Bowie County set to consider sale of 581-acre I-30 megasite between Hooks and New Boston

NEW BOSTON, Texas — Bowie County commissioners will consider authorizing the sale of a 581-acre industrial tract on Interstate 30 between Hooks and New Boston at a special meeting Friday, a sign that a buyer may have been found for land local governments bought six years ago to attract a major employer.

The item appears on the agenda for a special Commissioners Court meeting set for 1 p.m. Friday, Aug. 28, at the Bowie County Courthouse in New Boston.

Commissioners will consider authorizing County Judge Bobby Howell to execute closing documents for the sale of real property jointly owned by the Hooks Industrial Development Corporation and the New Boston Special Industrial Development Corporation, according to the agenda.

The agenda does not name a buyer or a price. The vote follows an executive session that includes deliberation regarding economic development negotiations under Section 551.087 of the Texas Government Code, along with real estate, personnel and litigation items.

A legal description attached to the agenda identifies the land as a 581.611-acre tract in the John Paxton Headright Survey on the north side of I-30, with more than 5,000 feet of frontage along the interstate.

The tract is the larger of two pieces of an 847-acre site purchased in the spring of 2020 from Gurdon Timber Ltd. The deed is dated March 31, 2020, and recorded in Bowie County real property records.

The cities of Hooks and New Boston and Bowie County each contributed $500,000 toward the $1.5 million purchase, according to news reports at the time. The land sits near Red River Army Depot and has been marketed by regional economic development group AR-TX REDI as the East Texas Logistics Center, a site the group pitched as a location for a large distribution or logistics operation.

A March 2025 Four States Living magazine profile of AR-TX REDI CEO Rob Sitterley reported that a $1.5 billion artificial intelligence data center campus with 350 jobs was being planned on the site. TXKtoday could not immediately confirm whether that project is connected to Friday’s agenda item.

AR-TX REDI’s marketing materials list the site’s sale price as “free for qualifying projects,” reflecting the original plan to give the land away to attract a major employer. A 2021 master plan prepared for the group envisioned a truck stop and seven building sites totaling about 5 million square feet of distribution space.

The site is outside any city limits and has no zoning. It sits in a federal Opportunity Zone and a Foreign Trade Zone, with a Southwestern Electric Power Co. transmission line crossing the property, CenterPoint Energy gas service and water from the city of New Boston through Riverbend Water Resources District.

About 234 acres of the full 850-acre site is mapped FEMA floodplain along Panther Creek, and nearly 200 acres is flagged as potential wetlands, according to REDI’s site materials.

The 264-acre companion tract on the south side of I-30 is not part of Friday’s agenda item.

The Bowie Central Appraisal District values the tract at about $1.4 million.

The land sale shares the agenda with the county’s year-end budget work. A public hearing on elected officials’ salaries and the proposed 2026-2027 budget begins at 1 p.m., before the meeting. Commissioners will then consider salary increases for elected officials, the proposed budget and the proposed tax rate.

The court will also take up a new certificate pay policy effective Oct. 1 and a proposal to make certain positions exempt from accruing vacation and sick leave or earning overtime on the same date, with employees allowed to take remaining vacation balances as approved by department heads.

The meeting notice was posted Aug. 24 by County Clerk Tina Petty.