Luring the CAT to Central Texas

Local Government Tools that Made The Difference

• Local property tax abatement (Chapter 312, Texas Tax Code) - no city or county tax bill for 10 years.
• Value limitation and tax credits (Chapter 313, Texas Tax Code) - Eight-year limitation on the value assessed for school district maintenance and operation tax and two-year eligibility for tax credits. (No limitation on interest and sinking tax assessment.)
• Freeport exemption from personal property tax on parts and materials exported within 175 days of delivery to manufacturing facility.
  
• Economic development sales tax - Incentive funds allocated by 4A corporation.

Incentives for Caterpillar

Local

• City of Seguin -100 percent property tax abatement for 10 years.
• Guadalupe County -100 percent property tax abatement for 10 years
• Seguin ISD - Available $80 M value limitation per year on appraised property value for maintence and operations plus hold harmless funding from the state of Texas.
• Freeport exemption on personal property tax in Seguin, Guadalupe County, Seguin ISD.
• Seguin Economic Development Corp. - $2M incentive: $1M cash; $1M bond for sewer, road infrastructure.
• Regional partners offering incentives include: Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative, Center Point Energy and Springs Hill Water Supply Corp.

State

• Texas Enterprise Fund - $10M.
• Texas Department of Transportation - Deceleration lane, traffic signal - $450,000-$500,000 est.
  

A Caterpillar 725 articulated dump truck powered by a C-11 diesel engine that is among the type that will be built in Seguin.

On the Road Again

By Julia Hayden

I took a break from it all last weekend, and hit the highway - in support of a spasm of marketing for the Adelsverein Trilogy. Months ago I had been invited to participate in a cultural festival at the Fort Bend Museum in Richmond. It was the first long road-trip in a while, if three hours on IH-10 East, almost-but-not-quite to Houston counts as a road trip. I have to say that the passing scenery was not particularly spectacular, but oh, my - the rest stops are absolutely palatial. I couldn't resist taking a picture of this one, just about an hour's drive out from San Antonio.

That part of East Texas is subtly different from the area around San Antonio, and the Hill Country that I know - more heavily wooded, with stands of massive, spreading oak trees interspersed with meadows of tall-grass - and much, much greener, especially after a summer where we haven't had all that much rain. Tall oaks loom over houses, and the smaller trees form tangled thickets, stitched together with wild grapevines.  There are creeks with water running in them, lakes and waterways. This part of Texas was historically more Anglo; with not as deep a Hispanic presence. It was the closest to the then-United States in the 19^th century, and presumably offered those American settlers in Texas a little more of what they were accustomed to, as far as landscape and plant-life went;  more Southern rather than Southwest, flatter rather than gently rolling.

Richmond Texas is pretty much now a bedroom suburb of Houston. Enough remains of the town to show what it once was like, anchored by the railway and a bend of the Brazos, adorned with  stately, white-pillared homes,  rambling Victorian cottages trimmed with yards of wooden gingerbread trim, and dignified old two-storey commercial blocks on the main street. Here and there, this pleasing 19^th century aspect is broken up with indigestible chunks of Brutal Concrete Moderne, but it's easy enough to look away from those.

When in the name of all that's unholy, did Halloween turn into an extravaganza of coffins and mock gravestones set up in suburban lawns, and formations of witches plastered onto tree trunks and garage doors, great glowing hanging jack o lanterns, and ghosts and witches and skeletons and huge ass spiders (shudder!) and monstrous webs, and life-sized skeletons? When did decorating the house for the benefit of small children in dime-store costumes or something cobbled together from a stack of torn bedsheets and some Rit dye, panhandling door to door for packets of candy corn and little pastel rolls of sweettarts go so very, very far over the top as  - a full Griswald Christmas? It probably happened about the same time that the pattern catalogue for costumes at the yardage store became as thick as a seasonal catalogue and stayed on the yardage store pattern table year around. But it must be fun, since so many San Antonio homes indulge themselves, and others have their yards decorated according to the upcoming holiday anyway.

Back in the day, it used to be an innocent, home-made, modest little affair. Mom bought us each a pumpkin, and in the early days Dad helped us carve them with a kitchen knife and scrape out the mooshy tangle of seeds and stringy orange fibers. By the time my brother and I were in junior high, we conducted the ritual pumpkin butchery ourselves, and assisted our younger sister with marking out a scary face in straight-angled cuts. Fit the pumpkins with candle-ends, saved for this purpose in the drawer with the silverware, set them out on the front porch, and there we were, all set. Of all the neighbors in the town where I grew up, only one got ambitious, rigging a ghost of cheesecloth to fly silently down a wire running from the trees by their gate to just above the front door.

Sunday Afternoon at the Dog Park with the Lesser Weevil

There is a dog park, hidden away in the back forty of McAllister Park, a sprawling public park/semi-wilderness area in Northside San Antonio. It is formed by a large fenced area of trees and shrubs, dotted with benches and a number of trash cans and dispensers offering what my daughter describes as ‘poopy-bags'.  A paved path leads around the perimeter of the fenced area. Another long paved path leads from a parking lot: on any given afternoon when the weather is fair and mild, and most especially on weekends, that path is alive with leashed dogs and their people. The dogs are normally wild with excitement, heading toward their social-hour, play-date and mad-minute. It must be something they look forwards to all the rest of their limited, doggy lives - if they are capable of retaining a pleasurable memory.

One of our neighbors told us about the park; admittedly, we were nervous about the whole off-the-leash concept with regard to the Lesser Weevil.  We have no apprehensions about the Weevil and humans - it's other dogs. Now and again in the early months, she took an instant and abiding dislike to another dog on a leash. But our neighbor assured us, over and over - that it is all right, the dogs seem to govern themselves very well, off leash, and the more there are of them in the confines of the park, the better they all behave. So we took a chance - and we stuck very close to her that first time, and waited until she had behaved well with the first half-dozen dogs that came romping up for a bit of friendly butt-sniffing.

Weevil still does not play as uninhibitedly with the other dogs as others do. She'll chase a thrown tennis ball and run races, but she will stay fairly close to Blondie. And Spike the Shi Tzu basically attaches herself to my ankles, never going much farther than ten feet away, even if there are other small dogs who want to play with her.  It was quite lively this last Sunday; not least because it seemed to be Big Dog Day. Sometimes people tell us that the Weevil is a big dog; no, she actually is rather agreeably medium-sized. On Sunday she looked positively dainty, next to a Newfoundland the size of a small sofa, two mastiffs who topped out at a couple of hundred pounds each, and a Great Dane who looked big enough to put a saddle on and ride like a horse. No kidding, the Great Dane's nose alone was bigger than the smallest dog present - a four-month-old Chihuahua puppy, too small to be put down on the ground, among all those specimens of canine gigantism.

The Wild Boar Hunt - A Texas Grizzly Bear

My friend Jim and his son Scott are still talking about hunting the biggest, meanest, baddest, ugliest, smelliest creatures on this earth.

Their first wld boar hunt began last May after one of the hunters booked it online. Scott and three hunter friends from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, met Jim at Langley Ranch, a commercial hunting operation outside Centerville, halfway between Houston and Dallas.

Wild boars are elusive, intelligent creatures. Jim says they can smell food up to seven miles away or buried 10 feet in the ground. Some of the hogs at Langley Ranch have strong genetic ties to the Russian boar. Known for their scruffy, black coats and threatening tusks, their quick tempers send many a hunter scrambling up a tree for safety.