The Actual Price of Beef...
- Jack Curtis
- Jul 14
- 6 min read
Apparently, ground beef is all it takes to make Marc Maxwell newsworthy again.
Over the past week, the Sulphur Springs News-Telegram and Front Porch News have run the same story about Maxwell securing a donation of meat for the Hopkins County Community Chest, complete with a posed photo op. Here are those links if you haven't seen them yet:
Sulphur Springs News-Telegram
Front Porch News:
The donation to HCCC was a nice gesture in itself. Hungry families need food, and I guess it gave Maxwell the perfect opportunity for some self-serving publicity. Local outlets made sure he received it, running photographs, quotations, and a tidy human-interest story about what inspired the gift.
Now, can someone around here cover news about his actual job?
Before this high-in-saturated-fats publicity tour, KLTV (you know, from over in Tyler) managed to provide reporting to inform viewers that the City has allocated more than $1 million for legal expenses related to the Matrix Project, that MSB Global is no longer expected to lead the development, and that the Vistra litigation may not reach trial until sometime in 2027.
There is also a separate lawsuit by yours truly alleging that Maxwell and the City Council approved the original Letter of Intent and Chapter 380 agreements through vague notices, closed session deliberations, and public votes that never meaningfully told citizens what was being approved. In June, after the lawsuit was filed, the Council attempted to ratify the prior agreements, and there is evidence of closed-door meetings with the new developer that were pontentially illegal.
IDK, those seem moderately newsworthy, but so far it's been crickets.
There was Maxwell’s August 2025 interview with Front Porch News, which was presented as an effort to “provide clarity” about the project. Front Porch even felt compelled to announce, before anyone asked, that “The City did not pay us for this interview.” The City may not have paid for it, but it certainly received the product.
The interview gave Maxwell a friendly platform to tell the public a reassuring story about the project’s origins, MSB’s qualifications, and the people supposedly capable of delivering an $18 billion development.
The problem is that Maxwell's story doesn't survive basic fact-checking, and MSB Global has turned out to be the complete fraud many believed they were. (See here, here, here, and here if you'd like an appetizer.)
This was not a minor mistake about somebody’s résumé. Maxwell was using those representations to assure the public that the City had selected competent people to undertake what it described as one of the largest data centers in the country.
MSB wasn't selected through a competitive request for proposals. No competing developer was publicly evaluated. The City requested bids for sewer materials at Thermo but apparently saw no need to competitively evaluate the developer receiving $17.5MM worth of public land and incentives for an $18 billion project.
No media acknowledgment of these issues since then. No mea culpa or balancing stories.
In September of 2025, Maxwell went on television promising that the project would generate more than $100 million every year—enough to replace every street, pay off the City’s debt, and refund everyone’s property taxes.
Yet, here we are. Less than a year later and the original developer is being phased out because of an inability to perform, the land is still tied up in litigation, and the City is spending seven figures a year defending decisions the public was never allowed to meaningfully examine beforehand.
Meanwhile, taxpayers and utility customers are already paying the bill. The City borrowed $12 million in 2024, largely for Thermo-related infrastructure, followed by another $7 million for the City Hall expansion. The City’s own budget identifies more than $8.1 million in planned former-mine expenditures, while the related Thermo and City Hall debt alone requires approximately $1.35 million in fiscal-year 2026 debt service from utility revenue and property taxes.
And Maxwell's stories about the Matrix Project's origins haven't aged any better.
For example, on November 28, 2024, a City Facebook post claimed that, during an October 2024 municipal conference, it had never heard of MSB Global, Ganna Halvorsen had never heard of the Thermo property, and no introduction, negotiation, or discussion involving the project existed. According to that account, Halvorsen casually mentioned Mark Blanchard a month later, and the project grew innocently from there.
However, documents obtained by the public since then show this overly-sanitized version of events is misleading. These documents include an email Maxwell sent the very next day to Matthew Goering at Vistra stating that the "City is in discussions with 4 data center developers."
There is a broader pattern here with Maxwell that's going unreported:
Maxwell signed the Letter of Intent after the Council discussed “Thermo 4, 5, 6, & 7” and approved generic action following executive session. The agenda did not identify MSB, a data center, an $18 billion project, or even property descriptions that appeared in the Letter of Intent itself. The public was expected to somehow reverse-engineer the deal after it had already been signed.
He also formed the Greater Sulphur Springs Regional Center LLC months before the Council formally authorized his role in that entity.
More recently, Maxwell signed a lobbying agreement with Gaylord Hughey for $12,500 per month. I have found no express Council vote authorizing that contract in the published agendas or minutes.
I mean, I like ground beef too, but c'mon.
The issue is not whether a city manager can sign routine documents. The issue is Maxwell's repeated willingness to exercise significant public authority without regard to legal restraints and the basic transparency the law requires.
Then, there is how Maxwell treats the people asking questions.
During the May 5 Council meeting, residents challenged the City’s decision to allocate $1.2 million for legal expenses arising from the Matrix Project. Maxwell abruptly left during the discussion and never returned.
There is also this widely circulated photograph from another meeting that appears to show Maxwell slouched in his chair and rolling his eyes while citizens addressed the Council:
A still photograph can miss context, but it cannot invent the posture. The image resonates because residents know full well the attitude it captured.
A public official who walked out while citizens questioned a million-dollar legal bill is now being presented to those same citizens through carefully framed stories about generosity and compassion.
Any attempts at private generosity do not erase public accountability. Donating food does not answer questions about misleading statements, deficient due diligence, undisclosed decision-making, unauthorized agreements, public debt, developer failure, or the money being spent defending it all.
All of this aside, though, there is still the problem of selective journalism itself.
The imbalance of coverage does more than leave the public uninformed; it transfers editorial power to the officials who are supposed to be scrutinized. When a "newsroom" publishes the photograph, repeats the quotation, and accepts the human-interest pitch—but ignores the lawsuits, the public debt, the disappearing developer, the contradictory records, and the million-dollar legal allocation—it allows City Hall to decide which version of events becomes news. Over time, the public isn't given meaningful information, but instead, it's given a manufactured impression of the people exercising power over it.
Selective journalism concedes power to government by allowing public officials to convert access into influence as a means of controlling public narratives. The official no longer has to answer the difficult story because the easier story replaces it.
Did Maxwell pay anyone to publish these stories? I have no evidence of that, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Front Porch News expressly says the City did not pay for its interview in August 2025.
However, the more disturbing possibility is that he did not have to.
Maybe the price is simply access. Maybe it is convenience. Maybe it is a photograph and a ready-made story that can be published without reading a court filing, examining an agreement, or asking an uncomfortable follow-up question.
Whatever the explanation, I have not seen these same local outlets explain the Open Meetings Act lawsuit, examine the allegations, investigate the contradictory origin stories, discuss the City’s attempt to redo the approvals, trace the public money, or ask how an $18 billion project reached the agreement stage before most residents even knew it existed.
KLTV managed to cover it from Tyler. Many of us have managed to investigate it from a laptop.
What, exactly, would it cost to get the people who call themselves the local media to cover the actual local news?
Give him credit for the beef, fine, but don't be silent on what Maxwell is really giving to this community.
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