One Question About a Bond, Now the State is Involved
Godley ISD Seeking New CFO
6/22/2026
One Question About a Bond. Now the State is Involved.
Eleven months. Three sworn criminal complaints. A petition asking the State of Texas to take over the district’s governance. Evidence now in front of a District Attorney and the Texas Education Agency. Godley taxpayers have been asked to carry hundreds of millions of dollars in school bond debt, and if the allegations are right, what was put at risk runs into the millions. The people forcing it into the light are a handful of ordinary citizens who simply refused to look away. We are getting closer every single day.
By Travis Spencer · realestatemindset.org
The latest, and the reason for this update
Godley ISD has publicly posted an opening for its Chief Financial Officer position, the role Spencer Davis holds. That posting is what moved me to write today. .
At the end of July 2025 I was just a guy with a question about a bond. What I set out to learn was how to fight one, how a district asks for money and how an ordinary citizen pushes back. Filing criminal complaints was on that list too, if I am honest. It was something I wanted to learn how to do. I just never imagined I would be doing it at this level, three of them, my own name sworn to every page. I went to ask one honest question about how public money was being spent, and the way the door closed told me there was something behind it. Eleven months later I am still pulling that thread. And I will be honest from the first sentence, I am tired in a way I did not know a person could be tired, and, for the first time in a long while, I am also hopeful.
I have lost friends over this. I have spent money I did not have to spare, my own, and money from people who believed in me and put their trust on the line. There are nights the fear sits on my chest like a stone. And still, I cannot stop, because the truth in these records deserves daylight, and if I look away now, no one else picks it up. This is an update on one part of that fight, the part about Spencer Davis, the Chief Financial Officer of Godley Independent School District, and everything here is drawn from records I obtained lawfully, the district’s own published financials, and filings I signed myself.
What is actually at stake
Let me be plain, and careful about how I say it. Godley taxpayers have been asked to carry hundreds of millions of dollars in school bond debt. If the allegations are right, this is not a paperwork quibble. It is a community shouldering that debt on a financial picture that was not straight, and public funding formula data flowing through channels it was never supposed to. The exposure runs into the millions. And the only people who have forced any of it into the light are a handful of residents with no budget, no staff, and no obligation to care, who cared anyway. That is the whole story, a few ordinary people against an institution, armed with nothing but records and refusal.
The weight of it
People see a headline and do not see the hours. So let me show you the hours.
Every request had a deadline I had to chase. Every complaint was read, and read again, and audited line by line before I would put my name on it. There is a log I update so nothing slips. This was never a hobby and never a vendetta. It is the slow, grinding work of making a public institution show its math.
Eleven months, start to now
Late July 2025
Where it began. I walk into the Godley ISD fight as one citizen with a question about an ISD bond election. Eleven months later I am still here, and the paper trail has only grown.
Oct 6, 2025
First sworn complaint. I sign and notarize my first criminal complaint against the CFO, raising bond election misstatements and federal securities disclosure and Texas Election Code §255.003 questions.
Oct 10, 2025
Second sworn complaint. Four days later, a second notarized complaint, built on the district’s own audit, alleging interfund commingling between the General Fund and the Debt Service Fund.
Nov 2025
The bond goes to voters. The November bond election proceeds against the backdrop of the financial questions we had raised. The bond fails by a landslide.
Spring 2026
The records campaign. I file roughly two dozen public information requests. The district answers with delay, bundling, and missed deadlines, so I file formal complaints with the Office of the Attorney General on every request they let lapse.
May 19 to 21, 2026
I ask the State to step in. I petition the Texas Education Agency to appoint a conservator, direct state oversight of the district, referenced to the open SIU investigation. (Also see criminal organization in Godley, TX)
May 2026
Multiple referrals. Evidence goes to the Johnson County Criminal District Attorney and the TEA Special Investigations Unit (Case No. 2026-10-0234). A third criminal complaint follows. They join a stack of others.
Jun 18, 2026
The seat is posted. The district publicly posts an opening for the Chief Financial Officer position, the role Mr. Davis holds. I will let that fact stand on its own.
Today
Closer every day. The record is in the right hands, a DA, a state investigations unit, the Commissioner’s office. I am still standing. And we are getting closer.
What Spencer was saying, in his official capacity
People ask why a CFO became the center of this. The answer is in what he said while wearing the title, statements my sworn complaint contends were made in his official capacity, during a live bond election. According to that complaint:
On the bond He urged passage of $250,560,595 in combined principal and interest in school bonds, posting in a local community group, a public official, my complaint contends, advocating bond passage in his official role.
On the district’s health He understated it, my complaint alleges, failing to report roughly $10.7 million in debt service liabilities, and stating payroll was 82% of the budget when the complaint contends the real figure is closer to 60%.
On the debt service fund He stated the I&S fund “can only be used to pay off current debt and cannot be used for repairs.” The complaint points to the district’s own official statement and interfund transfer report as telling a different story.
These are allegations I submitted for review, my contentions, drawn from the district’s own documents. They are not findings. Mr. Davis has not been charged or convicted, and is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the statements are on the record, and I asked the authorities to weigh them against federal securities disclosure law, Texas Election Code §255.003, and the precedent of SEC v. Carla Merka, a case in which a school CFO was likewise alleged to have been dishonest about a district’s financial standing in connection with the bond market.
Three complaints I never imagined I would sign
Over this campaign I have sworn out three criminal complaints in the name and under the authority of the State of Texas. The first two I signed in October 2025, my hand not entirely steady, at a notary’s desk. You do not do this casually. You do it when you have read the documents enough times that you can no longer pretend you did not.
It is notarized and sworn. I put my own name on every line, knowing it would be handed to people whose entire job is to test whether I am telling the truth.
The second complaint, four days later, takes on interfund commingling. And here is the part that still stops me cold. I did not have to argue it from the outside. The district’s own independent audit for the year ended August 31, 2023, reproduced on page 88 of its December 2024 bond official statement, lays the balances right out:
I did not write these numbers down. The district’s own auditors did. I just refused to look away from them.
The third complaint is the most recent, sworn in 2026 as this record matured, and it grew out of something altogether different from the bond.
The appraisal district thread, and why I am careful here
While reading public records I obtained under the Texas Public Information Act, I began noticing communications between the school district and the county appraisal district. The more I read, the more I came to believe I was looking at a pattern, an informal channel through which information seemed to move between the two offices, running alongside the formal, public process the law lays out. My most recent criminal complaint is largely built on that thread.
Now let me be deliberate about what I will and will not say here, because it matters. I have laid the specifics out in full for the District Attorney and the Texas Education Agency, with the underlying records attached. What I will not do is try that case in public while it is active, and I will not publish records that carry confidential information about private citizens, including protected information about senior homeowners. Those documents belong in the hands of the investigators, not in a blog post. Putting them here would only risk the very accountability I am working toward.
So I will give you the shape of it. I alleged that confidential information, and information that had not yet been certified, appears to have moved through a channel it should not have, and I asked the authorities to determine whether that crossed a legal line. Those are my allegations, submitted for review. They are not findings, and no one has been charged. If the State concludes there is something here, you will hear it from them, on the record, where it belongs.
A district under financial strain
None of this sits in a vacuum. The district’s own budget records show its General Fund 2024 to 2025 budget was originally adopted with a planned deficit of roughly $1.7 million, a district leaning on a thin margin while asking voters for hundreds of millions more in debt. That is the financial picture the CFO’s public statements were describing, and it is why getting those statements right was never a small thing.
I asked the State of Texas to step in
This spring I did something I never imagined a private citizen could do. I formally petitioned the Texas Education Agency, and the Commissioner of Education himself, to appoint a conservator over Godley ISD, direct state oversight of the district’s governance and its handling of public money while the investigation runs. It is one of the most serious interventions the State can make in a school district, and I did not ask for it lightly. I asked for it because the record had grown to the point where looking away was no longer something I could do in good conscience.
I am not a lawyer. I am one person who learned the statutes because no one else was going to. And I got that petition in front of the highest education official in the state. Whatever the Commissioner decides, that fact still takes my breath away. The system has a door, and an ordinary citizen who refuses to quit can walk through it.
Where it went, multiple referrals
None of this is gathering dust. The Davis evidence is now in front of the Johnson County Criminal District Attorney’s office and the TEA Special Investigations Unit, which already has an open case (No. 2026-10-0234) examining the district’s finances. These are not my only referrals on Godley ISD. They join a stack of them. Whether any becomes action is not mine to decide. My job was to gather the record, organize it so it could not be ignored, and hand it to the people with the power to act. That part is done.
The hardest part is not the work, it is the apathy
I can do the work. The records, the deadlines, the midnight log, that is hard, but it is honest hard. What has truly broken my heart, over and over, is something I was not prepared for. Handing real, documented evidence to the people whose job it is to care, and watching it land in silence. You assemble it perfectly. You cite the statute. You make it impossible to misunderstand. And then nothing. No call. No acknowledgment. The feeling of shouting into a sealed room while the thing you are warning about keeps right on happening.
That apathy is its own grief. It whispers that maybe none of it matters, that a citizen who does everything right can still be met with a shrug. There were months I wondered if I was crazy for caring more than the system seemed to. I had to make peace with a hard truth. I can control the quality of what I file. I cannot control whether anyone acts on it. All I can do is make the record so clean, so complete, so impossible to ignore, that looking away becomes its own decision someone has to own.
And then, the daylight
So let me be bold about the other side of the ledger, because there is one, and it is growing. For most of these eleven months this felt hopeless. Not anymore. The record I built is no longer just mine. It is in front of a District Attorney, a state investigations unit with an open case, and the Commissioner of Education. And this month, the district quietly posted the CFO’s position, the seat Mr. Davis holds. I will not tell you what that means. I do not know, and I will not pretend to. But I will tell you what it felt like. The first real crack of daylight under a door we had been pounding on for the better part of a year. After being told one person could not move anything, something moved. We are getting closer every single day. Not the end. But proof that the slow way works, and that a handful of people who refuse to quit can make an institution blink.
I have lost so much doing this. But I would lose myself entirely if I stopped, and now, for the first time, I can see why it was worth it.
Two field guides, so you do not have to start from zero
One belief kept me going, that what I learned the hard way could save the next person months of pain. So I wrote it down. Everything I know about standing up to a public body and winning the paper war is in two volumes, at realestatemindset.org.
The Advocacy Playbook, Volume I
The foundation. How to file a Texas Public Information Act request that works, how to read what comes back, how to track deadlines, and what to do the moment a government body starts stalling. The book I wish someone had handed me on day one.
The Advocacy Playbook, Volume II
The escalation. Building a record that holds up, filing complaints with the Attorney General, petitioning a state agency, organizing evidence for regulators and prosecutors, and protecting yourself, legally and personally, while you do it.
What I am asking of you
Comment below. Tell me whether this kind of accountability matters to you. If you are in Godley, in Johnson County, or anywhere a school district answers to the people who pay for it, say so. Tell me what to keep digging into. I read every word, and on the hard days your words are the difference between closing the laptop and opening the next file.
Share this with one person who cares how public money gets handled. One reader who understands the stakes is worth more to this fight than almost anything I own.
Take action today
Do not just read this. Do this.
If this stirred something in you, do not let it fade. Turn it into a records request. Here is the truth I keep coming back to. What I found in Godley may not be unique to Godley. That quiet, informal channel between a school district and its appraisal district, the one that carried the data at the center of this story, can exist in any county in Texas. I have come to believe it may be far more common than anyone realizes. I cannot prove that yet. But I know how to test it, and so can you.
Your assignment, and it is urgent: Pick your own school district and your own county appraisal district. Send each one a public information request asking for all emails and communications between the two offices over the last several years. That is the whole ask. You are not accusing anyone of anything. You are simply reading the mail the public already owns.
If even a fraction of the people reading this send those requests, we stop being a handful. We become a wall. Whatever is or is not sitting in those inboxes, sunlight is how a community finds out, and a system that counts on no one looking cannot survive a thousand people looking at once. You do not need a lawyer. You do not need permission. The Advocacy Playbook walks you through every step. File them, then tell me what you find.
Why support matters, and what it really buys
Accountability has a price tag. Records cost money, copy fees, deposits, filing costs, and not getting normal paying work done. For most of these eleven months I have paid it out of my own thinning pocket, and that is exactly why I have been so afraid I would have to choose between this work and my own footing. Your support changes that math and has already changed the fight. It keeps this independent, beholden to no one but the truth, and it means a handful of citizens do not have to carry it alone. Every contribution, however small, buys another request, another filing, another day we get to keep going.
I will keep reporting what the records show, carefully, truthfully, and out loud, for as long as you will stand with me. We are closer than we have ever been. Thank you for reading to the end. You have no idea what it means to not be doing this in silence.
Still standing, Travis
3 literal heros!
Mitch and Travis should run for that CFO position 😂❤️
The three Musketeres ❤️❤️