In Oak Valley, a sleepy town in rural Navarro County, Texas, there is very little of anything. A rutted road cuts through its two square miles of sun-beaten grassland, past a modest prefabricated community center and a “poor excuse for a park,” as the local mayor describes it.
Only around 400 people He lives in Oak Valley. But despite its tiny size and limited resources, the Texas town is preparing to bring an industrial-scale bitcoin mine into its borders through unusual means, a move that could boost its annual budget by as much as fortyfold.
Four miles from Oak Valley, on a 265-acre plot of land, public cryptocurrency mining company Riot Platforms is busily building what will become the world’s largest bitcoin mining facility, according to the company. Once completed, consume up to 1 gigawatt of energyenough to supply hundreds of thousands of homes.
Riot’s facility is currently located on unincorporated land in the jurisdiction of Navarro County government. But the company is in the process of negotiating a deal, as evidenced by a series of email communications seen by WIRED, through which Oak Valley will annex the land.
The annexation plan, which has not yet been finalized, will allow Much-needed improvements to Oak Valley roads and other public infrastructure. It won’t cost Riot anything, either, because the energy company that serves the area will foot the bill. For Riot, it’s a public relations tactic meant to curry favor with local residents and county officials who oppose a lucrative abatement on their property taxes. Millions of dollars potentially depend on its ability to garner local support in Navarro County before a final decision is made on its abatement request.
Riot declined to comment on the possibility of annexation by Oak Valley. Brian Morgenstern, Riot’s director of public policy, would only say that “annexation should be good for all parties.” “We want to make sure we’re being good neighbors and creating positive impacts for the community,” he says.
To fund public works, a municipality like Oak Valley has to rely primarily on money it collects from the electric provider in exchange for the use of local rights-of-way. These so-called franchise fees are calculated as a percentage of residents’ energy bills. Under normal circumstances, Oak Valley collects about $9,000 in franchise fees a year, which accounts for 75 percent of a meager total budget that isn’t nearly enough to cover simple infrastructure improvements.
“Oak Valley doesn’t have money,” says David Brewer, a commissioner on the Navarro County Commissioners Court, the district’s governing body. “Our county budget is extremely tight, so we can’t help in some of the areas we want to help.”
But if Oak Valley succeeds in annexing the energy-hungry Riot plant, Brewer says, it will absorb franchise fees “worth between a quarter and a half million dollars a year” once the 1-gigawatt plant is completed.
Leading the push for annexation is Max Taylor, the mayor of Oak Valley, who declined to be interviewed for this article. change of legislation In 2019, Texas municipalities can no longer forcibly annex a parcel of land, so they must ask the owner for permission. But Taylor appears to have had no trouble convincing Riot: “This project has my full support,” David Schatz, Riot’s senior vice president of operations, wrote in an email to Taylor on June 25.
