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Landowners near Starbase are facing annexation into Musk's company town

The city built around SpaceX wants to annex 7,100 more acres, but neighboring landowners who never voted to incorporate Starbase say they're being run over by a corporation whose employees hold the city's top offices.

ATA Staff
By ATA Staff
Landowners near Starbase are facing annexation into Musk's company town
Prickly pear cactus grows along a tidal flat near SpaceX's Starbase complex, where the newly incorporated city is seeking to annex about 7,100 acres of surrounding land. (Alexander Hatley/Creative Commons)

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Property owners outside Starbase could be absorbed into the municipality under a proposed 7,100-acre annexation they had no vote in creating, NPR reports.

  • Among them is Barbara Buckner, whose parcel was bought decades ago by a grandmother who escaped Poland during the Holocaust and raised a family in Chicago before investing in South Texas.
"You have people that they're trying to build a future for themselves. In this case, trying to build a retirement for themselves and getting basically run over by a big corporation," Buckner told NPR.

Listen to the audio feature from NPR

Full story by Reynaldo Leaños Jr. at NPR: Elon Musk's Starbase wants to expand in south Texas

  • Signatures from affected landowners were due Tuesday, with two public hearings to follow before city officials vote on the annexation in September.
  • Starbase's mayor, Robert "Bobby" Peden, and one of its two city commissioners work for SpaceX. Peden did not respond to NPR's interview requests.
A City of Starbase map shows the roughly 7,133 acres, in blue, that the city has proposed annexing in Cameron County, Texas. (City of Starbase)

The annexation is one front among several. Conservation and tribal groups are separately suing to block a federal land swap that would hand SpaceX 727 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge

MyRGV: Conservationists seek to stop SpaceX land swap with federal government

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