The Lead’s Editorial: Four years of Rich Paces’ chaos is enough

Precinct 2 Commissioner Rich Paces opened his remarks at last week’s Republican Women of Kerr County candidate forum by reading from a prepared statement. It wasn’t lost on many in the room that Paces was violating the forum’s rules against using notes. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched his four-year tenure on the Commissioners Court.

Rich Paces doesn’t believe rules apply to him.

In March 2023, shortly after taking office, election conspiracy theorist Mark Cook asked Commissioner Paces if he had read a book titled “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates.” The book argues that local officials have a duty to resist higher authorities they deem unjust or tyrannical. In text messages obtained by The Lead, Paces told Cook he had read the book and “agrees with the doctrine.”

That single statement explains everything that’s happened since.

For four years, Kerr County taxpayers have funded Paces’ personal crusade against facts, expertise, and democratic accountability. He doesn’t see himself as a county commissioner bound by state law, expert opinion, or voter mandates. He sees himself as a resistance fighter – with himself as the sole judge of what constitutes tyranny worth resisting.

The costs have been staggering.

The Election integrity crusade
Built on the false premise that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, Paces spent three years waging war on our election systems. He falsely claimed voting machines are “black boxes” with motherboards from China – they’re from Texas. He brought in Mark Cook – the same conspiracy theorist who gave him that book and is part of the Mike Lindell and Tina Peters network that attempted to prove Trump was cheated – to demonstrate voting machine vulnerabilities. Cook showed up with a headset and sunglasses, made grand claims, and provided no evidence beyond a PowerPoint presentation.

The crusade cost Kerr County hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff time, legal fees, and operational chaos in the County Clerk’s office. County election officials – the actual experts – tried to explain that our systems are secure and auditable. Paces ignored them.

The result? The Kerr County Republican Party committed to hand-counting election day ballots for the March 3 primary.

Paces promised 400 volunteers would materialize to do the work.

They didn’t.

The party discovered hand-counting would cost it thousands per hour and couldn’t find enough people willing to spend their day validating Paces’ conspiracy theories. The hand-count was abandoned. The party now vows to try again for any runoffs – apparently undeterred by the practical failure of Paces’ grand promises.

Three years of disruption.

Hundreds of thousands in taxpayer costs. A time-consuming hand-count process that couldn’t even get off the ground. All to chase election fraud that doesn’t exist.

Violating the law he’s sworn to uphold
On February 12, 2024, just two days after receiving specific training on the Texas Open Meetings Act, Paces joined Commissioners Jeff Holt and Tom Jones at a Headwaters Groundwater Conservation District meeting, forming an undisclosed quorum without the required 72-hour public notice. County Attorney Heather Stebbins referred all three for criminal investigation.

For Paces, this wasn’t his first violation. In March 2023, he sent an email to Commissioners Don Harris and Harley Belew discussing an upcoming voter integrity resolution before it appeared on any public agenda – another violation of the same transparency law designed to prevent backroom deals.

The man who claims to fight for election integrity can’t even follow the laws that ensure transparent, accountable government.

Ignoring voters to fund his pet project
In 2022, Rich Paces campaigned against all three county bond measures on the ballot, including improvements to the Hill Country Youth Event Center’s Ag Barn, enhanced courthouse security, and a new animal control facility. The animal shelter passed anyway – voters defied Paces and approved the facility. The Ag Barn improvements failed.

So Paces led the effort to spend ARPA funds on it anyway.

Over $500,000 in federal pandemic relief funds went toward replacing the Ag Barn’s roof and addressing structural issues, with work completed in June 2025. The expenditure created what Paces himself later acknowledged was a “piecemeal effort” that still doesn’t address the facility’s long-term needs. In his own June 2025 presentation to commissioners court, Paces outlined another $1.8 million in necessary improvements – electrical upgrades, fire suppression, concrete floors, interior finishes – all deferred because the comprehensive bond package voters rejected would have funded them properly.

The optics are inescapable: voters said no to Ag Barn improvements. Paces spent the money anyway, creating an incomplete solution that will cost more in the long run.

In reality, you could argue that those ARPA funds could have aided in laying the groundwork for flood warning infrastructure – a system the county desperately needed and still doesn’t have. Instead, we have an insulated roof on a barn voters already rejected, and a growing list of what still needs to be done.

Using manufactured data to serve industry interests
After the July 4 flood, Paces claimed in a Kerrville Daily Times op-ed that aggregate mining operations diverted 3 billion gallons of water during the flood, effectively “saving Comfort.” As a petroleum engineer, Paces knows that 3 billion gallons equals 12 times the entire capacity of Nimitz Lake, or roughly 36 supertankers worth of oil. The claim defies basic physics.

His source? Unverified self-reports from the mining companies themselves. Aerial imagery shows no evidence of such massive water accumulation.

Paces chairs the Kerr County Aggregate Production Operations Advisory Council – the body that oversees the very industry he was advocating for with manufactured numbers. This isn’t oversight. It’s public relations work for private companies, using his position as commissioner to legitimize absurd claims.

Creating regulatory chaos on battery storage
Paces’ opposition to Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) offers a case study in creating problems without solutions – and ignoring inconvenient facts in the process.

He raises cybersecurity concerns that the Public Utility Commission says it cannot address for specific locations. He demands information PUCT won’t share for security reasons, then uses their refusal as evidence of danger.

His proposed solution?

Hire a part-time Fire Marshal specifically to police BESS installations. But it remains unclear whether Kerr County has the regulatory authority to do this narrowly without adopting the full state fire code, which is more stringent than what the city of Kerrville currently enforces. That could impose new regulatory burdens on a community not inclined toward that level of oversight, affecting businesses and property owners far beyond the BESS facilities Paces targets.

We also get a heavy dose of fear-based histronics from Paces. What Paces won’t discuss is what battery storage actually does for Texas and Kerr County.

Real-time electricity prices in ERCOT averaged $31 per megawatt-hour lower in 2024 than 2023, with August prices falling $160 per megawatt-hour during the state’s peak demand month. Battery storage has contributed to at least $750 million in electricity cost savings for Texas consumers since 2023. During summer 2023, ERCOT issued 11 conservation notices to manage tight supply, but in summer 2024, with comparable demand, no alerts were needed thanks to nearly 5 GW of new battery storage capacity.

When grid emergencies do occur, batteries respond. During record heat in August 2023, batteries supplied 1.8 GW to the grid, reducing energy prices by almost 50 percent. In September 2023, battery storage supplied electricity to approximately 434,000 homes and helped avoid grid failure.

Every Kerr County resident connected to the ERCOT grid benefits from this price stabilization and reliability – including Kerrville Public Utility Board customers who already enjoy some of the state’s lowest rates thanks to renewable energy contracts.

Much of the anti-BESS rhetoric comes from oil and gas factions opposed to renewable energy. Paces, a retired petroleum engineer, seems determined to create obstacles for the very energy infrastructure that’s keeping Texas residents’ power bills affordable.

He offers no viable alternatives – just obstruction dressed up as vigilance, with potential collateral damage to small businesses trying to navigate the regulatory uncertainty he’s created.

The pattern holds: when facts conflict with ideology, Paces ignores the facts.

Small-town bullying
When Paces can’t wage ideological crusades, he sometimes just picks on local businesses. Early in his term, he picked on Central Provisions, a new market and antique store in Center Point, which needed parking accommodations.

Paces unilaterally requested no-parking signs without consulting the business owners. They learned about his plan only when The Lead told them it was on the commissioners’ court agenda. Down the street, another business drew similar crowds but faced no such action. The selective enforcement raised obvious questions about Paces’ motives.

It’s a small thing compared to his larger disruptions. But it shows the same pattern: rules and consultation are for other people. Paces does what he wants.

Praying against Texas jobs
Perhaps no moment better captured Paces’ ideological rigidity than his January 2025 invocation opening the commissioners court. He prayed for the repeal of federal subsidies supporting wind and solar energy – an industry that employs 262,000 Texans, pays average salaries of $115,000 (double the state median household income), and saves Texas consumers $7 billion compared to fossil fuels.

Texas leads the nation in wind energy and ranks second in solar. But Paces, a retired petroleum engineer, sees renewable energy as tyranny worth resisting – never mind that oil and gas receive roughly $20 billion in annual subsidies, or that taxpayers fund billions of dollars in orphaned well cleanup costs.

When your ideology requires you to pray against thousands of Texas jobs, you’ve lost touch with reality.

The choice before voters
Rich Paces came to office in 2022 as a petroleum engineer with technical expertise and professional credentials. Paces likes to say he was called to serve; we’re doubtful of divine intervention.

Maybe somewhere the Lord Almighty calls people to ignore voters who rejected the Ag Barn or violate the Open Meetings Act. He helped spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars chasing election fraud that doesn’t exist. He coughed up questionable data to serve the mining industry he’s supposed to oversee. He obstructed energy projects without offering solutions. He created chaos in the County Clerk’s office, uncertainty for local businesses, and dysfunction in county operations.

At the Republican Women’s forum, Paces broke the rules again by reading from prepared notes. It’s a small thing. But it’s perfectly consistent with everything we’ve seen: Rich Paces believes rules are for other people.

Four years of chaos is enough. Kerr County Republicans should thoroughly reject his re-election in the March 3 primary.

The doctrine of the lesser magistrates holds that local officials should resist tyranny. What Paces has given us is the tyranny of one man’s ideology over facts, expertise, and democratic accountability.

We deserve better.