Big Spring City Council passes ‘Second Amendment Stronghold’ 4-2

The Big Spring City Council addressed several issues in a four-hour meeting Tuesday night, including passage of a resolution declaring Big Spring a “Second Amendment Stronghold.”

Big Spring's Michael Cross spoke in favor of the resolution.

“It's become very clear that our Second Amendment is under great attack,” Cross said, “and it's an attack that has been provoked by, from what I see, current laws not doing what they need to do, and current legislation that was passed by administrations not doing what they need to do.”

City attorney Andrew Hagen said the resolution – which passed 4-2 with council members Nick Ornelas, District 1, and Troy Tompkins, District 5, dissenting – will have little practical effect.

“There's no meaningful legal impact at all,” Hagen said.

A similar resolution was passed in 2014, and another resolution failed to pass in 2019.

In other business, the council passed a zoning change to an 18-acre tract of land north of the Big Spring State Hospital on U.S. Highway 87 in preparation for the creation of short-term housing for visiting workers.

“What we put in, we make an investment for the property to last, although the buildings are modular and could be moved at some time in the future,” said Travis Kelly of Target Hospitality, a company headquartered in The Woodlands. “We've put several of these facilities up across the United States, 17 of them actually just here in the Permian Basin region. Some of those facilities have been around for 10 or 12 years in various parts of the country.”

Kelly assured the council that the facility, planned to house up to 400 workers, would meet all building codes.

“Everything that we're going to do would be falling under that building code,” Kelly said. “Nothing's waived or anything because it's called ‘temporary housing.'”

Roshni Patel, a local hotel operator, spoke against the planned project, saying it would take business away from area hotels.

“We, the hotel and motel owners, think that all buildings should have permanent structures and foundations,” Patel said. “When we allow man-camps and manufactured homes and all those types of businesses in town, there's less potential to have neighbors and more development in those particular areas. The majority of the cities in Texas do not allow development of man-camps within the city limits.”

Big Spring Economic Development Corporation Director Mark Willis said that such a facility would be an economic boom to Big Spring, although residents of such a facility typically have less positive impact on the city than full-time residents.

“If it's an all-encompassing thing where they eat on site and all of that, it's going to be considerably less than 400 people coming in and taking what we'd consider ‘regular' jobs in town,” Willis said. “So it would be a limited impact.