"Tarrant water district under microscope"

INVESTIGATIVE CATEGORY

Fort Worth Report
04/18/2021

We wish to nominate Jessica Priest for the Showcase Investigative Award. When we launched in April 2021, we had heard rumblings about a government agency left unchecked. For decades Tarrant Regional Water District has been full of corruption, nepotism, conflict of interest, cronyism, insider trading, politics and a massive land grab by investors buying cheap land and flipping it for huge profits. This involved board members, staff and crooked attorneys. TRWD is a government organization with five publicly elected board members, 410 employees and a budget of millions.

Priest’s articles have educated, engaged and empowered readers about the water district's inner workings and why they matter. She spent more than 200 hours researching, pouring over open records requests, emails and other documents. Her non-partisan reporting has inspired community activists from both major political parties to work together to demand needed changes and forced TRWD to look at how it can improve. Priest’s comprehensive reporting caught the attention of the District Attorney. In August the DA opened a full investigation of TRWD and later referred it to the grand jury. The grand jury declined to press charges in part because Priest's reporting led the Water District to change its governance policies (see below).

Jessica’s reporting impressed one reader who follows the district closely. She wrote a letter to us, pointing out Jesica’s professional, well-researched, fact-based writing resulted in these improvements. Now, five additional print and online local publications are regularly reporting this story.

The Board of Directors has voted to disallow two illegal payments totaling $360,000 to a former General Manager and a current U.S. Congresswoman's son.

Since at least one General Council attorney was complicit in the illegal payments scheme, the Board hired a different law firm to review internal documents to find if other illegal plans had been set in motion.

The Board hired a law firm to develop new comprehensive TRWD Board Governance Policies and Employee Policies.

A U.S. Congresswoman's son who hired his girlfriend, directly supervised her for years, married her but continued to directly supervise her, realized Priest would write about this again so his wife resigned minutes after the Board voted on the new nepotism policy.

This series of stories put our non-partisan, non-profit news organization, Fort Worth Report, on the news map in Fort Worth. Jessica did this without the long, institutional knowledge of a traditional news outlet. Rather, she put in the long, hard work digging up work, building sources and using old-fashioned reporting. Thank you for considering Jessica Priest in the category of Showcase Investigative Award.

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Submitted by Jamese Branch.