In a rural part of Hood County, 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth, residents say a nearby Bitcoin mine is disturbing their quiet way of life. They want to turn the unincorporated area into a town and seek limits on the noise and disruption coming from the mine’s computer servers and cooling fans.
But their initial efforts didn’t go so well once the company that owns the facility got involved. Keaton Peters, who covers energy for Straight Arrow News, says the mine owner challenged residents’ petition to get the incorporation measure on the November ballot.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us about this part of Hood County. What’s it like?
Keaton Peters: It’s a large rural area. There are some houses spread out. They’ve got some nice gentle hills, cows, horses, that kind of thing.
And they do have a couple of gas power plants there on the southern edge of Hood County. And a few years ago, Marathon Digital, a Bitcoin mining company, moved in and started renting some space next to one of those gas power plants.
So how are they saying that this Bitcoin mine is affecting them?
The Bitcoin mine, which, you know, they’re running computers to verify blocks of cryptocurrency transactions – those computers need fans to cool them off. Otherwise they’re going to break down.
So there are actually thousands of fans in these little like shipping container-type structures, and the noise adds up. Residents say that it affects their health and their quality of life.
To give a couple of examples: I talked to a guy named Danny who used to love barbecuing. He’s a three-time Texas steak cookout finalist. And he’s like, “I can’t have anyone over for a barbecue anymore because it sounds like if you put your AC unit right next to where you and your friends are trying to eat.”
Other folks have had some health issues like hearing loss and other things that they believe are linked to the Bitcoin mining operation. The company definitely disputes how connected the health issues are.
I’ve been out there myself, and you can hear the noise pretty much everywhere if you’re around the Bitcoin mine.
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So the residents’ solution was to turn their unincorporated land into a town. How did they intend to do that, and how would it have helped their efforts to deal with the Bitcoin mine?
So under Texas law, it’s called a type B municipality, and they actually only needed to get 50 valid registered voters to sign their petition and send it into the county officials just to verify, get approval, put it on the ballot in November. And then everyone who lives in what could become this new city called Mitchell Bend, Texas, they would get to vote on it at the election.
Now, how this would help the residents: They say that they want to pass a noise ordinance that goes a bit further than what the county can do. They want to be able to have some fees, have some more leverage, at least in making sure that they have more of a way to have their voice heard.
So what happened when they turned this petition in?
They turned it in in May, and they thought that everything was good to go, according to the residents who were doing the petition drive. They took it to county election officials, county attorney’s office, and everything seemed good. The county judge signed it, which would approve it for the ballot.
Then what happened was around the beginning of August, there was actually a letter sent from attorneys for Marathon Digital to the county judge saying that they had done their own review of the petition and that they found they were deficient of at least eight signatures that weren’t valid, which pushed them below 50, and a couple other issues they mentioned.
The county judge said that he vacated the first [petition] following the letter from lawyers from Marathon Digital. And once that happened, residents went around and said, “well we’re just going to start another petition.”
And they ended up having 59 valid signatures, and the county attorney’s office told me that the county judge did sign and put that on the ballot.
