From Texas Standard:
Earlier this year, Texas made headlines when they passed a bill that would move $1 billion of gold bullion being stored in New York to Texas.
Gov. Greg Abbott released a statement upon signing the bill into law, saying that Texas would work to store the gold into a secure facility.
In it, Abbott said the Texas Bullion Depository, the "first state-level facility of its kind in the nation,” will keep taxpayer funds from leaving the state through fees for storing gold outside our borders and increase "the security and stability of our gold reserves.”
Texas State Comptroller Glenn Hegar has created a task force within his office to strategize the best plan for the gold repatriation and storage going forward.
"Our objective is to come up with a wide variety of different business models that may work," Hegar says.
Afterward, the task force will go back to the state leadership – the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Speaker of the House, et al. – and form a more solid plan. So far, the task force has collected “over a dozen” points of information and suggestions from all over the state, Hegar says.
"Some of them would want to build and store a Texas gold bullion facility,” he says. “Others would suggest scattering multiple points throughout the state where people could store their gold."
Some of the big questions are: Who would be storing their gold with the state? Would it be individuals, the state itself, and other national or international entities? What type of payment system would the facility implement? Should there be multiple depositories or just one central one?
"It's been a really interesting project,” he says. “We're just slowly going through our due diligence. We've had a wide variety of interest from a number of people.”
Whatever the plan, Hegar says the gold is coming to Texas.
"We'll work throughout this whole process and come up with a business model that works,” he says. "My ultimate goal is to make sure that we have a Texas gold bullion depository that is safe and secure and everybody can rest well knowing that those metals are safe here in Texas."
