Imagine the excitement that must have gone through the offices at 801 Texas Avenue a few days ago after somebody there received a “tip” about KSEV-700 conservative talker Dan Patrick.
That tip apparently suggested that Patrick, who has led a charge on property tax reform that has included exposing cozy relationships between appraisal districts and politicians, was himself guilty of some shenanigans with his property taxes.
Isn’t that just potentially great copy? Conservative Chron critic turns out to be hypocritical blowhard on property taxes!
There’s just one tiny little problem: the facts didn’t bear out that fantastic story.
And now there’s potentially a much bigger problem, because the Chronicle‘s Dan Feldstein pretty much told that story anyway today.
Note how the story is framed:
Sure enough, Patrick’s home on Lake Conroe has a full homestead exemption, designed to lessen the tax burden on a primary residence. And his home in Katy also had a homestead break from the Katy Independent School District.
Until we made a couple of calls.
When Patrick transferred his homestead to Lake Conroe a few years ago, Montgomery and Fort Bend counties coordinated the removal of most of his Katy exemptions.
But Katy ISD straddles two counties and its school taxes are collected by Waller County. Montgomery didn’t communicate with Waller, and Patrick didn’t volunteer that he still had a KISD exemption because, he said, he didn’t even notice.
Waller kept the exemption until contacted by the Chronicle. The county has billed him $595.
Patrick tells a very different story on Lone Star Times today. He offers to provide documentation for his assertions, AND he writes that he made all of this very clear to Feldstein, whose story omitted or mischaracterized (in Patrick’s view) key facts:
Again, I want to be perfectly clear
