Morgan Wheatly

A longtime Clarendon business has changed hands September 3 with pharmacist Mike Butts announcing his retirement.

The new owner of Mike’s Pharmacy has local ties to Clarendon. Pharmacist Mark Land is the grandson of Helen and Billy Jack Land and the late Sellkirk and Lorine McAnear of Clarendon, and he currently owns and operates the Panhandle Drug Store in Panhandle.

Land has hired Mark King to be the full time pharmacist at Mike’s Pharmacy. King grew up in Wichita Falls, graduated high school in 1997 and from the Texas Tech School of Pharmacy in 2008. Mark, his wife Jennifer and their three children, 10-year-old Anderson, six-year-old Campbell, and one-year-old Truett, currently reside in Amarillo. The family will move to Clarendon hopefully within a year.

Mark has been working at Walgreens since graduating from pharmacy school and is very excited about the opportunity to work at an independent pharmacy and serve the Clarendon community. While in pharmacy school Mark had the opportunity to do a clinical rotation at Mike’s Pharmacy and enjoyed the staff and the working environment and has wanted to work in an independent pharmacy for some time.

Land currently lives in Panhandle with wife Callie and three daughters Mackie, 9; Leah, 6; and Carly, 4. He has owned and managed the drug store in Panhandle for more than five years. Land graduated Panhandle High School in 1994 and the Texas Tech School of Pharmacy in 2001. He was employed at the Veterans’ Administration for seven years before moving back to Panhandle in 2008. He is the son of Steve and Deborah Land.

Mike’s Pharmacy has been in Clarendon for 34 years, starting in the old Gibson’s discount center where Lowe’s Family Center is located today before Butts moving to the pharmacy’s present location in the mid 1980s.

“As I enter my retirement years, I want to thank you for 34 years of support,” Butts said in a advertisement to his customers. “I want each of you to know how special you have been to me and my family. I am going to pursue my passion for travel and will continue to live in Clarendon.”

Land says customers should not expect any major changes.

“The same great staff will remain at Mike’s Pharmacy along with the outstanding service, business hours and delivery service,” Land said. “We look forward to continuing the relationships that Mike and his staff have built with you over the past three decades. Along with Mike, we look forward to making this a smooth transition for all of you. We wish Mike the very best in his hard earned retirement.”

A project to bypass the Seventh Street bridge at City Park and rehabilitate a truss bridge on Rosenfield Street will begin in the next few days and should be completed by early December.

Representatives of contractor Gilvin Terrill and the Texas Department of Transportation held a preconstruction meeting Friday to discuss logistics and timetables for the $553,000 project

The Warren truss bridge on Rosenfield will be disassembled and completely rehabilitated, and the street will be closed during the time of the project.

Seventh Street at the City Park has been closed since late 2008 after TxDOT officials declared the 1908 pony truss bridge at that location to be unsafe. Due to its historic nature, the old bridge will be left in place, and a new concrete box culvert crossing will be placed immediately to the south of the existing structure.

The new crossing will necessitate shifting the roadway in that area and the relocation of some equipment in the Tot Park.

A two-foot tall steel rail will run the length of the Tot Park to keep children from running into the street, and Seventh Street itself will be repaved from the Kearney Street intersection to near the old school building.

The Seventh Street crossing will be have a 32-foot roadway to accommodate two lanes of traffic. The old truss bridge is only wide enough for one vehicle.

 Donley County Commissioners approved creation of a reinvestment zone for a proposed wind farm but took no action on the energy company’s tax abatement application Monday, September 9.

The reinvestment zone is a necessary first step before any tax abatement can be awarded, and this zone encompasses about 21,700 acres in the northeastern part of the county bordered on the north by Interstate 40.

Commissioners held discussions in closed session for about one and half hours and met with attorney James Wester, who is representing the county, and Cielo Wind Power representative Robert Peña.

The court will meet again on September 23 and take up Cielo’s tax abatement proposal at that time.

Peña told the Enterprise that everything is looking good for the company to begin developing a 161-megawatt wind farm in 2014 with the possibility that some construction may start this year. Two-thirds of the project is expected to be constructed in Donley County with the remainder residing in Gray County.

“We can confidently say that we’re here and we will have a presence in Donley County,” Peña said.

Cielo has already erected a meteorological testing tower at Clarendon College’s Pampa Center, and Peña said the working relationship with Donley County officials has been positive and professional.

In addition to finalizing the local tax abatement agreement, Peña said he still has some work to do with the Groom Independent School District and said Gray County officials will also meet later this month to finalize an abatement agreement in that county.

Last month Peña said the market value of the project would be about $95 million, and the project expects to generate about $1 million in direct sales taxes. At that time, Cielo proposed a 100 percent tax abatement for ten years, but Peña said that direct payments in lieu of taxes would be discussed in a closed session of the court.