Tom Whitehurst

Sunday, December 3, 2000

Voters' rejection of the economic development sales tax last month certainly changed the responsibilities of five residents appointed by the City Council to decide how to spend the money.
   But the group, called the Corpus Christi Business and Job Development Corp., still has at least 78 million reasons to exist.
   That's the projected combined price tag of the two sales tax initiatives approved by voters - the $35 million multipurpose arena and the $43 million renovation of the bayfront seawall. The group still will oversee those projects for the city.
   The group's existence is required by the state law that governs municipal sales tax initiatives. The members are Rosalinda Bonilla, supervisor of student teachers at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi; Robert Broadway, controller and refinery services manager for Valero Refining; Gloria Perez, owner of Coastal Bend Chem-Dry and chairwoman of the Corpus Christi Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; John Richards, dean emeritus of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi's College of Business; and Sam J. Susser, chairman of SSP, which operates Circle K convenience stores throughout Texas and Oklahoma.
   The consensus among them is that they would have relished the job of overseeing an economic development kitty, but their current role, though narrower, is still exciting.
   "I'm already getting a lot of calls about it," Perez said.
   Those calls are from local contractors looking forward to the bid process, and other concerned citizens who want to know things like whether the meetings will be open - they will. Their next meeting is at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 8 at City Hall. After that, they'll meet monthly, on the first Monday of the month.
   The group will review all architectural and construction plans, bids and contracts, and will make recommendations to the council, which has the final say.
   "This is going to be a pretty influential board," said Perez, its vice president. "They usually go by the recommendations of other boards."
   Broadway, the group's secretary, pointed out another important function of the board - accountability. "It will be another set of eyes and ears that will be outside city government."
   No such group had oversight of the city's 1986 bond package of $105 million, which has been cited as a reason that voters rejected the economic development tax. The 1986 bonds are among several trust-in-government issues that have been blamed for the defeat of several initiatives since then. The 1986 package was supposed to have been completed by 1991 but wasn't declared finished until this year.
   But Richards, president of the oversight group, said it's unlikely that a citizens group would have made much difference in the outcome of the 1986 package.
   "The bond issue was based on a broader tax base through growth, and you didn't have growth. You had shrinkage," said Richards, the former business school dean and longtime student of the local economy.
   "A lot of people forget what happened to this city in 1986. We had 12 percent unemployment. We had buildings, magnificent structures, sold for 50 cents on the dollar. This city really weathered a depression. As a personal note, I'm still driving the car I could afford back in 1986.
   "We were on a roll in the late '70s and the early '80s and, bam! Everything came to a standstill. What happened was every business in Corpus Christi, with very few exceptions, was in or depended on the oil business, which went to pot.
   "I doubt that a reasonable and prudent citizens committee wouldn't have looked at this and said, 'We've got to cut back on this spending or postpone it.' "
   "I don't blame anybody except OPEC."
   It beats blaming each other.
  
  

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