On Wednesday, the Top ‘O Texas Republican Women held their monthly meeting with Pampa Economic Development Corporation Director Ryan Bradley as the guest speaker. The presentation goes as follows and includes the question and answer segment:
“My name is Ryan Bradley and I was born and raised here. I have four wonderful kids and one of them graduated 8th grade last night, and one of the cool things Clay Jones said is he is a third generation Harvester, and I’m a second generation Harvester. Both my parents graduated from here, I’m the second and now my kids are going to be the third generation Harvesters.”
“Upon graduation, I went to Houston and worked for a company called Oceaneering and Hunting thereafter. I did a lot of subsea robotic engineering and traveled the world and saw some really crazy, cool things. It gave me the perspective of what more looks like, what big things are and what great things are and how all those things tie together.”
“When I grew up here, my father ran Titan Specialties and I thought that every semi-truck that had a piece of pipe on it was driving to Pampa, Texas because that was the center of my universe and ‘all semis go to Pampa and they’re all going to Titan.’ I have since learned that is not the case, but there is a lot of innerworkings between communities, businesses and general regions. I was able to move back and I was the General Manager for Hunting for the past four years and ended that in August of last year. I got to be part of the Chamber of Commerce for a year, I got to be a member of the EDC after that, and then in August of last year, I got to be the new EDC director.”
“This has been an absolute blast. There’s a lot of opportunities in our town, and I’m going to talk about a lot of those things, but the thing I really want you to really hear is that our town has a lot to offer. We need to take pride in what we have. There’s obviously room for improvement all over the place, but we have a lot of opportunity. Getting to be a part of the Chamber and on the EDC, I’ve gotten to see all these things and now I get to live it. I get to go out in the community, to conferences and to businesses and be Pampa’s biggest cheerleader, which is fun and it’s good that I grew up here because I get to talk about the nuances of small-town living and why Pampa is amazing.”
“With all those things though, getting to talk to businesses and going on recruitment trips, when I first took the job as director, I just thought it was going to be bringing in new business and having those discussions, but what I’ve realized since then it’s a lot more than that-it’s interfacing with the community and getting the community ready for the growth and getting Pampa in a position that is sellable, so when new businesses come in, they come into a warm and loving community and they feel like it’s a home they want to invest their money into.”
“There is a lot of money sitting in our town and there is a lot of opportunity for investment, but where we’re going to get a lot of growth is going to come from the outside. We need to start bringing some outside companies in of various sizes. Our EDC elected a strategic plan for the next five years that focuses on industry growth-large and small. At the tail end of it, we started sniffing for data centers and we added that to our strategic plan at the last second, not knowing how big of a key that would actually end up being.”
“Our board is a wonderful board-there’s a lot of people on there that want to see Pampa grow and invest in it. We are aggressively chasing big companies. Any local companies that want to grow or expand, we are here to help. That is our first priority is to take care of our own, but I want you all to know that we want to snag a big fish from the outside as well. It’s no secret that Celanese was a big anchor for our town and a lot of the oil companies were too, and with that brought a lot of skills and industry and wealth that we need to replace. Our town is at a crossroads where you can decide to stay where you are and manage the decline that all of the small towns in the panhandle are seeing, or you can try to change that curve. Our board has elected to try to change that curve and change that trajectory, and chase these new and big things that will help.”
“I grew up here when the town was hopping, my parents grew up here when the town was hopping-all those things are still here, all the people are still here, but we have to start doing what we can to bring new industries and businesses in and make that whole sector healthy again.”
“We had our meeting last Thursday, and I let the board and public know that we are chasing 13 leads right now. Three or four of those are leads that might be something, three or four of those are the companies working on paperwork, a couple of them are in a holding pattern and one of them got cancelled. But there’s this rather larger bulk of opportunity that our town has and when I tell them there’s opportunity here and things to do, I’m trying to help you all quantify that there truly is and we’re actively chasing it.”
“Getting into the data center stuff, that started out with Duos and Doug Recker. He spoke at the Chamber Gala earlier this year, and I’ve spent many, many hours taking online classes and reading forums about what AI is, what data centers are and how they work. Don’t let me be your single point of knowledge, but I’m getting better at it and I can talk a broad range of things now.”
“They wanted to put in what they call micro data centers and they put them on the edge of the network or grid, and they focus on school systems and municipalities and they’re about the size of a small building. There’s one row of racks with a bunch of computers in it and they connect it to the school or municipality and they sell out those racks to people like Amazon, Netflix or whatever is going on in that region. They’ll even sell some of it to the school system or the hospital, or just whoever needs the support.”
“I said when I first started this that I wanted a power plant. If we can get a power plant, then that’s going to be here for 100 years and energy is the thing everyone needs right now and if we can get that, we might not grow huge, but we won’t ever die.”
“They came and pitched these little data centers and I asked them if they could sell a Bitcoin miner, or what about something bigger than these little things, and they asked what we have. I told them we had tons of land and tons of natural gas. Then it just kind of snowballed into what it is now. Duos saw the opportunity and they had us pitch to several other clients and customers in that space and now you see a lot of things start to show up around our area. That industry is starting to realize that the panhandle of Texas has a lot of natural gas and a lot of wind potential and a lot of land. It’s going to be big, and not all of it is from me. There’s so much more than what we’ve been doing. Ours is a partnership with Duos and APR and they’re going to put in a temporary power plant and data center, and then as they expand, they’ll build a bigger power plant. The bigger plant will take 2-4 years to actually build out, but the temporary one will only take 2-3 months. They’ll find another location and do it again.”
When are we going to see some action on this?
“I honestly don’t know their timeline, my best guess is this year around August, September and October.”
Where is it going to be located?
“County Road 3-if you go to County Road 3 going north, it’s stopped by 152 to Borger and 60 to Amarillo. That whole stretch is what’s going to have the data center. That large intersection that Keystone put in to remove their towers out of when you go out to Borger and there’s a big turnaround, right in that land on the west side will be a power plant.”
How big are these buildings going to be?
“That depends on who they sell them to, so they can range anywhere from a couple hundred thousand square feet to a million square feet. For reference, our Walmart is about 200, so the small ones are about the size of Walmart and the big ones are about the size of four Walmarts.”
How many jobs will that bring in?
“Small one will have about 40-50 people, the large ones will have actually not too many more than that. What happens is you get one in a region, they will multiply. In order to get one present, you have to bring in the electricity and fiber infrastructure and they like to be sitting next to each other. They can all even be in competition, but being located near one another is beneficial to all of them. Once you get one, they grow. You’ll see that throughout the Texas panhandle.”
Will the workforce be people coming in or for people that are already here?
“This project is probably going to last 2 or 3 years, and during the construction phase, you’ll have about a thousand or more workers coming in for the construction to build all of the stuff, but they’re transiet so once it’s built, they’ll leave. The first ones that they sell them to-let’s say it’s Google, then Google will relocate their own people to Pampa to work. That’s probably how the first one is going to happen, but after that, we’re going to work with the schools and community college to get all the training programs in place so the jobs thereafter can be trained into them. We don’t have that right now, so that first wave will come from the outside, which isn’t a bad thing.”
So Duos is the one that does the selling?
“Yes, so APR and Duos are sister companies: APR does the power generation side of it and Duos does the data center side.”
How did you acquire the land that you’re thinking about selling?
“We bought it last January. It was during an open auction, but some of that was from the acquisition of Celanese.”
Is there anything you can tell us about the hydrogen plant?
“I don’t know anything about it, it’s not part of our project, that’s through the city.”
So do you know anything about the solar farm they’re wanting to build? That company that came in donated all this money for the Youth Center and donated a bunch of other stuff to the city, but we haven’t heard anything else.
“Intersect Power is still around and still actively involved in the community. We don’t have anything to do with them though.”
What is the PEDC’s commitment to this project financially?
“Nothing. We’re just selling them the land.”
Do you have contracts with them?
“These things exist, but I am not going to talk about them at this time.”
Are you sure they’re going to come here?
“I’m 99.99% sure. I’ve been conversing with them and it’s very positive.”
Tell us about the man who encouraged you to go for this project.
“Doug Recker is an ex-marine and was one of the first people to build data centers in Virginia and he started his own business of deploying these little micro data centers out on the edge in rural communities. That’s how he found us and that’s what his expertise is. He speaks at a lot of events and is just a ball of energy. He is the frontman and salesman and there are a handful of people behind him that do a lot of work.”
Did they put one of these up in Childress?
“There is one going up in Childress, but there is no correlation between that and our project here in Pampa.”
The power generation plant comes from where?
“Natural gas. The land that we got from the Celanese acquisition has two major lines of gas that feed Chicago in the northeast. All the ontakes are in the eastern panhandle and in western Oklahoma with the storage location in Sayre, and all that gets collected and fed up north. Pampa gets the first dibs on all the natural gas collected in our region to go up to the top. We have plenty of gas here.”
“These large companies are looking for a place to invest, and they see our region as a place they can deploy their capital into. They all have a big pile of money and they have to go make an investment somewhere and since all of that stuff hasn’t been built out here yet, it’s an opportunity to invest that capital into our region. They are happy to built wind mills, solar panels, batteries and power plants and those sort of things because they’re constantly looking for those deployments.”
Do you know what is going to be involved with bringing fiber to that location and the necessary infrastructure?
“Not necessarily. I believe there’s one line that comes in through 152, another one at 60, and another one that comes up from Lefors, and they all kind of pass through here. I don’t know which ones in particular they’re going to do, but a couple of those are going to get upgraded. The more data centers you convince to move here, that is a shared cost among all the other peers.”
Can anyone work at one of these centers, and how many Pampa people would be able to work there?
“Yes, and my generic answer is about 100-125 jobs a year for the next four years. How that gets broken down is each data center is like a small business, so you’ll have a computer engineer, low-voltage electrical technician and those are specialized jobs, but after that, you still have to have the admin, the finance person, the security person, the maintenance guy, all of those jobs that go with any business. You’ll end up with an influx of white-collar jobs as well as blue-collar jobs for each one.”
What would it look like to put our kids on a career path and keep them here?
“So depending on who you land, many of the large ones have programs that integrate into the high schools, and so what they will do is partner with your high school and build out a computer lab or training center that the students can start in and have real-world experience with the real hardware and graduate with certificates that will get them the job to go directly out there. You can do that at the high school level and you can also do that at the community college level. A personal passion project for me is, I used to mentor high school robotics when I was in Houston and now my kids are getting of the age where they need mentored for robotics as well, so trying to start those all the way down to 5th grade and start training for industry applications and career paths before they get into middle school, just starting that conversation. So when they get through middle school, they have some thought of it, but when they get into high school, they really kind of know what they want to do and they’re on a trajectory to have a career.”
“There are two committees that the EDC has just issued out: one is the beautification committee and the other is the workforce committee and the EDC is dumping roughly $100,000 into every year for deployment out into the community. On the beautification side of it, we are starting with downtown and we’ve already got the documentation process done and we are getting all reviewed to make sure everything is correct. What it basically does is we are giving out grants worth $9,500 for people to put awnings, fix doors and all kinds of stuff. It’s all front-facing clean up and improvement.”
“That’s something that’s always been talked about, especially right now with all the mayoral stuff, and it’s something that is a mechanism by which we can do and is our way of reinvesting back into the community.”
Is that just for businesses or regular people?
“Property owners. So if you have a property that is in the red bricks area and you want to improve it, we are here to help.”
“The workforce is the same thing, but it’s in its infancy stage, but that’s the one we’re going to invest in the high school and the community, getting the workforce involved in getting them trained and certified to go to work.”
“We just need to start taking pride in Pampa. There’s a handful of people who do take pride in their stuff, and there’s a few that don’t and you can see that. It takes just one bad apple to make a whole street look bad, and if we can start just getting the whole town to take pride in their appearance, then they will take better care of their stuff and kind of get us out of the rut.”
