Take This Job and Shove It

By Richard Lacayo

The apple of temptation came to Williamson County, Texas, last week, but the county commission didn't bite. Earlier this year Apple Computer, the California-based high-tech firm, proposed to build an $80 million office complex near the town of Round Rock. The five-member county commission was delighted. The project would bring as many as 1,450 new jobs, with a potential contribution to the local economy of $300 million by the year 2000. Then the commission learned that Apple extends health benefits to the live-in partners of unmarried employees, whether straight or gay. Jobs or no jobs, that was a big snag.

After a heated public meeting, the commissioners effectively killed the project last week. By a 3-to-2 vote they refused Apple's request for a $750,000 tax abatement over seven years. The swing vote, commissioner David Hays, was a surprise. Only days earlier the local paper published a letter from Hays supporting the abatements. But over the weekend he was lobbied by conservative Christians. "If I had voted yes," Hays said later on a radio show, "I would have had to walk into my church with people saying, 'There is the man who brought homosexuality to Williamson County.' "

Notwithstanding whether homosexuality might be there already, Williamson County is an area in flux. Farms and ranches are making way for industrial parks and the expanding suburbs of nearby Austin, the state capital and the closest thing Texas has to a hotbed of liberalism. Business has been so good in Williamson County that unemployment among its 139,500 residents is 3.5%, about half the state average. "The county is growing like crazy," says Cathy Gilstrap, a Round Rock accountant. "There are those who want the growth, but they don't want any change."

The get-out-of-town vote on Apple isn't the only sign of hard lines being drawn around the area. Last month conservative Christians who recently gained a majority on the Round Rock school board fired district superintendent Dan McLendon. Though he had been given a raise by the previous board for overseeing an increase in test scores, McLendon had also recommended discontinuing public prayers before school football games.

Only about 50 U.S. companies currently have a benefits policy comparable to Apple's, yet some local officials and business leaders were worried that the vote would send a negative signal to other firms. "We needed that plant," says Round Rock Mayor Charlie Culpepper. "Families need jobs, but government needs to stay out of business." While Governor Ann Richards urged the company to consider other sites in Texas, proposals for tax breaks and cheap real estate poured in from all over the state, including Waco, Gainesville and one other place: a parcel of land in Dallas offered up by the Baptist Foundation of Texas.

With reporting by Carlton Stowers/Georgetown