COMMENTARY
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, is facing a new round of financial scrutiny after The New York Times reported August 10 that he has drawn six-figure income for years from a cell tower company he co-founded in 2005 — one that landed a site on the grounds of a Frisco, Texas hospital where Paxton himself sat on the board. Paxton is locked in a close, closely watched race against Democrat James Talarico, and any story that touches on how he has built his wealth carries more weight in that context than it might otherwise — whether or not the reporting itself holds up.
The Times built its central finding around a number: income of $100,000 to $1 million roughly every 18 months from the tower. But according to a Wireless Estimator leasing timeline compiled from documents obtained from Collin County, plus imagery showing a tenant not reflected in any recorded lease, the picture is considerably less dramatic than the income range suggests.
For roughly the tower’s first decade, this wasn’t a company printing money off a hospital-front asset — it was two partners splitting a modest annual profit while still working off the cost of building the 119-foot monopole cell site.
The piece also talks about Paxton at length without adding a single confirmed fact to the questions that actually matter — whether Paxton voted on his own company’s lease with the hospital and what the lease’s original terms were.
Asked to respond, Paxton campaign spokesman Nick Maddux told the Times: “This week, every major publication in Texas covered the overflow crowds at Attorney General Paxton’s Protect the Texas Promise tour, and the Times spent that same week combing through twenty-year-old lease paperwork on a cell tower that Ken Paxton has disclosed publicly for many years. That is not journalism; it’s a search for a story that does not exist.”
What the article actually reports
Paxton co-founded Premier Vertical Properties in 2005 with Richard Sine, a Texas telecom executive, while serving as a state representative. He reported sitting on the board of Centennial Medical Center in Frisco from 2003 to 2013. Less than a year after Premier was formed, the company signed a lease letting T-Mobile use a tower it controlled on the hospital’s grounds—property owned at the time by Tenet Hospitals—and later added Verizon and DISH Wireless as tenants, after Paxton had already left the board.
Sine’s signature is on all three lease agreements; Paxton’s is not, though the T-Mobile site itself is named “Paxton MP” in the paperwork.
Paxton’s state ethics form first listed an interest in Premier in 2006, valued then at under $5,000; this year’s filing puts the company’s assets at “at least $55,610 or more” without mentioning profit. His federal Senate candidacy paperwork lists a reported asset value of $250,001 to $500,000 against that income range — a spread wide enough that the actual figure’s placement matters a great deal to how the story should be read.
The timeline, corrected
Collin County records show three leases: T-Mobile, signed April 24, 2006; Verizon, December 8, 2016; and DISH Wireless, June 12, 2024. But tower imagery shows what appears to be Clearwire equipment on the structure from near the beginning, which was removed around 2021—a tenancy with no corresponding recorded lease in the county’s files.
That’s not unusual on its own; colocation agreements are sometimes handled through a master lease or side agreement that never generates its own county filing. But it means the tower likely carried two paying tenants, not one, for most of its first decade — T-Mobile and what appears to be Clearwire — rather than sitting single-tenant until Verizon arrived in 2016, as the recorded documents alone would suggest. The site currently has four tenants, two of them added within the past two years.
What that tenancy was actually worth
Cell tower lease expert Ken Schmidt of Steel in the Air ran the numbers for Wireless Estimator on what a two-tenant tower like this would have generated in that period, using market averages rather than actual figures:
Clearwire — $18,000/year
T-Mobile — $24,000/year
Total — $42,000/year
Expenses
Ground Rent — $12,000/year
Insurance — $600/year
Maintenance — $800/year
Taxes — $600/year (or none if the hospital was exempt)
Total — $15,000/year
Profit — $27,000/year
Split two ways between Paxton and Sine, that’s roughly $13,500 a year apiece — for close to a decade. Set against Schmidt’s estimate that zoning, engineering and building the site cost somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000 in 2005, that profit level means the partners were looking at seven to nine years of combined earnings to work off the initial construction investment, before either of them saw a dollar that wasn’t paying the site back.
The Times leans on a colorful comparison to make the deal sound remarkable: landing a hospital site off a major highway in a company’s first year of existence, likened to a batter hitting a home run on his first at-bat. That comparison may reflect what the source wasn’t shown—there’s no indication in the piece that they had the tenant timeline in hand, and a single carrier paying rent for the better part of a decade is a modest return for a first swing at the plate.
That’s not what a home run looks like, and the timing undercuts the premise further. Although Highway 121 fronted the hospital, the now-adjacent Sam Rayburn Tollway didn’t reach this stretch of Frisco until 2008—two years after Premier’s tower went up—so this wasn’t a hot corridor yet, as it is now. Frisco’s population was a fraction of today’s roughly 247,000, up from about 34,000 in 2000. With no tollway traffic and plenty of open ground, there was no scarcity forcing anyone to fight over this particular site at 12505 Lebanon Rd.—which fits with why no second MNO signed on for another ten years.
Frisco records show a second, unbuilt tower bid
It remains unknown whether Premier operates any other cell towers in Texas beyond the Frisco hospital site, since the FCC’s Antenna Structure Registration database only requires towers of 200 feet or taller — or those that may interfere with a nearby flight path — to be listed, and the company’s known structures fall well under that threshold.
What is documented, however, is that Premier was actively pursuing at least one other site in Frisco. City records from April 2012 show the company offered the city $800 a month to lease park property near Bennett and Alma Griffin Middle School for a second monopole, a rate city staff flatly rejected after finding it undercut comparable rates in the area. Staff recommended against the proposal and said there could be a counteroffer.
No available deed filings or subsequent city business show the offer was ever revised or the lease finalized. Satellite imagery of the site today shows no tower at the park or at the school. The nearest structure, less than one-third of a mile away, is a self-supporting 105-foot tower owned by Blue Sky Towers, which wasn’t constructed until November of 2025.
The questions the piece raises and then leaves sitting there
Here’s the actual shape of the story: a hospital board would ordinarily have to approve a land lease like this one, and the Times says it’s unclear whether Paxton, sitting on that board, voted on or participated in discussions of the deal with his own company.
That’s a legitimate question. It’s also one of the things the article doesn’t answer. Tenet didn’t respond to questions, and the hospital’s current administration says it has no records from that era. So the reporting establishes that a potentially important document trail doesn’t exist, or at least wasn’t produced, and stops there.
Worth noting: even if Paxton didn’t recuse himself from a vote on the lease, and even if the rest of the board went along with it anyway, the most serious exposure that scenario points to is a hospital ethics violation — a finding well short of a civil or criminal charge, and not the kind of thing the story’s framing seems built to suggest.
Reading it all together
Strip out the framing and what’s left is a tower that took most of a decade to earn back what it cost to build, a board seat that ended in 2013, and a disclosure range wide enough to cover both a modest asset and a genuinely undervalued one.
Paxton’s finances have drawn real scrutiny before: a bribery investigation over a $100,000 gift, a grand jury review of a McKinney land deal, a 2015 securities fraud charge, a 2023 impeachment over bribery-adjacent allegations. Every one of those closed or resolved without a conviction or an admitted violation, and this story doesn’t add a data point to that list — it adds a tower whose ownership was never hidden, a tenant history more complicated than either the Times or its own “home run” quote suggests, and an income figure that, run through the actual cost of building and running the thing, looks a lot less remarkable than the headline number implies.
Update: The article was revised on August 14, 2026, to identify that Premier had been active in Frisco, attempting to construct at least one new cell tower.
