In August 2021, a handful of Bastrop County residents noticed something big unfolding on quiet Walker Watson Road.
The two-lane road, about a quarter-mile long from end to end, bisects cow pastures, corn fields and woods. It’s lined by 15 homesteads, most on lots of 1 acre or more. Farmers have lived there for generations. Other residents are newcomers looking to escape the hassles of city life.
What they had in common was an appreciation for the area’s peacefulness.
Then the cement trucks, backhoes and tractors arrived.
Seemingly overnight, an 80,000-square-foot warehouse and on-site modular homes for employee went up on the south side of the road, towering over the fields. The construction frenzy brought noise at all hours, light pollution and heavy traffic.
Residents soon learned that the newcomer was The Boring Co., a tunnel firm owned by Elon Musk, one of the richest men on Earth.
One year later, the commercial rocket company SpaceX, another Musk-owned firm, started building a 521,000-square-foot structure across the street from The Boring Co. property.
Emails between SpaceX and Bastrop County officials indicate that the company plans to build a manufacturing plant at the site for Starlink, a subsidiary that’s creating a global broadband internet network via satellites. Construction began in May 2022.
Neighbors say the companies have created nuisances besides noise and strong nighttime lighting, including water runoff spilling onto the roadway. Records obtained by the Express-News back up those claims. The documents also reveal that the companies have pressured Bastrop County officials to approve numerous permits at breakneck speed, and that The Boring Co. has been cited for two code violations and issued three warnings of noncompliance.
On June 22 of this year, then-county engineer Robert Pugh complained in a letter to Bastrop County Commissioner Clara Beckett about the heavy demands both companies had placed on the county’s Development Services Department, which has a dozen employees in engineering and development-related jobs.
Pugh wrote that staff had been “regularly hounded” by Boring Co. and Starlink employees and consultants to “expedite and approve permit applications that are incomplete and not in compliance with the Commissioners Court (CC) regulations.”
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“Sooner or later, I knew either my health or urban sprawl would take this little spot of nature away from me. I never dreamed it would be industry,” said Lynn Collier, who owns a ranch on the road with her two brothers. “I never dreamed that a factory would just come and buy all this up.”
So far, The Boring Co. has dug a tunnel between the two companies’ properties — which total about 100 acres — and built a miniature neighborhood on its site, complete with a soon-to-open Montessori school.
Collier sees strong similarities between her corner of Bastrop County and Boca Chica, near Brownsville in South Texas, where SpaceX has snapped up many residential properties near its spaceport. The company ceremoniously renamed the community “Starbase.” The Boring Co. has offered to buy out homeowners in Bastrop County, too.
“If you are someplace in rural Texas, and somebody has enough money, they just take over,” she said. “If it can happen here, it could happen anywhere.”
I’m not a rural person, and I would have expected there to be a lot of growth and construction in Bastrop County because of its proximity to Travis County. As someone who has driven to Austin via State Highway 71, which goes through Bastrop, for over 30 years, anyone can tell you that it is vastly different than it used to be. I don’t doubt that things are more frenetic than ever and that this can be chaotic and unpleasant for residents there. I also don’t doubt that anyone in Elon Musk’s orbit will do whatever they can to game things in his companies’ favor, whatever the cost to others may be. I don’t have any prescriptions here, I just thought this was an interesting read. Good luck to all those that have to deal with this.
They should write a piece about the developers who came and tore down the Heights and replaced it with flood causing town house chipboard development.