By GvilleTX Newsroom
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick visited GlobalWafers America's Sherman silicon facility Aug. 26 while on a statewide campaign bus tour, the company said, putting a 2026 re-election stop inside a Texoma plant tied by federal and state records to jobs, land-use policy and electric-grid costs. Patrick's campaign site says the Republican lieutenant governor is seeking another term; Gov. Greg Abbott's campaign site says Abbott announced his own re-election bid in Houston.
The Texas Secretary of State lists Patrick and Abbott as Republican statewide officeholders whose current terms expire in 2026. The same office lists governor and lieutenant governor as four-year offices on the 2026 ballot, with the primary already held March 3 and the general election set for Nov. 3; early voting is scheduled for Oct. 19-30. Patrick's campaign biography says he first won the lieutenant governor's office in 2014 and was returned to it in 2018 and 2022.
The Sherman stop took Patrick to a federally backed semiconductor project. The National Institute of Standards and Technology says GlobalWafers' Sherman project received a final $380 million CHIPS for America award. NIST describes the plant as a 300mm silicon wafer manufacturing facility and says the Sherman work is expected to mean about 1,200 construction jobs and 750 manufacturing jobs.
Patrick has used campaign bus tours in North Texas before. His 2022 campaign tour page lists stops in Gainesville and Sherman and describes that earlier trip as a 131-city tour.
For readers in Cooke County and around Texoma, the visit connects the statewide campaign to nearby questions about how industrial growth is permitted, where heavy operations are placed and who covers infrastructure costs. Those questions have already moved through state agencies, the Legislature and the governor's office.
Patrick had entered the Grayson County cement-kiln dispute before this week's stop. In an April 16, 2024, letter to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Patrick said he had traveled to the Sherman area, held a Sherman town hall and opposed a proposed cement kiln in Grayson County. In that letter, he asked TCEQ to pause permitting for permanent cement plants statewide until lawmakers could address the issue.
The Legislature later passed SB 1758. The enrolled bill analysis says the measure created a Grayson County pilot study on vibration effects from cement-kiln and aggregate operations near semiconductor wafer facilities. The same analysis says TCEQ may not approve certain cement-kiln or aggregate permits within 10 miles of covered Grayson County wafer facilities, and says that pilot section expires Sept. 1, 2031.
Abbott has tied the same election season to taxes and power demand. His office said he signed property-tax relief laws in Denton in 2025 that raised school-district homestead exemptions and the business personal-property exemption. His office also said in June that he directed PUC and ERCOT to keep residential ratepayers from bearing data-center infrastructure costs, and in August said data centers meeting his standards must cover the electric facilities they require, reuse water and disclose incentives, ownership, power demand, water use and mitigation plans.
The University of Texas/Texas Politics Project's August poll found Texans remained more opposed than supportive when asked about construction of a data center in their own community, with results almost unchanged from June. That places the Sherman visit inside a broader Texas debate over jobs, property taxes, land and utility costs as the fall general-election campaign moves toward November.
_Editor's note: Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law._
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