MIDLAND, Texas — Midland County Commissioners held a special meeting Monday to discuss urgent topics. One such topic was the Bass Pro Shops that will be coming to Midland.
Bass Pro Shops announced they would be coming to Midland in late March, and progress has been slow yet steady.
However, some adjustments to the size of the facility made Bass Pro Shops ask for a few adjustments.
“They’ve increased the size of their facility, almost doubling it," Midland County Judge Terry Johnson said. "They're adding approximately another hundred employees to the scenario.”
According to Johnson, the new facility would be about the size of the Bass Pro Shops in San Antonio.
This increase in size meant that Bass Pro Shops wanted more leeway regarding a sales tax rebate. This request was granted by the court.
“They were asking for a little bit more of an offset, if we extended from seven to ten years," Johnson said. "I think it's a great investment for this court to make for this community to bring Bass Pro to Midland.”
The court would not have been able to grant this request had it not been for the Community and Economic Development Plan that they had passed earlier in the meeting.
A Community and Economic Development Plan, specifically pursuant to Code 381 of the Texas Local Government Code, is what allowed the court to move forward on Bass Pro Shop's request.
“It allows the county court to issue funds to private industry or private individuals," Johnson said. "Normally we can’t do that, the legislature passed rules that came up with a way to do it in a very limited scope of doing it. We passed that today to allow us a chance to move on to the next item on the agenda.”
But why is there such a rush to grant these requests? And why is there such a massive interest in bringing Bass Pro Shops to Midland?
Johnson said it is to broaden the scope of Midland and make it more than what it already is.
“We need to diversify… we have been a one industry town, a one-horse town if you will, for my entire life of living here," Johnson said. "This is going to take us in a direction that I've hoped we could go in a very very long time."