A little bit about Rob.

“I truly believe God has been preparing me for this position all my life,” Kelly said. “I didn’t go looking for this job, it came looking for me. When asked to run, I told them ‘no thanks, my gate is closed.’ They persisted and persuaded me to open it. My family and I earnestly prayed about every aspect of this decision and believe this is the time. I’m ready to serve the citizens of Kerr County as their next county judge.”

Kelly has been a commercial litigation attorney, mediator and arbitrator for more than 40 years. He practiced in San Antonio where he served on the management committee of one of the largest law firms in South Texas prior to running as the Republican candidate for Chief Justice of the San Antonio Court of Appeals. After the election he moved his practice to Kerrville to be near the family ranch in the Camp Verde area.

Kelly has a strong record of leadership in his profession and the community. He has been a frequent author and lecturer for the State Bar of Texas, the American Banking Association, Texas Association of Defense Counsel, The University of Texas, University of Houston Law School and Texas Tech University Law School.

He chaired the San Antonio Bar Association Ethics Committee, was president of the Christian Legal Society, served on the board of the Bexar County Dispute Resolution Center and was the volunteer coordinator of Habitat for Humanity.

He also was active with the United Methodist Church as a lay stewardship speaker and lay director on the Walk to Emmaus. He was involved in the Kairos Prison Ministry and has served on many Emmaus and Kairos teams.

Since moving to Kerr County, Kelly continued his community service on the Kerrville Independent School District board and was president during the successful bond issue to build the new Tivy High School and Fred H. Tally Elementary School.

He continued with Habitat for Humanity and was president as the organization grew from building one house each year to four homes per year.

He was president of the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country and served on the Peterson Regional Medical Center Development Committee raising the funds to build the new hospital.

He led the Hill Country Emmaus Community and has worked on dozens of teams. Kelly has taught biblical principles of dispute resolution to numerous Sunday School classes, the Texas Coalition of Home Schools, Laity Lodge and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes among others. He served on the Alternative Dispute Resolution Council of the State Bar of Texas.

Recently, Kelly was certified as a member of the Kerr County Community Emergency Response Team. He also is a graduate of the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office Citizen’s Academy and the Kerrville Police Department Citizen’s Academy, as well as has worked with Kerr County Crime Stoppers.

Kelly is a member of First United Methodist Church. He and his wife, Vicki, also a widow, live in West Kerr County, where she is an artist.

Together they have four children and five grandchildren, Meg Russell in Austin, Dan and son, Connor, in Bandera, Jennifer married to Scott Delaney with children, Bradley and Brynne, in Philadelphia, and Alan Van Reet married to Bobbi Richardson with daughters, Jayme and Ashlee, in Keller.

Rob started laying out what he was going to inform us about.

He said he would like to present 3 issues

1. Info on Co-vid 19

2. Property being purchased to make sure we have room for growth.

3. Public Defenders Office.

The first thing he advised was the hot line that will be set up

830-315-5900 1,2,3,4 for a total of five lines. And we will have online portal.

He made it clear about the closing of bars, and dealing with restaurants and the fact that it out of control of any local official. It has to pertain to executive order GA32

Executive Order GA-32 (texas.gov)

This is tied to folks in hospital. When the amount of people in hospital gets over 15% then restaurants must go back to 50%. Then he told us they have 125 beds in the hospital. But the Texas hospital bed capacity determines how many are used in formula.

You can google this for more info. Anyway they say we only have 88. %15 of 88 equals 13.2 and we now have like 23 in the hospital.

Next was the 1A, 1B then the rest of the people.

As new, active COVID-19 cases climbed sharply this week, Kerr County public health authorities have been working fastidiously behind the scenes to organize a communitywide phone bank to assist in the organized distribution of vaccinations to the public when enough doses become available. At the same time, they continued to plead with citizens to be extra vigilant by using safety precautions.

Mass Vaccination Plan

“There has been a lot of confusion and misinformation by word of mouth or social media regarding the vaccinations and when certain individuals can expect to be inoculated locally,” said William B. “Dub” Thomas, coordinator of Kerr County Emergency Management.

“What we hope everyone can understand is that we are still trying to make sure our first tier of vaccine recipients – health care workers, first responders, etc. – are covered if they choose to be,” Thomas said. “Then, and only then, will we move on to Tier 1B, which is the level that includes those individuals 65 years of age and older who have an underlying medical condition.”

“We understand that many residents want to get their vaccination and the protection it will provide as quickly as they possibly can,” Thomas said. “This sense of urgency has resulted in local pharmacies and the hospital being inundated with phone calls.”

“We live in a community where many individuals will fall into the 1B category, and they know their turn will be next,” Thomas said. “Once we receive large doses of the vaccines, we will implement our communitywide vaccination plan to take care of a maximum number of recipients as quickly as possible.”

Meeting on Wednesday afternoon to work on the roll out of the protective doses of Moderna to the local population was the Kerr County Vaccine Task Force, comprised of city and county emergency management leaders, as well as representatives from Peterson Health, Family Practice Associates and HEB.

Working hard on behalf of the welfare of all Kerr County citizens who want to receive the vaccination, they nailed down details of the communitywide vaccination plan, which will include a phone bank for securing appointments, forms to fill out in advance and more.

Many healthcare workers in that first tier still need to get their shot before incoming vials of the vaccine can be given to the next tier of the public, said meeting host Fredericksburg Fire Department and EMS Fire Chief Eric Maloney.

Kerr County has a large number of people working in healthcare – some 3,400 people who work in various medical capacities, whether they are private physicians, home health care nurses, paramedics and the like. The large number of healthcare personnel here, coupled with the small allotment of doses provided in the first round, means that many here in that first tier still need to be vaccinated.

When it is time to vaccinate the Tier 1B category of individuals – those who are 65 years or older and who have an underlying medical condition – Kerr County has a “mass vaccination footprint” model in the form of its communitywide flu clinic developed some 10 years ago.

The fact that recipients of the COVID-19 vaccine will need to be observed for 15 minutes after they receive their shots “would be a problem for a drive-through clinic, so the model will need to be adapted slightly,” Thomas said.

The task force is coordinating with a few select sites around Kerrville, so that everything is set up and ready to go quickly when Kerr County receives a large enough cache of doses.

Thomas is working on acquiring and lining up volunteers from the Kerr County CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) and others to man the COVID-19 phone bank, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. That way, Kerr County individuals can call and reserve their time to receive their first dose.

Organizers will limit how many people will be in the clinic area at a time by asking vaccination recipients to come alone. The appointments will also allow organizers to space out visits so that attendees will be able to avoid the risk of catching the novel coronavirus from a crowd of people congregated in waiting lines.

“We will release the phone numbers to the COVID-19 Phone Bank as soon as they are established and online for taking calls,” Thomas said. “We will make public announcements asking people to call the phone bank and set up their appointments, but again, that will not happen until we receive enough doses in our area to host a mass clinic.”

In a show of community solidarity through this pandemic, the various sites around town that receive doses of the vaccine are keeping the lines of communication open between them and are coordinating their efforts. That way, if one place finds itself with an excess of doses and another site has a need, they can be sure that the doses are distributed in a timely way to those who want them.

“We do not want to sit on something,” but instead work together to roll out the vaccines as quickly and orderly as we can, Maloney said. The idea is to make sure as many individuals receive their first doses as soon as possible.

Task force members agreed that they could make the shot clinic(s) run faster and more smoothly, by making a pre-registration packet that contains the necessary paperwork. The packet could be read, filled out at the recipient’s convenience and then just handed over at the time of their appointment. Expected to be included with the packet are information sheets, educating vaccine recipients of the requirements they must meet to receive the shot – such as not having had another vaccine within a certain time frame, etc.

Amber Burress, pharmacy manager at H-E-B, also suggested that when a citizen makes his/her appointment, that they will automatically be scheduled for their second dose of the vaccine to come at the same time of their appointment on a date exactly 4 weeks after their first dose. (The Moderna vaccine, which is the one that will be distributed in Kerr County because its storage requirements are more easily met without special refrigeration devices, consists of two doses, given through injection exactly 28 days apart.)

Then we found out that there will only be 6 providers in Kerrville. So when we get the vaccine in bulk. A command center will be set up and open 8 to 5 M thru F. It was noted that if your not on code red for Kerr County you should get on it. Here is link CodeRed Emergency Notifications | Kerrville TX - Official Website

3. The cost of providing attorneys to people that can't afford on was $750,000 last year. A plan to combine 5 counties was developed. The public defender’s office would serve the counties of Kerr, Bandera, Gillespie, Kendall and Medina County, with Kerrville being the home base. A small number of staff — apart from the approximately 20 in Kerrville with another office in Hondo, officials have said. This will save Kerr county $300,000 a year. 

Various officials have hailed the PDO as an economic boon for the area, due to the new jobs that largely will be paid for with out-of-county money. Salaries and benefits for the office would total about $3,009,996, according to a proposal presented by the TIDC in March.

The amount of the grant awarded to PDO is $2,503,264 for its first year, according to the county's press release. The TIDC, using monies allocated by the Texas Legislature, would fund 80% of the cost of the office the first year and two-thirds of the cost in subsequent years. Participating counties would pay the remainder, shared at a prorated amount based on case counts. They have a goal of meeting with a client within 48 hours of being locked up.

More on TIDC

The Texas Indigent Defense Commission provides financial and technical support to counties to develop and maintain quality, cost-effective indigent defense systems that meet the needs of local communities and the requirements of the Constitution and state law. More information is available at www.tidc.texas.gov.

This was a very informative meeting. We learned a lot. 

Contact and Phone Numbers

700 Main, Ste. 101
Kerrville, TX 78028
 (830) 792-2211
 (830) 792-2218