while I am here, let me post this also...
A little more insight on just how big this state is with the energy money. They are finding large amounts of natural gas in northern LA right now, and millionaires are being made.
Quote:
A recent rush on natural gas drilling in northwest Louisiana is turning many landowners into instant millionaires, and stoking others' hopes.
It's an unnatural and sometimes unsettling reality sinking in on the generally modest, conservative citizens of this area. Gas plays in the region date from 1870, but no one has seen anything like this.
Signing bonuses are turning large property owners into millionaires overnight. Mineral leases were going for as little as $100 an acre a year ago. Reports are now coming in of bonuses from $10,000 to $30,000 an acre. At those rates, a family with 100 acres would immediately get a check for as much as $3 million, plus 20 percent to 30 percent of future royalties.
Mike Smith, 60, an appraiser in Bossier City with 343 acres of timber farm, first heard about the lucrative lease deals in the late spring. A quick deal gave him lottery-like shock, and now he's retiring early.
"I got a check for over a million, in less than two weeks," Smith said. "I just didn't get used to it. Gosh, it was like, damn. Somebody hands you a million dollars, and you have to think about it for a while."
After leasing more than 1,000 acres of its public land at an auction this summer, DeSoto Parish received a bonus check of $28.7 million, which was 60 percent more than the annual tax revenue for the mostly rural jurisdiction.
"Everybody's mouth was wide open," Parish President Bryant Yopp said.
|
article link
Cadillac sales were up 70% there this past summer.
