Ken Paxton has spent a decade as the top law enforcement officer in Texas, on a taxpayer salary, and somehow ended up with an estimated net worth of $13 million and 15 properties across five states.

This week, reporters found one of the pipes the money came through. It is a cell tower behind a hospital in Frisco.

The arrangement

Here is the sequence, as reported by the New York Times and covered by the El Paso Times on August 11, 2026:

• 2003–2013: Paxton served on the board of the hospital that became Baylor, Scott & White Medical Center in Frisco.
• 2005: While a state representative, Paxton co-founded a cell tower company, Premier Vertical Properties.
• 2006: Premier signed a deal with T-Mobile to lease space on a 119-foot cell tower standing on that hospital's grounds.

So a sitting hospital board member's brand-new company ended up holding the tower on the hospital's own campus.

The Times reported that the deal has netted Paxton a six-figure payout roughly every 18 months since 2006 — and that it is one of his top sources of income. That is twenty years of checks.

The question nobody can answer

The Times laid out the problem in one sentence:

"Industry experts said a hospital's board would need to review and approve a decision to lease land to a cell tower company such as Premier. It is not clear whether Mr. Paxton, as a board member, voted on any contract between the hospital and his company, or whether he had participated in any such discussions."

Read that carefully. The board had to approve it. Paxton was on the board. Whether he voted on his own company's deal is not clear.

That is not an accusation. It is worse in a way — it means the record does not show. And there is a reason it does not show: Paxton did not list the tower's address on his state or federal financial disclosures, so reporters had to find the site through Collin County deed records.

Disclosure exists so this exact question is answerable without a deed search.

The Times also noted that industry experts were surprised a tower in a prime spot — near a highway and a busy hospital — went to a company created the year before, rather than to a larger, established firm.

The response was about the reporter

Paxton's team did not address whether he voted on the contract. Senior advisor Nick Maddux went after the newspaper instead:

"The New York Times is not a newspaper anymore; it is an opposition research slop shop. It hired a journalist with a long history of manufacturing fake stories that have all been debunked to continue its slop on the Texas Senate beat."

Maddux added that the Times "spent that same week combing through 20-year-old lease paperwork on a cell tower that Ken Paxton has disclosed publicly for many years."

Both halves of that are worth pausing on.

The paperwork being twenty years old is not a defense — the payments are current. He is still collecting.

And "disclosed publicly for many years" sits awkwardly next to the fact that the disclosures left off where the tower actually was.

Texas Democratic Party spokesman Ryan Martin called it "classic corruption": "Paxton has made millions while serving in public office, and Texans deserve answers."

Why this is familiar

The pattern here is not new for Paxton. It is the same shape every time: an official position, a private benefit, and a paper trail that stops just short of the room where the decision got made.

We wrote about the $274,300 check that arrived one day before he went to bat for the donor. Before that, eight of his own senior deputies reported him to the FBI for using his office to help a friend and donor — and all eight were fired or forced out. The Texas House impeached him 121 to 23 over that conduct. A judge later ruled his office broke the Texas Whistleblower Act and ordered the state to pay the fired aides $6.6 million, a bill Texas taxpayers are now covering.

The full record is on his report card, and it is long.

The timing

Paxton is on the ballot November 3 against Democrat James Talarico, and he has been trailing in poll after poll.

He has also just collected endorsements from 18 of the 23 Republicans Texas sends to Congress — six of whom were backing John Cornyn against him three months ago.

Those members endorsed a man whose answer to "did you vote on your own company's contract?" is that the newspaper asking is a slop shop.

Texans have been asking for a while how a public servant on a public salary assembled $13 million and 15 properties. The cell tower is one answer. It took deed records to find it.

Source

Paxton faces scrutiny over cell tower deal in Texas US Senate race by Adam Powell, El Paso Times, August 11, 2026, reporting on an investigation by The New York Times. Photo: Getty Images.