By Christin Coyne
ccoyne@mineralwellsindex.com
Plans are progressing to purchase 187 acres in the northeast corner of Wolters Industrial Park to bring a maximum security facility to hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees to Mineral Wells.
“We’ve got the property under contract,” Steve Butcher, a recruiter for the Industrial Foundation, said. “It appears to be on track.”
The Industrial Foundation hopes to give roughly 30 acres to Emerald Correctional Management to build a 1,000-bed facility to house ICE detainees before they are flown out of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.
They are currently doing a survey of the land, Butcher said, and have submitted a specific use permit application with the permission of the owners.
A public hearing on a specific use permit application has been scheduled for the planning and zoning commission on June 1. If it passes the planning and zoning commission, the city council will likely vote on the application at their June 2 meeting.
If all goes as planned, the land purchase will be finalized sometime in June, according to Butcher.
“Emerald has an engineering crew out marking where they are going to do their soil boring,” Butcher said.
The rush to buy the land and put everything in place for the proposal is being done in order not to endanger Emerald’s project funding, Butcher said.
Though other sites in Wolters Industrial Park, including sites in Palo Pinto County, were considered, there were no other feasible options, according to Butcher.
The current piece of land being considered is in Parker County and across the street from the city gym and the Corrections Corporation of America pre-parole transfer facility.
They are looking at a price in the neighborhood of $3,000 an acre, according to Butcher.
Butcher and other city leaders expressed surprise that the owners were open to an offer when they inquired this spring. According to Butcher, they had repeatedly rebuffed or ignored during previous attempts to purchase the property over the last 20 years.
The Industrial Foundation would have the remaining acreage to give to other businesses.
The 62 acres that the Industrial Foundation had planned to give to Emerald is the last property owned by the group that seeks to bring businesses and jobs to Mineral Wells.
“Our goal would be to develop the property by the airport,” Butcher said. “We’ve been trying to put somebody out there for the last 20 years … it would be outstanding to put an aviation business out there."
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