A Town of 1,400 Is Suddenly Moving Millions

Money From Three Directions

Hubbard has about 1,400 residents and roughly $1.73 million in its general fund. The money now moving into and around this Hill County town runs into the tens of millions, and it is arriving from three directions at once: a private data center is paying for pieces of the city government, voters have approved a $7.6 million school bond, and the city has borrowed millions more on its own.

Near the top of two of the institutions handling that money sits the same man.

The Man in the Middle

Jason Patrick is Hubbard's city manager. He is also its police chief. He is, at the same time, president of the Hubbard Independent School District's board of trustees. One person holds the senior administrative job in the city, runs its police department, and chairs its school board.

I have spoken with Patrick on the record several times this year, by phone in March and in person at City Hall in July. He is enthusiastic about what is happening. "It is a celebration in this community," he told me. "I kid you not." He called the data center "the monstrosity, the huge hyperscale, largest project in the United States," and he framed its spending as simple neighborliness. "So why wouldn't they want to pour something into the nearest community?" he said.

The Data Center's Money

The company is Nexus Data Centers, building what the City of Hubbard itself has called a "multi-billion-dollar data center facility" on State Highway 171 just outside town. Its planned power draw, roughly 600 megawatts, would be enough to run a small city on its own.

Nexus is not taking a tax break. It told Hill County it preferred "direct investment rather than reduced tax obligations." That investment, announced in February as a $50 million "Community Partnership Program," now reaches into much of the city's budget. Working from the city's own resolutions, its council minutes, and Nexus's letters, I count commitments that include:

• $5,500 for swimming-pool and concession equipment
• $1,000 a month to the recreation center's programs, and $500 a month to the food pantry
• three new police officers, with Patrick telling the council the funding would be "indefinite for salary and benefits," and roughly $246,600 for three patrol vehicles and equipment
• $247,381 for two brush trucks for the volunteer fire department, routed through Nexus's charitable arm, Nexus Hub Incorporated
• $250,000 to buy the city's Civic Center, and a new City Hall and police station built to a $2 million "cost basis"
• $2,689,500 toward a citywide water-line replacement

Two arms of the town's public safety now sit on that list: the police department, which is getting officers whose pay Nexus has agreed to cover, and the volunteer fire department, which is getting its trucks. Every donation letter carries the same sentence: the money "is not tied to any agreement, permit, approval, or obligation on the part of the City." I quote it here exactly as Nexus wrote it.

The Civic Center sale has already closed. Hill County records now list the property at 300 North Magnolia under a Nexus company, Nexus Land Holdings.

The Water Line, and a Question

The water line is the largest single item. The full project was awarded at $4,387,500. The city has paid the contractor about $1.7 million; in June, the city council voted to enter an agreement under which Nexus would pay the remaining $2,689,500 directly to the contractor. Patrick calls it a bargain. "A hell of a deal for the city," he said. "He saved us almost $4 million."

For that same water-line project, the city also borrowed about $4 million through a 2025 certificate of obligation, a kind of municipal debt that does not require a public vote. If Nexus is covering the largest share of the contract, what is the borrowed money paying for? I have asked, and I do not yet have a clear answer.

The School's Money

While the city's spending runs on data-center dollars and borrowing, the school district has been raising money the older way, by asking voters.

Last November, Hubbard ISD put a $7.6 million bond on the ballot for athletic facilities, a new agriculture building, and repairs to the elementary school. It failed on an exact tie, 178 to 178. Over the winter a group of parents who called themselves "Bonding with the Jags" handed out fliers and held town halls, and in May the same $7.6 million bond passed.

Patrick is the president of the board that put it forward. He is also, as noted, the city manager and the police chief. None of this is hidden. Put together, it means the person atop the city's payroll and its police force also leads its school board, in a year when both institutions are moving more money than the town has seen in a long time.

A Footprint Bigger Than the Town

Set all of this against the size of the place. Hubbard is two square miles. The land assembled around it is bigger than the town. According to Hill County appraisal records, Nexus companies own more than 3,100 acres in and around Hubbard, spread across dozens of parcels and appraised at over $30 million. That is close to five square miles, more than twice the footprint of the town itself.

The town those acres surround is small by every measure. Hubbard's median household income is about $47,000. Its general fund is smaller than the water-line contract, smaller than the school bond, and a fraction of the data center's community program. Residents' own costs have gone up, too: last fall the city raised its tax rate to about $0.88 per $100 of value, from about $0.81, which the city's own tax ordinance records as a 25 percent effective tax increase, measured against a revenue-neutral rate.

Patrick expects the site to bring far more than land and money. He told me the jobs pay "$27 an hour with 30 hours mandatory overtime," bringing home "$8,000 to $10,000 a month," in a place where some workers, he said, "were working $7 an hour." He also expects a crowd: "6,000 people in less than 45 days," he told me, and "15,000 people out there working by January." Those are his projections, not numbers I have confirmed, and 15,000 workers would be more than ten times the population of the town they would be working next to.

A Question About Cameras

In November 2025, a data-center town hall was held in Hubbard. According to the city secretary's written answer to a records request, "The Data Center requested no recordings," and no audio or video of that meeting exists. This year, Nexus is offering to pay for the equipment to put the city council's own meetings on permanent public video. I do not know what changed between the two.

How I Got Here

I should say plainly where this comes from. In the fall of 2025, I started asking the City of Hubbard a simple question: why did the data center's town hall not allow cameras? Soon after, I was blocked from the city's Facebook page. Around the same time, I noticed someone else filing public-records requests with Hubbard, a man named Basil Zangare who publishes as BZ Watchdog. I reached out. We work differently, and we do not agree on everything, but we share one goal, accountability in Texas local government. We began comparing notes, sat in on council meetings together in nearby Hillsboro and Whitney to get to know each other, and started building a record.

Between us, we now hold more than a thousand records and documents on Hubbard. Some of what we asked for came back the same way: no records responsive to your request, in cases where our reading of Texas law says the records should exist.

Before I Published This, I Talked to Basil

On July 16, the evening before this went out, I interviewed Basil about what he has been finding on the ground, so I could put some of it on the record.

Basil has been going business to business in Hubbard with a simple question: has the data center brought you more customers? He told me the answer was almost always no. "All of the small businesses have told me they have not seen any increase in traffic from the data center business," he said. The only exception among the storefronts was a national chain, not one of the local shops. His read: "The business boom that Jason Patrick's talking about is the big corporation chains, not the small mom-and-pop places. Those places are not getting the increase in business that they were told they were going to get with the deal of the data center coming to Hubbard."

The one group he sees actually gaining is the food trucks. "The food truck businesses may be getting all the business," he told me. That is worth setting against what the council did on June 20. The same night it adopted an ordinance restricting where food trucks can operate, it denied one vendor's application to run a food truck on leased land, five votes to none. The one kind of business that seems to be thriving is also the one the city has just moved to control more tightly.

Basil told me the owners he spoke with had concerns about going on the record and did not want to be named, in a small town where one man holds several of the top offices. I am not naming any of them. I cannot independently vouch for every conversation he had. What I can tell you is what he told me, on the record: most of Hubbard's storefronts are not seeing the boom the city is celebrating.

In fairness to Patrick's side of it, this is a snapshot of the town as it is today. The data center is still ramping up, and Patrick expects thousands more workers to arrive in the coming months; if they do, the businesses seeing little now could see more. Many of the improvements are long-term as well, the water lines, the new buildings, the school upgrades, the kind that take years to show their full effect.

When I Asked to Talk, the City Stopped Talking

I have spent more time with Jason Patrick than most reporters get, two conversations by phone and two more in person, the most recent this month at City Hall. I appreciate that he has been willing to sit with me at all, because the city as an institution has not.

In April, the day after I asked to interview Patrick, the City Secretary wrote back: "per our attorney's directive, at this time the City of Hubbard will not be participating in interviews." I filed a public-records request for that directive and the communications behind it. It is past its legal deadline, with no response.

Patrick talked to me anyway. When I saw him this month, he raised the lawyers himself. He told me he did not agree with the advice to stop talking, "do I agree with it? No," but that he had to follow what the attorneys who "represent this city that I work for" told him. When I said that he serves the constituents, not the city attorney, he answered, "Yes, sir."

The records we hold leave gaps in the timeline of what has happened in Hubbard, and when I started pressing on those gaps, the response was not answers. It was a lawyer's instruction that the city would not talk to me. From the outside, a city that goes quiet the moment the questions get harder invites the very questions it is trying to avoid.

What Comes Next

I wanted to settle this directly, with the city and with Jason. The attorney's directive has effectively taken that off the table, and left us to chip away at it through records requests instead. I have asked to sit down with Patrick on camera and put the remaining questions to him directly, on the record. Until the city's attorney allows that, I will keep working through what we have found in public, one article at a time.

For Basil, the Hubbard work is finished. "I'm done with my Hubbard investigation," he told me. "I handed it off to you to take care of it and pass the torch." He is moving on to other work, and I am carrying the Hubbard reporting forward. This is the first of several articles. Over the coming weeks I will lay out what the investigation has documented.

I want to be plain about what this is and what it is not. I am not accusing anyone in Hubbard of a crime, and I am not alleging misconduct. What Basil and I have done is gather the public record and identify questions we believe deserve answers. We have reached the point where it is time to put those records in front of the people who live in Hubbard and pay for it, and to ask for their help: answering the questions, filling the gaps we have not filled, and correcting anything we have gotten wrong.

I am not trying to make Hubbard look bad. If the city's attorney lets Patrick answer on camera, I will put every one of our questions to him directly. Until then, stay tuned. There is a lot to cover.

A Disclosure

There is one thing readers deserve to hear from me directly. Basil Zangare, who publishes as BZ Watchdog, is planning a run for Hill County Commissioner, Precinct 3. In the weeks ahead I plan to interview Basil on the record about how his journalism ties to his run for office, what led him to become a candidate, and what he wants the public to understand about how his candidacy relates to his work under BZ Watchdog. Those strike me as fair questions, and I intend to ask them plainly. Look for that conversation soon.