A Texas county has approved holding an election suggested by SpaceX that would let residents living around Elon Musk’s company decide whether to create a new city named Starbase.
The election is scheduled for May 3 and is for only residents living near the launch site, being currently part of an unincorporated area of Cameron County located along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In December of last year, more than 70 area residents filed a formal petition to make Starbase its city. Most of the residents are company employees and the community includes at least 219 primary residents and more than 100 children according to the Starbase petition described.
According to Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño, the county reviewed and found the petition met the state’s requirements for the incorporation process to move forward. In case the election passes, SpaceX’s city will become the newest town in Cameron County since Los Indios in 1995.
Musk has long talked about his desire to make a new town in coastal South Texas, where his rocket launch company, SpaceX, is based.
For years, the plan was not moved forward officially because creating a new municipality in Texas requires a certain number of residents and support from a majority of voters.
At the end of last year, company employees who live around its offices and launch site gathered signatures and filled out an official petition to hold an election to create a town.
According to the petition, the town will be about 1.5 square miles, a little larger than Central Park but small by Texas standards. The petition also suggested that the mayor would be SpaceX’s security manager, Gunnar Milburn.
Billionaire Elon Musk has expanded his footprint in Texas over the past few years by moving his companies from California and building offices, warehouses, and manufacturing plants across a growing number of Texas counties.
In 2014, SpaceX’s launch site broke ground here. SpaceX has more than 3,400 full-time employees and contractors working at the Starbase site. In addition, only 10 of the roughly 250 lots of land within the new city limits do not belong to the company.
There’s also Tesla’s massive 10-million-square-foot (930,000-square-meter) Gigafactory making its Cybertrucks, which opened near Austin in 2022 and will also serve as the company headquarters.
