When state lawmakers decided in 2015 that Texas needed to be the only state to have its own precious metals depository, supporters said there were plenty of reasons the project would be a gold mine.
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“When I first presented this, to be honest with you, we got hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world, really, who wanted to be able to put their gold in something that has the Texas banner above it,” said ... the bill’s author. “This doesn’t work in Wisconsin, it doesn’t work in Idaho.”
Best of all, because the state would find a private partner to build and own the physical depository, it would cost taxpayers nothing. The enterprise would even reap a big profit for Texas. “We estimate that we could raise tens of millions of dollars in fees,” [the bill’s author] testified.
More than three years after the depository opened, none of those things has happened. Yet this year, state lawmakers quietly voted to let the state borrow millions of dollars to bail out a project created to fix a problem that didn’t exist and which they had vowed would cost nothing.
