Tyson rumor sparks angst and anger, but is there anything to it?

The farm fields around the intersection of 71st Street South and Tyler Road are growing more rumors than crops these days.

The rumors are that Tyson Foods, the nation’s biggest meat company, is eyeing this obscure intersection between Haysville and Clearwater for a giant plant to process hundreds of millions of chickens a year.

Red signs dot the roadside in this mostly empty rural landscape and their message couldn’t be clearer: “No Tyson Sedgwick County.”

Tyson says it hasn’t even started to consider specific sites, although it has identified Segwick, Cloud and Montgomery counties in Kansas among its finalists.

Of the rumors surrounding Tyler and 71st, “That’s not coming from here, that’s not coming from us,” Tyson spokesman Worth Sparkman said.

There isn’t much there now: an old farmhouse, a rusty barn, a broken windmill, a few horses grazing and a distant view of the Occidental Chemical plant about 1 1/2 miles to the northeast.

But the speculation runs rampant that if Tyson does choose Sedgwick County, this windswept stretch of not much could be exactly what the company needs and wants.

The Greater Wichita Partnership, a coalition of business leaders analyzing the Tyson situation on the county’s behalf, said it’s working with real estate agents to identify multiple sites in the southwest part of the county that could accommodate the chicken plant.

“At this time, no official site has been selected,” GWP said in its weekly update on Tyson negotiations.

Still, rumors alone were enough to bring an angry overflow crowd to last week’s Clearwater City Council meeting, where they got a city resolution opposing Tyson.

The opposition fears that the processing plant – and a network of chicken barns to support it – would destroy the peaceful lifestyle of the area with pollution, smells, trucks and 1,500 workers.

Burt Ussery, the mayor of Clearwater, said he doesn’t know how Tyler and 71st emerged as the focal point of the anti-Tyson activism.

“That’s what I keep asking myself,” he said.

He speculated the site may have been used as “a placeholder somebody suggested when they first invited Tyson.”

But Tyler and 71st may not be completely idle speculation.

Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell said he’s spoken to neighbors in the area and they’ve told him that “options have been purchased on land in that area.”

Land options are usually bought for a small percentage of the price of the property they cover. They give the buyer time to seek any governmental approvals needed to develop a site and then buy the land later for a set price.

Unlike property sales, options don’t have to be recorded with the government. And if a deal falls through, the option buyer loses a relatively small amount of money.

O’Donnell said he doesn’t think Tyson itself has bought any options, but a local development concern may be trying to buy up enough options and tie up enough land to eventually try to sell a complete site to Tyson.

He said he hasn’t talked to anyone who has bought or sold an option.

Also fueling the speculation is that the property has several features that would make it an attractive site for a chicken plant, beyond just the open land that would be needed to accommodate the project.

The property has built-in rail access, cut across by a railroad track that serves the nearby Occidental Chemical plant.

There are paved roads in and out, and it’s only six miles from I-35, providing easy access to the major trucking corridor running from Mexico to Minnesota.

There’s also water, via wells that now feed pivot irrigation of the cropland.

So far, about the closest anyone’s come to an official confirmation of anything has been the Greater Wichita Partnership’s last weekly report on Tyson progress, which noted the southwest part of the county has been determined to have enough water available to support the chicken plant.

“Tyson Foods has provided revisions to site criteria which the project team is working through,” the update said. “It is possible that multiple sites may meet the criteria and therefore could be presented as potential options to decision-makers.”

This story was originally published November 21, 2017 at 2:02 PM with the headline "Tyson rumor sparks angst and anger, but is there anything to it?."