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Sunday, April 23, 2000

City loses to Valley at leapfrog

But winning elements are moving into place

The news releases that cross this desk have shown an alarming trend lately. Check this out:
   "The firm maintains offices in San Antonio, Brownsville, Pharr, Austin, Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, and in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C."
   Here's another: ". . . one of the largest commercial building contractors in Central and South Texas, is based in San Antonio, Texas, with Regional Offices in Austin, Texas, and Edinburg, Texas."
   Notice who's missing? Us.
   It would appear that companies are playing leapfrog and Corpus Christi is the loser. We seem to be the no-man's land between the NAFTA-generated boom in the Valley and the NAFTA-tourism-medical-and-everything-else-related boom in San Antonio.
   Backing off
   The first example was from Turner Collie & Braden Inc., an engineering firm involved in public works infrastructure and the like. The second is from SpawGlass Contractors Inc.
   Both companies are busy with projects in the Valley. TC&B has a lot of wastewater infrastructure work resulting from the effort to bring services to colonias and SpawGlass is building a general classroom and computer center at the University of Texas-Pan American.
   TC&B has an office in Pharr because the city government selected the company as its city engineer and made the on-site office a precondition, though the city has since backed off that requirement, says senior vice president Carlos Garza.
   'A lot of companies'
   The reason TC&B doesn't have an office in Corpus Christi, Garza says, is that as far as he can tell, there are enough local engineering firms to wrap up the work that's available.
   "We are certainly not oblivious to Corpus Christi, or anti-Corpus Christi. If we were to see that the activity down there were such that you would need another consultant, we'd try to get some of that work."
   He wouldn't come right out and say that Corpus Christi isn't worth TC&B's time. In fact, he said he didn't know a lot about the Corpus Christi market and would like to know more. But he conceded that if there were sufficient work available in Corpus Christi, the likelihood of his company not knowing about it is nil.
   "If these things are there, believe me, there'd be a lot of companies such as ours snooping around."
   SpawGlass president Fred Raley knows plenty about Corpus Christi, having lived and worked here. SpawGlass had a regional office here in the 1980s. The company built First City II and III and several Mustang Island condominiums. Now the company is building the new control tower at Corpus Christi International Airport and is pursuing other projects here.
   "We've always liked Corpus Christi," Raley says. "It's just been tough to maintain a steady flow of work. It's nothing to do, I think personally, with Corpus Christi. It's just the downturn of the economy in general in the late '80s."
   Again with that old oil bust.
   "I very much love the city and I still own property in Corpus Christi. We've always tried to maintain a presence in Corpus Christi. We haven't always been successful."
   So, what would it take for SpawGlass to open another regional office here?
   "The continuity of work for my company would be one thing. We have people who work for the company who are from Corpus Christi and have expressed interest in moving back there."
   One potential economic catalyst, he says, would be more direct flights to Corpus Christi. The airport improvements, such as the tower and a planned new terminal, are a step in that direction. "It's truly a tourist vacation spot, very much like San Antonio."
   He saw how tourism helped San Antonio grow, with many of yesterday's tourists becoming today's residents, and bringing their business activities with them. He lauded the Port of Corpus Christi's decision to build a cruise terminal to generate tourism. "That would be a great opportunity for people to go to the area and visit Corpus Christi."
   And a great opportunity for Corpus Christi to improve at leapfrog.
  

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Tom Whitehurst

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