Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Boring Company take over rural Texas area

In August 2021, a handful of Bastrop County residents noticed something big beginning to unfold on their 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 peels off FM 1209 in the county of 102,000 people southeast of Austin.

About 15 homesteads line the road, most of them on lots that are 1 acre or more. Some residents are farmers who have lived there for generations. Others moved there only in recent years to escape the trials 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 aiming to create a global broadband internet network via interconnected satellites. Construction began in May 2022.

Neighbors say the companies have created nuisances besides noise and strong nighttime lighting, such as 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 — even as The Boring Co. was being 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 and engineering departments.

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.”

The behind-the-scenes push underscores how quickly the companies are transforming Walker Watson Road.

“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 — totaling 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.”

“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.”

In business with Musk

When The Boring Co. began to communicate with Bastrop County in the spring of 2021 about building a facility on Walker Watson Road, officials were excited.

The county is still recovering from a massive 2011 wildfire that killed two people, destroyed more than 1,600 homes and caused as much as $300 million in damage. The prospect of any new business coming to Bastrop, much less a Musk-backed business, was intriguing to county officials. Increasing the county’s tax base is a high priority.

On March 18, 2021, Adena Lewis, the county’s director of tourism and economic development, broke the news of The Boring Co.’s interest in Bastrop in an email to County Judge Paul Pape and engineer Carolyn Dill, a contract county employee. Lewis said the company wanted to build a facility that would employ up to 30 workers on as many as 50 acres in western Bastrop County. It would receive “possible monthly/bimonthly deliveries of 14’ wide loads weighing 180,000+ lbs.”

Musk companies have a strong allure for local officials, with promises of jobs and the white-hot profile that a publicity-seeking billionaire can confer.

SpaceX is remaking commercial space travel with lower-cost, reusable rockets, and Tesla’s sleek, all-electric vehicles have shaken up the automotive industry, spurring major automakers to introduce their own lines of emissions-free cars, SUVs and trucks.

Like The Boring Co., SpaceX is privately held. Tesla shares are bought and sold on the Nasdaq public exchange.

The companies’ appeal is especially strong in Texas. SpaceX and Tesla have invested billions in operations in the state.

In addition to its South Texas launch pads, SpaceX operates a rocket-engine development and testing facility in McGregor near Waco. And last year, Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters from San Jose, Calif., to the Austin area, where it’s built a $1 billion, 10 million-square-foot factory on 2,500 acres fronting the Colorado River to build its Model Y sedan and the Cybertruck, production of which is expected to begin next year.

Bastrop County borders Travis County, which is dominated by Austin. It’s a short drive from Tesla’s Gigafactory to Walker Watson Road.

Last month, soon after closing his controversial $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Musk floated the idea of opening a second headquarters for the micro-blogging platform in Austin, in addition to the one in San Francisco.

The Boring Co. is no Tesla, SpaceX or Twitter. It lacks the glamour and success of its corporate siblings.

Musk launched the company in 2016 with a mission to “solve traffic, enable rapid point-to-point transportation and transform cities” via networks of tunnels. The company is looking to build underground loops for electric vehicles — such as Teslas — to move people from place to place faster than driving on streets and interstates.

But The Boring Co. is struggling to gain traction. To date, it has completed only one commercial transportation project: a 1.7-mile, $50 million loop beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The company hopes it’s the starting point of its grander plan — a 29-mile loop system linking the glitzy Las Vegas Strip to the city’s downtown.

The company has tried for the past year and a half to make inroads with Central Texas cities, and even finalized plans with the city of Kyle in Hays County to build a tunnel underneath a railroad track for pedestrians and bicyclists. But plans fell through after Union Pacific Railroad aired concerns about digging under its tracks. Other municipalities in the region have decided not to work with The Boring Co.

Still, The Boring Co. is currently in talks with the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority over the company’s plan to build a tunnel loop connecting San Antonio International Airport to downtown.

Code violations

The $800,000 facility it’s built in Bastrop is essentially a testing site for its tunnel-digging machinery.

“Three months ago, this was a cow pasture,” said Chap Ambrose, a computer programmer who lives adjacent to The Boring Co. site on Walker Watson Road.

Ambrose, the father of two young children, said he was curious at first about the construction next door, and a little intrigued. But as the months have gone by, he’s become increasingly agitated with what he said have been broken promises and broken development codes.

He pointed to large puddles of water near his home as proof of improper drainage at the company site.

He said the company promised to not operate construction equipment late at night, and to make road repairs and adjust the placement of its driveway.

Ambrose said the tunnel firm hasn’t made good on its pledges.

“The leadership team has told us lies, like that the noise will be like farm equipment — only during business hours,” he said. “You can hear it running all night.”

The company has been hit with county code violations.

In an email dated March 1, 2022, Pugh, the county engineer at the time, told The Boring Co.’s director of business operations, Paul Gentsch, that inspectors discovered the company had built employee housing on the property without proper septic-tank disposal. He directed the company to fix the problem within 60 days.

In another email to Gentsch, also in March, Pugh noted several problems county officials found during an inspection of the property on Feb. 24. They included a discrepancy between the number of houses the company said would be located on the property and the number actually built; an RV and two trailers that weren’t in the original design plans; and septic holding tanks that a contractor was servicing without a legally required permit.

County inspectors also observed a cement truck being hosed down in ditch next to public right-of-way, in violation of a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality regulation, according to an email.

“In sum, priority needs to be given to bringing OSSF (on-site septic facility) into compliance, and all site plans submitted need to be consistent, showing all structures, OSSF fields, building locations and roadway locations and configurations,” Pugh wrote.

Company officials said in a follow-up letter that they would fix the problems.

Regarding the washout from the concrete truck, Sarah Roberts — a principal with KSR Advantage, a Waco-based business management consultant working with both The Boring Co. and SpaceX — said “the team took immediate corrective action with the concrete supplier” and cleaned up the concrete dregs. By May, the company appeared to have fixed the problem.

“The team assures that this will not happen in the future and is deeply sorry for this error,” she wrote on March 7.

But the company still hadn’t resolved the septic tank problem as of May 17, county officials said in a letter to The Boring Co. They warned that continued use of unauthorized holding tanks could result in a Class C misdemeanor charge, fines and court costs.

It is unknown whether the company ultimately fixed the problem. Neither the company nor county officials returned requests for comment.

Bastrop County could barely keep up. The Boring Co.’s and SpaceX’s constant stream of permit applications, development reviews and plan changes strained county staff.

The companies inundated Development Services and engineering employees with “monthly, if not weekly” requests to approve development and septic revisions, and “weekly, if not daily” emails pressing the county to approve last-minute changes, Pugh said in his letter to County Commissioner Clara Beckett early last summer.

“In addition, we have been regularly pressured by (County Commissioner) Mel Hamner and (tourism and economic development director) Adena Lewis to expedite permit approvals at the expense of other customers,” he wrote.

He noted that he felt pressed to act fast by Beckett as well.

“Now, in addition to being pressured by Mel and Adena, I am being requested by you to expedite permit processing and apparently Carolyn Dill has been engaged in this process to pressure me to issue permits in an unreasonable short time frame,” Pugh wrote.

Hamner, Lewis, Beckett and Dill did not return requests for comment.

Pugh was concerned the county didn’t have enough staffers to handle all of the demands that Musk’s companies had piled on.

Pugh, who’d been with the county since July 2021, sent his letter to Beckett on June 22. By the end of the month, he was no longer working for Bastrop County.

County officials declined to comment on Pugh’s departure, and he did not return a request for comment.

Many of the permit requests related to the warehouse and houses, as well as space for testing tunnel equipment. One document depicts space on The Boring Co. property for the construction of three tunnels. But a notation on the plan said, “TBC plans to construct as many tunnels as necessary for Research and Development purposes.”

At least one tunnel already has been dug under Walker Watson Road.

In a video Musk posted on Twitter in October, the billionaire appears to be visiting the SpaceX site in Bastrop with a gaggle of his children and associates. The video shows a massive tunnel-boring machine erupting from the ground — the Prufrock II, the company’s next-generation digger.

The tunnel company’s property has at least 10 single-family, modular homes for employees, according to records obtained by the Express-News. The company also has an Austin Chai Wala food truck on-site and is planning to open a 15-student Montessori school on the property in January, according to emails from company officials.

From crickets to construction

While Musk’s companies have been busy building their operations on Walker Watson Road, neighbors Collier and Ambrose are mourning the loss of their quiet way of life.

Ambrose likes Musk. He has Starlink’s internet service at his home, and he’s pre-ordered a Tesla Cybertruck. He tweets to Musk regularly, even inviting him over to his home, which sits on a hilltop directly overlooking The Boring Co. and SpaceX facilities.

But he’s grown increasingly frustrated over the past year.

“This driveway is illegal in space, size and location,” he said on a dreary November morning, walking down Walker Watson Road and standing directly in front of The Boring Co.’s massive entrance gates.

“They have 18-wheelers backing up the road, and when we take our kids to school and go to the grocery store, it’s just a mess,” he said.

Ambrose said The Boring Co. has bought out several of his neighbors, and the company asked him if he wanted to sell his homestead. But he refuses to move. His property is “priceless,” he said, surrounded by “bobcats, turkeys, rabbits, deer, every kind of native Texas plant you could imagine.”

He used to hear crickets chirping at night. Now he said that’s drowned out by the noise of construction and tunnel digging.

Collier said the company asked to buy her home, but she, too, refused.

She said she’s worried that what’s happened in Boca Chica and Bastrop is going to happen elsewhere in Texas.

“Any municipality who would take a company with this poor a track record seriously, you have to think about what’s going to happen not just five years down the road, but 20 years down the road,” she said.

Annie Blanks writes for the Express-News through Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. ReportforAmerica.org. annie.blanks@express-news.net.