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El Paso Inc. - What Happened, What We Need to Do
September 24, 2005

— El Paso Inc.

El Paso-owned and proud
Sep. 18 - Sep. 24

Hunt: 'What happened, what we need to do'
by Dan Huff

A major local developer and philanthropist, Woody Hunt, says El Paso is in a much better position to reverse an economic and social decline than he’s ever seen – but, first, certain things need to be done.
“Our public policy needs to be proactive, it needs to be transparent, it needs to be competitive and it needs to be collaborative,” Hunt told the Rotary Club of El Paso. “Everybody needs to work together, and we need to focus on growing the pie.”
The positive signs, he said, include continuing education improvement in the public schools and colleges, the growing numbers at Fort Bliss, and a more aggressive community leadership.
These, Hunt said, would overcome problems that he said began in the 1950s at a time when El Paso’s per-capita income and education levels were about 20 percent above the rest of the Texas.
By 2000, he said, the levels had fallen to 30 percent below the state average, and even lower when compared to the nation, according to a UTEP study funded by Hunt’s Cimarron Foundation.
The decline, he said, began “about the time we sought participation in the garment industry and the low-income jobs and the low-education levels and low pay that went along with that. We forgot that education attainment is linked to income, and we took the wrong path.”
The Cimarron Foundation is one of the outgrowths of Hunt’s success as CEO and controlling shareholder of the privately held Hunt Building Corp., which his father and grandfather founded in 1947. The company is the largest private landholder in El Paso, with 6,500 acres, and specializes in development, construction and property management. It is recognized as the largest U.S. builder of military housing.

More studies
Another UTEP study funded by the foundation looked at what Hunt termed the “balance of payments” between local taxes and the return the community has gotten from Austin and Washington.
He said that study revealed “the worse our income levels got, the more (federal and state) money we were getting. We enjoyed an increasing balance of payment with Austin and Washington, which continues to this day” – which Hunt doesn’t see as a positive development.
“In other words,” he said, “our failure to raise per-capita income meant more state and federal dollars coming in our direction. This is not a way to become competitive … A balance of payments which is in your favor … can destroy the adjustments necessary in a highly competitive world.”
A third study, completed earlier this year, of local education trends revealed a bright spot, Hunt said. It showed El Paso’s nine area school districts were doing better than any other urban area in Texas when it comes to K-12 graduation rates and test scores among Hispanics.
El Paso schools overall are doing 30 percent better than those in Dallas-Fort Worth, and a little bit less when compared to Houston, Hunt said.
“The only city that’s even close is San Antonio, and it’s about 12 percent behind us,” he said. “This tells me our education levels are going to start closing with the state’s,” which he says bodes well for the community’s economic competitiveness.
Another trend locally is the increasing number of Ph.D. programs at UTEP, which has gone from only one in 1990 to 13 today, Hunt said.
But the education news isn’t all good. Hunt, who is serving a six-year term as a regent for the University of Texas System, pointed out that only 16 percent of the local workforce have college degrees.
“The national average is 27 percent; the state average is 27 percent,” he said. “That gap has got to close, it has got to be at the top of any list.”

Fort Bliss
Adding to the potential for economic growth is the coming increase of troops at Fort Bliss, but But Hunt said the military should be looked at as single employment sector, much as the garment industry was. A potential problem, he said, is that a large employer such as the Army may be subject to sudden changes or declines.
Nevertheless, he said the military situation “is an opportunity that we somehow have to convert into a higher quality of life, a higher per-capita income. Policywise, how we deal with this economic boost is what’s important.”
A related plus, he said, is the number of defense contractors who are looking at El Paso in light of the Fort Bliss expansion.
“I’ve never seen so many large defense contractors involved in some way in our community,” Hunt said. “They got here even earlier than we understood it. This is going to be a lot bigger than what we thought. I won’t go into names, but they’re here, they’re looking into opportunities, and they’re talking to our universities and they’re talking to our business development people. So that tells me what’s happening at Fort Bliss is real.”

Aggressive
Hunt also cited the city’s aggressive approach to the Emergent Technology Fund coming from the last state legislative session.
“We have a center that is already set up and running. One of the first in the state. This marks one of the first times that instead of running behind, we’re actually ahead in the organization process,” he said, adding the center is turning in its first proposals, many of them defense related, to get those state funds.
He also said there would be a chance coming up Wednesday with a meeting of the state Legislative Budget Board to fund the four-year Texas Tech medical school in El Paso.
“The board is going to meet and we’re hoping at that time they’re going to approve funds that will allow us to turn our two-year medical school into an accredited for-year school,” he said. “We’ll know on the 21st, but if we don’t succeed then we’ll continue to work on it until we do succeed. But we’re very close.”
Still another plus, he said, is the creation of the Regional Economic Development Corp. (REDCO).
After 18 months, “REDCO now has a budget two-and a half times larger than when its components were in the Chamber of Commerce, and is hard at work recruiting high-paying jobs – many in the defense industry – to the region.

Planning
“Now,” Hunt told the Rotarians, “the question for our community and our political leaders is what kind of policies do we need to be able to ensure that we don’t miss these opportunities?”
One thing El Pasoans shouldn’t do, he said, is repeat the situation that occurred a few years ago with the old Farah Building when a developer created a political furor by requesting a public subsidy of $25 million to convert the 50-acre property into a retail center.
Hunt indicated local officials should strive to avoid having to react to essentially off-the-wall proposals by committing to long-range planning through a process that is transparent to the entire community.
The same advice should apply to future housing development, he argued.
“What we shouldn’t do is continue to annex property into the city without compensation for the cost of providing services.” In those situations, he said, “the city is essentially transferring a public subsidy for private gain.”

PSB land
Hunt said El Paso is in an enviable position compared with other cities because the Public Service Board controls 30,000 acres of developable land within the city limits.
He said the PSB should be encouraged to sell large tracts of land instead of acting, as he said it has in the past, as a “land bank” for local developers and releasing parcels in dribs and drabs on an as-needed basis.
What that has meant, Hunt said, “is we don’t have the high-quality development here that you find in Albuquerque, or even in Las Cruces. Maybe soon in Santa Teresa, and certainly in Phoenix and Tucson.”
Property needs to be sold in large pieces, he said.
“It needs to be master-planned, as does any land that we annex.”
Dealing with larger tracts, Hunt said, would help attract “nationally competitive developers and builders who will bring their capital and their skills … We want resort hotels, high-end golf courses. It’s not going to happen if we don’t attract the capital and the skills, and the only way you’re going to do that is to permit high-end opportunities with master-planned property

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	Meet the Hunts: Philanthropic El Pasoans adopt a higher profile January 02, 2011
	Texas Tech receives $10 million grant, will expand nursing school October 21, 2010
	UTEP Introduces President’s Medal at Convocation, Honors Hunt September 22, 2010
	Hunt Family Foundation Pledges $5 Million to UTEP August 13, 2010
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