What to watch: The Midland Development Corporation (MDC) Board of Directors will meet at 10 a.m. Monday, May 4, to consider a $655,000 regional aerospace corridor agreement with El Paso County, receive the FY 2024-2025 audit, and review the March economic development activity report.

Key points:

  • Aerospace corridor: The board may authorize the MDC to execute an agreement with El Paso County to coordinate work on a West Texas Aerospace Corridor Master Plan. Under the agreement, El Paso County would reimburse the MDC up to $655,000 for planning work running through July 31, 2027.

The Texas Space Commission awarded El Paso County an $800,000 grant last year through the state’s Space Exploration and Aeronautics Research Fund to support the corridor effort. The plan will map regional aerospace infrastructure, supply chains, and workforce needs from El Paso to Midland and produce a strategic plan and implementation roadmap.

Aerospace and defense is one of the few industries already taking root in Midland not tied to oil and gas. Midland International Air and Space Port is the only commercial spaceport in the world that shares its runway with a commercial airline. This federal license took years to secure, and no other city has managed to secure it. The Texas chapter of the Space Force Association is now headquartered here.

The corridor master plan MDC may join is the planning layer that maps out what West Texas needs to compete for the next round of aerospace and defense investment against places like Florida’s Space Coast, Alabama, and California, which have spent decades positioning for the same business.

If approved, the agreement would expand MDC’s role into multi-county aerospace planning and tie Midland’s economic development arm directly into a regional aerospace planning effort that the state has separately invested in across the West Texas–Borderplex region.

  • Financial audit: The board will review the MDC’s audited financial statements for fiscal year 2024-25. The audit reports a net position of $76.4 million, up about $6.8 million from the prior year, and sales tax revenue of $17.28 million. Total expenses were $12.36 million. The auditor issued an unmodified opinion, meaning no material concerns about the financial statements themselves.

The audit also discloses approximately $62 million in outstanding economic development commitments, which is the running total of incentive promises MDC made to companies that have not yet been fully paid out as those companies meet performance thresholds.

  • March activity: MDC Executive Director Sara Harris will present the March activity report. Sales tax revenue, MDC’s primary funding source, is up 5.2% year to date through March compared with the same period a year earlier. February sales tax was up 20.1% year over year, and April collections, which post in May, were up 3.8%. The Midland MSA unemployment rate sat at 3.3 percent in February.