About Us

When the City signed its land deal with Samsung in 2021, unbeknownst to many of us living in and around Taylor, our lives were changed forever. The Samsung plant is going to be one of the largest buildings ever built on the planet, over 6,000,000 square feet in total, with nine major buildings projected. Just the first building of the project is estimated to cost well over 17 billion dollars and require over 2,000 employees to manage. The first building alone is projected to consume 10 million gallons of water daily. Life in Taylor and surrounding areas will never be the same.

To support the workings of a plant of this size, the areas surrounding the Samsung plant will need to be developed into housing complexes, commercial buildings for Samsung vender operations, and other commercial uses. This means that much, if not all, of the land surrounding Samsung will need to be sold to developers for commercial development and/or taken by the City and others through eminent domain to establish roads, pipelines, wastewater treatment plants, etc.

Our home is going to change from ranch-style, wide-open country to densely developed urban living. It’s only a matter of time.

For those living closer to the plant, this development will affect us immediately since it will need to be completed in time for the 1st plant’s opening in 2024. Change is not coming. It’s already here.

Several of us who saw this coming wanted to sell our land so we could move to other locations where we could continue to live the lifestyle we currently enjoy. Others of us just did not want to live in a 10- to 20-year construction zone, where work crews are destroying our roads, dumping waste near our properties, and filling our days and nights with incessant land drilling and construction noises. Some of us simply wanted to maximize the value of our property by selling now and then purchasing ranch land elsewhere for a profit. For a multitude of reasons, we decided to sell our land and move.

The Samsung deal should have made our properties valuable, given our land will ultimately be developed for commercial purposes. But when we found buyers willing to pay commercial prices, the City of Taylor declined to approve those buyers’ proposed uses of our land. The City essentially tried to force us to sell our land strictly for agricultural use, the land prices of which are far lower than what our land is worth and is certainly less than what we needed to relocate.

When the buyers could not get approval from the City to develop our land for commercial purposes, they backed out of the deals. Consequently, our land deals fell through. So far, we have calculated that the City has blown up over 100 million dollars in land sales this way.

Feeling like our land had been put in prison, some of us reached out to attorneys we knew who deal with representing landowners in suits with municipalities. One of these attorneys recently sued Taylor and won that case. We learned that what the City is doing to us in not only wrong; it is illegal.

And we also learned that the City is not going to talk to landowners one at a time about our complaints. Speaking to the City one at a time, we have too little power. Councilmember-at-large Dwayne Ariola stated at the last City council meeting that if landowners come together and give the City one voice to engage with, the City may be open to giving us some “comfort.” In other words, those of us who organize are more likely to get what we want and need through addressing the City as a group.

The Taylor Landowner Rights Coalition was formed to support landowners to bargain and fight together so that we have the power we need to clean up this mess.  

Our lives are being changed forever by Samsung. The City is benefitting immensely from this. City of Taylor residents are benefitting immensely from this. We are the ones being squeezed to make the development possible. This is unacceptable. We are standing up for our rights and for our futures, and we hope you will join us.