The Lead’s Editorial: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE DOWNRIGHT UGLY

THE GOOD

The Hill Country Charity Ball Association walked into Sendera Springs Tuesday night and walked out with a record. The 39th Annual Hill Country Charity Ball raised $222,000 for five local beneficiaries — $62,000 more than the organization had ever raised in a single night across nearly four decades of trying.

This wasn’t random generosity. The HCCBA selected its beneficiaries deliberately, with flood recovery and children at the center of every choice. The Mountain Home Volunteer Fire Department’s swiftwater team — the people who went into the Guadalupe River on July 4 — received the largest share. The Reece Zunker Memorial Scholarship Fund, named for one of the flood’s victims, received enough to fund four college scholarships for Kerrville ISD seniors.

Kerr County has been through the worst year in recent memory. Tuesday night, it showed who it is.

THE BAD

Commissioner Holt’s Kendall County moment

Kerr County Precinct 3 Commissioner Jeff Holt announced during his comments at the April 27 Commissioners Court meeting that he is stepping down from his leadership role with the Marine Corps JROTC program in Comfort.

The reason: he needs to spend more time doing his actual job — the one Kerr County voters elected him to and taxpayers pay him for.

We don’t doubt the sincerity of the announcement. But Comfort is in Kendall County. Kerr County Precinct 3 is here. The voters who put Jeff Holt on that court deserved his full attention before he took on outside commitments in another county — not after. This is the kind of judgment call that matters, and it was made in the wrong order.

The airport crash families deserved better than immunity

Judge M. Patrick Maguire’s May 1 dismissal of all claims against the Kerrville-Kerr County Joint Airport Board and former airport manager Mary Rohrer in the 2021 Airport Race Wars 2 crash is, legally speaking, defensible. Governmental immunity in Texas is broad by design.

But legality and accountability are not the same thing.

Two little boys — Santiago Martinez, 8, and Daniel Trujillo-Jones, 6 — died on a public runway at a for-profit event the Joint Airport Board actively sought approval to host. The safety barriers stopped at 660 feet. Spectators were standing past 660 feet. Kerrville police and fire were on scene. Nobody said stop.

The board told the FAA and TxDOT the barriers would be in place. They weren’t — not where it counted. The track was never prepped for traction. These aren’t legal technicalities. They are choices made by people who work for the public, on public property, at an event the public approved.

The immunity doctrine protected the institution. It protected no one else. The Bexar County case against the promoter continues — and that is where the families must now look for any measure of justice.

The Legislature passed a law it didn’t understand

The Heaven’s 27 Camp Safety Act was passed in special session after 28 people died at Camp Mystic on July 4, 2025. The grief was real. The urgency was understandable. The homework, apparently, was not done.

The law requires every licensed youth camp to maintain two internet connections — one of them end-to-end fiber optic. For rural camps across the Hill Country, fiber either doesn’t exist or would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install. Nineteen camps, including UBarU right here in Kerr County, had to file a federal lawsuit to say what any local resident could have told the Legislature for free.

Now Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows have issued a joint statement telling DSHS to use flexibility on a mandate that has no flexibility written into it. A press release is not a waiver. A press release is not an amendment. Two men cannot instruct a state agency to ignore a statute through a statement from the Lt. Governor’s office.

And the harder problem — the floodway provision that could permanently bar river camps from operating — got no mention at all. No Kerr County camp has been relicensed for the 2026 season. DSHS won’t even tell us which FEMA map it’s using to draw the lines.

The Legislature legislated in grief. That’s human. Legislating without reading the map — literally — is the Bad.

THE DOWNRIGHT UGLY

The Kerr County Republican Party exists to support Republican candidates. That is its stated purpose, its legal function, and its moral obligation to the voters it claims to represent.

What it apparently also does: steal signs.

Kerr County GOP Chair Helen Herd and a volunteer were caught in the act this week removing campaign signs belonging to Brenda Hughes — a Republican candidate for Precinct 1 Commissioner — from property where Hughes had written permission to place them. The property sits directly in front of GOP headquarters. Hughes had replaced the signs multiple times after they went missing. Now we know why they kept disappearing.

When Hughes’ husband Buzzie confronted Herd, she offered one explanation: “Because Brenda is a Democrat.”

She is not. Hughes has never voted in a Democratic primary. She built the Republican Women of Kerr County membership from 92 to 236 in a single year. Her voting record is public.

Herd’s accusation isn’t just wrong. It’s a deliberate smear used to justify what a Kerrville police report now documents as theft. And Clayson Lambert — Hughes’ opponent in the May 26 Republican runoff — was sitting inside the office watching it happen, and covered his face with a manila folder rather than face a camera on his way out.

This is interference in a Republican primary by the chair of the Kerr County Republican Party. It is an abuse of her position, a violation of the trust voters place in party leadership, and an embarrassment to every Republican in this county who competes honestly.

The same organization behind this conduct wants to hand-count Kerr County’s ballots. Buzzie Hughes said it plainly, and he’s right: if they’ll steal signs and lie to voters at the polls, they cannot be trusted with the count.

Helen Herd should resign. Voters should remember what they saw.