I should back up. The ranch is called Vickers Springs. It is 480 acres of limestone and live oak in Burnet County, Texas, about an hour and a half northwest of Austin and two miles east of a town called Bertram. My grandfather paid $63 an acre for it in 1947.
My father expanded it twice. I bought my father out in 1985 with thirty years of savings and a small loan from the Burnet County Cattleman's Bank. I have lived on it with my wife, Lynette, since the summer we married, forty-one years come October. I worked for the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) for thirty-two years before retiring in 2018.
I was a senior transmission engineer. I designed substations, transformer arrays, distribution networks, and the occasional ad hoc fix at 3:00 a.m. when a thunderhead had knocked out service to half of Llano County. I have a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a habit, picked up from my father, of reading my electric bills line by line for thirty-eight consecutive Augusts.
That habit, more than any of the engineering, is what mattered in this particular story.
I built a private substation on Vickers Springs in 1988. The substation feeds my irrigation pumps, my deep wells, my equipment shop, my hay barn, and the main house. It is fed in turn by a 46-kilovolt LCRA transmission tap I helped engineer for myself the year after I married Lynette. The tap is recorded with the county and with LCRA. The substation is mine in fee. I have maintained it personally for thirty-seven years. It is the only piece of working transmission infrastructure in Burnet County that has never failed. I take some quiet pride in that.
Lynette tells me occasionally that the substation is the one thing in my life I love more than my Kubota tractor. I do not argue. She is correct, we both know it, and the substation does not care either way.
Our son, Brody, is thirty-eight. He is a deputy sheriff in Llano County, two counties west of us. He is married and has a five-year-old daughter named Hazel. She is the only person I let into the substation, ever, and I let her in only because she has my father's habit of asking sensible questions about machinery she does not yet understand.
In 2015, a developer from Atlanta named Spencer Roxborough subdivided the 600 acres west of my property line and built 124 homes on it. He called the subdivision Sunset Mesa Estates. The lots sold for an average of $670,000. The buyers came from Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. Most of them had not lived in Burnet County before they signed.
Spencer had a problem in 2015 that I did not learn about until late that summer. His problem was that the LCRA had declined to extend transmission service to Sunset Mesa Estates. The cost of running a high-voltage line nine miles across rough limestone to serve 124 homes did not pencil out for LCRA's planning department. Spencer's request was denied in writing in April of 2015.
Spencer did not tell his buyers this. Spencer solved his problem a different way.
In May of 2015, Spencer hired a private electrical contractor named Garrick Voss to install an unauthorized underground line from the rear of his subdivision across the property boundary and into the secondary distribution system of my private substation. The work was done without permits, inspections, or LCRA notification, and Voss was paid $23,000 in cash. The unauthorized tap was energized on June 2, 2015.
For the next nine years, the residents of Sunset Mesa Estates received their electricity, without their knowledge, from a substation I had built for myself. I noticed the difference in August because I read every electric bill.