Blog Assignment #3 Guest Speakers

On Monday, January 28, 2013 we had two extremely fascinating people come talk to us about the development project they are working on. The two speakers were Mr. Mike Gentry and  Dr. Samuel Harrison. Both Mr. Gentry and Dr. Harrison attended Texas A&M University and were in the Corp. Mr. Gentry is now a practicing lawyer here in College Station and Dr. Harrison is a Doctor. The development project that was discussed during the lecture was based on a piece of land that Dr. Harrison's great grandfather won in a poker game. They discussed all the legality and procedures that were taken in order to sell the land. At the beginning of the process they had to dig up the land to look for artifacts and coffins but nothing was found. Had anything been found during this they would have had to shut down the project. The biggest hassle that Dr. Harrison talked about was the oil spill that had to be cleaned before he could sell off the property. There are two ways in which to clean an oil spill on a property; either Exxon can come in and do it for you or you can do a voluntary clean up. The problem with Exxon doing it is that your name remains on a list for a very long time so it could take years before the spill is cleaned up. Dr. Harrison instead did it himself and had dirt transported to the location and switched out with the contaminated soil. Once all of that was taken care of he sold the land to bucee's biggest competitor, Chicks.The most interesting thing that I heard through this lecture aside from how they dealt with the contaminated soil was that nearly 77,000 cars pass that lot a day.