be honest about the price. Money I did not have. Hours I will never get back. And some nights, my own peace of mind, lying awake wondering if I was the crazy one after all. I was not. The documents say so now, in their own ink.
So why am I more hopeful today than I have ever been in this fight? Let me tell you, because I want you to carry it too.
Because I am not guessing anymore. I am holding it. Doubt is what exhausts a person. Proof is rocket fuel.
Because the truth was never on their side of the table. It is on ours. Every wall they built, every dollar they charged me, every quiet decision to consider it resolved, the law has a name for all of it. We are not begging anyone for mercy. We are holding up a mirror, and the glass does not lie.
Because a year ago this was one tired man in a driveway, and today it is a movement. Neighbors comparing their notices. Strangers becoming allies. People who believed they were alone realizing the same thing was done to all of us. That is exactly how a wall comes down. Never with one hero. Always with a thousand ordinary people who decide, in the very same season, to stop looking away.
And because sunlight has never lost. Not once. Not in the long run. Broken things love the dark, and the moment you carry them into the light, they start to crack. I am carrying these pages into the light right now, and you are standing next to me while I do it.
They bet that we would get tired before they did.
They have never met us.
Thank you, with my whole heart
You are the only reason I have anything left in the tank. Every person who watched and read all the way to the end. Every neighbor who whispered, me too. Every comment, every share, every quiet message in the dark that simply said, keep going. You took a man who some mornings could not get out of his own truck, and you made him part of something far bigger than himself. You will never fully know how many days you are the reason I opened the door and kept walking.
So thank you. Truly. For your time, your trust, and your refusal to look away.
What you can do today
This was never about my house, or even about me. It is about the machine that prices your home, with your money, run by people who answer to you.
Protest your value. Every single year. Make them show their work.
File your own records request. It is your right. You do not need a lawyer to ask a question.
Write everything down. Dates, names, deadlines. A paper trail is the quiet superpower of ordinary people.
Share this with one neighbor. That is how a single candle becomes a sunrise.
Stay with me. Subscribe and follow along. I will post every page, every win, every setback, until this is made right.
I am going to keep filing. I am going to keep reading at that kitchen table. And I am going to keep handing you the truth one page at a time, until honesty is finally cheaper for them than hiding.
It was worse than I imagined. And we are going to be okay. I believe that today more than I have believed anything in a very long time.
Keep your head up. The light is already coming, and so much of it is simply us, standing together.
With hope, and with everything I have,
Travis Spencer
Real Estate Mindset, R.E.M. Empowerment Community
Excellent read!! How can we file our record form?
Is there a way to make a one time donation to your cause? I am not crazy about substack, as they have not refunded or cancelled a different subscription I had paid for but no longer wanted.