For the first time since 2014, the Travis County Commissioners Court has voted to distribute revenues from its 18,820-acre property in Throckmorton County among 14 school districts across the county.
Melissa Velasquez, executive assistant for Commissioner Brigid Shea, brought the fund to the commissioner’s attention recently after discovering that more than $3.7 million had accumulated from hunting, grazing and oil-pumping agreements at the Travis County School Lands since 2014. The court voted Tuesday to send out $3.4 million of that sum to help school districts pay down debt and make permanent improvements.
“I’m sure for some of the schools this is going to be a really welcomed allocation of money,” Shea told the Austin Monitor. “And they didn’t know it was coming.”
With approximately 46.5 percent of the county’s student population, the Austin Independent School District is likely to receive the largest share of the funds, about $1.6 million. The remaining school districts should receive amounts ranging from $196 to $520,000.
In the years ahead, the county is looking to reverse the trend of declining annual revenues and generate more funds for school districts by adding renewable energy farms to the ranch’s energy production, which includes oil production by Phillips 66 and Sunoco Partners. The school land generates around $500,000 each year, down from more than $1.2 million in 2015, but the court is confident that the property’s location – approximately 140 miles northwest of Dallas, as the crow flies – makes it well-suited to both solar and wind production.
The county approved a solar agreement with Paradigm Power in November 2016, but plans fell through after the company failed to hold up its end of the deal. According to Shea, Paradigm never returned numerous calls from the county’s law department and nothing ever came of the agreement.
In 2018, the court decided not to renew its management contract with Neal McLain of Spade Ranches, who had been in charge of managing the property since 2006. Shea said Spade Ranches’ failure to make progress on wind and solar were major factors in the court’s decision to initiate a management contract with Nantz Land & Cattle, which committed to pursue both wind and solar over the five-year contract. On Tuesday, Shea said Nantz had already started negotiations with a wind developer.
“One of the really promising things that I think we have to look forward to as a source of potential additional revenue is this new management team is pursuing wind and/or solar leases on that land,” Shea said. “And I know Throckmorton is particularly windy so I think wind is definitely a possibility in the future, but it would generate more revenue for all of the various school districts that are within Travis County.”
Commissioner Jeff Travillion first proposed the option to enter into a contract with Nantz after the company expressed an interest in creating new sources of funds at the property.
“We had not been getting a whole lot of information, we had not been getting a whole lot of contact with the manager of the property before,” Travillion said. “We were basically going to roll over the contract, but instead of doing that, we pulled it back, put in some performance measurement and management protocols and wanted to have more of a sustainable process where we could look and compare what we have done over the previous years with what we were capable of going forward to do.”
The Republic of Texas gifted Travis County the vast property in 1839. According to Sherri Fleming, county executive of Health and Human Services, the county is likely among the last to still hold its original school land grant.
“We’re definitely being more aggressive now about trying to generate revenue from them for the schools, partly because the schools have just suffered such appalling loss of state funds, in what appears to me to be in violation of the state constitution,” Shea said.
Photo from Travis County.
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Travis County Commissioners Court: The legislative body for Travis County. It includes representatives from the four Travis County Precincts, as well as the County Judge. The County Judge serves as the chair of the Court.
