Tim O'Hare

A personal injury attorney, he was a Farmers Branch city councilman and mayor and chaired the Tarrant County Republican Party. He has been Tarrant County Judge, the chief executive of the county, since 2023. He is named as the Republican incumbent in the 2026 Tarrant County Judge election, held on 3 November 2026.

Career

O'Hare graduated from R.L. Turner High School in 1987, took a finance degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991 and a law degree at Southern Methodist University in 1995, and owns a personal injury law firm. He was elected to the Farmers Branch city council in 2005 and was mayor of Farmers Branch from 2008 to 2011. After moving to Tarrant County he chaired the county Republican Party from 2016 to 2018. In 2022 he won the election for Tarrant County Judge and took office in 2023.

Positions

Reference works describe O'Hare as a Republican. As a Farmers Branch official he backed local measures on immigration, including a rental ordinance, English as the city's official language and local police enforcement of immigration law. In 2021 he co-founded Southlake Families PAC, which opposed a school district's cultural competence plan and raised money for school board candidates. According to Wikipedia, in May 2025 he called county redistricting efforts purely about partisan politics and said the aim was to secure three Republican commissioners. The Texas Standard reported that in 2022 he campaigned against what he called diversity inclusion nonsense.

Controversies

As a city councilman O'Hare was the lead proponent of a Farmers Branch ordinance that sought to bar landlords from renting to people in the country unlawfully, according to the Texas Standard. Federal courts struck the ordinance down and the city defended it for seven years; the Texas Standard reports the litigation cost taxpayers $6.6 million, led to layoffs and service cuts. In March 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower-court ruling that the ordinance was unconstitutional, so the ruling stands.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia · Texas Standard