Starbase Official Walks Back SpaceX Land Swap Scope

A company town tied to Elon Musk said SpaceX still wants to buy Boca Chica State Park from the state – but will give up the South Texas beach.

Cayetana Polanco, city administrator for the city of Starbase, said a potential deal by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to sell the 1,300-acre park to SpaceX wouldn’t include the beachfront sand, The Texas Tribune reported.

“First, to be absolutely clear, nobody is buying or selling Boca Chica Beach,” Polanco said in a statement.

The pending deal drew outcries across the state last month after Texas Monthly reported that the state was in talks to sell the beloved state park to a firm owned by the world’s richest man. The park sits next to Musk’s burgeoning Starbase facility, near Brownsville.

After news of the discussions, Gov. Greg Abbott said the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department commission would not be taking up the issue of a potential sale of Boca Chica State Park to Elon Musk’s SpaceX “anytime soon.”

Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat who defeated Abbott the day before the scheduled talks, spoke out against the potential sale and criticized Abbott’s relationship with Musk.

“Like so many families in the Valley, I spent my summers at Boca Chica Beach,” Hinojosa, a native of Brownsville, 18 miles west of the beach, told the Tribune last month.

“Let me be clear: Texas is not for sale.”

During her transition, Hinojosa said she had spoken to the executive director of Texas Parks and Wildlife to request that “no action be taken” on the sale.

Two years ago, the Texas parks agency and SpaceX had agreed to a land swap, in which the state would give 43 acres of Boca Chica Beach State Park to Elon Musk’s rocket company, in exchange for 477 acres of land near the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge, according to the Texas Standard. Then SpaceX walked away from the deal.

But the deal wasn’t done. Texas Parks and Wildlife, the state agency responsible for managing and conserving state parks, rescheduled talks to give up control of 1,300 acres of park land in Cameron County, according to a draft agenda for a Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting for Nov. 5, the Tribune wrote.

The draft agenda referenced the “disposition” of the land, which can mean a sale, trade, transfer or otherwise relinquishment of ownership. The 1,300 acres of land is believed to be Boca Chica State Park, as it is one of the largest pieces of land Texas Parks and Wildlife owns in Cameron County, according to county appraisal district records.

A potential price for the park – sans beach – was not disclosed.

The Texas parks agency has remained silent on the proposed transaction and is trying to block the release of the draft agenda to the public, according to the Tribune.

After Hinojosa’s remarks, Justin Minsker, a spokesman for Texas Parks and Wildlife, said the agency would decline an interview, but said it looked forward to working with her and all elected officials. SpaceX did not respond to questions regarding a potential sale.

Compared to other states, Texas has one of the lowest proportions of park land in the nation, with 2.4 percent of land protected as state and national parks, national forests and other recreation areas, according to Environment Texas Research & Policy Center. In 2019, Texas ranked 37th in the nation for state park acreage per capita, with 636,000 acres of parkland for over 29 million people.

– Dana Bartholomew