Nydia Cardenas on the Roles and Issues of the Commissioner’s Chair
Daniel Vidal Soto
In terms of what the commissioners are responsible for, I think that is something that is missing, even when we’re talking to voters, people have no idea that county government exists. They might know city… state…and then federal government – but county (government) is usually, like, people don’t know about it.
In Texas, every county is split into four, each of those four quadrants are called precincts, and they each have a commissioner. And then there’s a judge, which is not like a legal judge, but almost like the mayor, but at the county level. So every commissioner court is five people, but the court part is not a court of law, but an administrative body and it is actually a full time administrative role, for the county.
And they’re responsible for 5 big buckets, as I describe it.
One is the public health system, like our JPS, the hospital systems, disease prevention programs.
They’re responsible for administering our elections. So, deciding and voting on how many polling locations we’ll have and where. On August 4 they were scheduled to vote on reducing polling locations by 40% but that got delayed to this upcoming Tuesday September 1 with a request for there to be more sites available.
They’re also responsible for roads and infrastructure and development in unincorporated parts of the county. Tarrant County is very big, and not all land is part of a city, so if something is not part of a city, then it’s unincorporated Tarrant County; and the commissioner’s court is responsible for managing roads, bridges, infrastructure in those places.
Then they’re responsible for setting the property tax rate for the county. So, a part of your property taxes that go to the county and the one goes to JPS, they set that tax rate. There’s been a lot of issues with the appraisal district that determines what your property values are. It just came out this week that people whose homes are under $300K in valuation paid over 105% of their valuation, whereas people whose homes valued at over a million dollars only paid only 71% on their property values. So that’s a big issue: our working families are paying more percentage taxes than our wealthy families.
So, the fifth big thing that they’re in charge of is they oversee the budget for the county jail, the sheriff, the court system, the juvenile and all our legal and criminal justice system. And we’ve had 80 people die in our jail under the current sheriff. We’re also sending more young people into the prison system than any other county, so these are all alarming things that are happening that, going to your point about talking about Manny, well Manny as a former police officer has refused to hold law enforcement accountable for any of these things and he was recently quoted as saying “youth in Tarrant County are becoming more violent and aggressive”.
So those are the 5 big buckets of what commissioners are responsible for, so those are actually really big things: our democracy, our health system, and we know health care access at a national level is being crunched down, and so we don’t have local infrastructure, then that’s why you see just so many people, I see a lot of people posting online like GoFundMe to either fight their disease or bury their loved ones or have a surgery that they need.
So, the Commissioners court could do a lot, but they keep cutting the budget down, so then, there are fewer resources available. “
In the March 3, 2026, election for commissioner, the Democratic vote totaled thirty-four thousand, and the Republican vote had thirty thousand voters. With a higher total vote, the Democrats have the potential to win this election.
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