THE PATH TO BOCA CHICA LITTERED WITH GRANDOISE PLANS

By Juan Montoya
At one time it was sold as a pristine beach location with a future as a resort for sun and beach worshipers from here, nearby Mexico, and the frozen reaches of the upper Midwest.
Since then, Boca Chica Beach has lost some of it luster to resort developers after the failed attempt to establish it as a prime investment area for retired Midwest farmers and urban dwellers.
If you drive to near the end of Highway 4, the hamlet (subdivision?) of Koepernick Shores is to the left nestled against the Laguna on the south side of the Brownsville Ship Channel. Koepernick is Polish for Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer best known for his discoveries of the solar system the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.

As with most Boca Chica ventures, some of the land developers and hucksters platted subdivisions that stretched out into the Laguna itself and lured unsuspecting Polish ethnicity residents of Chicago with tales of tropical climes and a retirement home surrounded by surf and sand.

When some of them arrived to claim their piece of paradise, they often found that their lots were five or six feet under the waters of the bay.
The other scam that attracted widespread support was the proposed Playa del Rio Resort development that was pushed by local developers, legislators and assorted propagandists. The story line was that the Playa del Rio development would encompass both sides of the river and be a truly international resort. The slick brochures featured multistory hotels nestled among the sand dunes.
Those of us who were here in the 1970s still remember the effort to have someone (the state to issue bonds, the county to back them) to extend the needed infrastructure to the site some 25 miles away from Brownsville.
When residents (and the state) balked, the developers did the next best thing, they encouraged a local businessman to build a water treatment plant at the last bend before Koepernick Shores, ostensibly to service the subdivision, but actually to further the Playa del Rio development. The water quality never passed state tests and the state prohibited it from operating for potable purposes and the project died a quiet death after much hoopla.
Nonetheless, someone (and no one is saying who did it) did extend a two-inch line from the city along Boca Chica Blvd. and out close to the project. By that time, however, the project was dead and the line was forgotten. Add the occasional hurricane scare and the polluted water flowing down the Rio Grande and it was no surprise that the plans were quietly shelved and forgotten.
All this comes to mind as the new SpaceX rocket launch pad project envisioned for the area is tossed around local government circles. The critical utility, potable water, remains the sticking point, and the answers we have received from the Brownsville Economic Development Corporation and from SpaceX itself are not encouraging.
When representatives from Rene Oliveira's office asked the firm's representatives how they were planning to overcome that problem, they got an answer that they would be using "gray" water. "Gray" water in technical terms means water that has been used already for household purposes other than sewer (that's black water). Where they were going to get that fluid in a place lacking potable water to be made "gray" was left unanswered.
Then, during the sham public hearing that was held later, project managers said that they weren't going to use "gray" water after all, but were going to truck it from the city to the site. Now, we're no engineers, but that seems like a lot of water to suppress fires, wash down the site after the launch, and generally keep the rockets from burning up their payloads when they achieve ignition.
The question still lurks in the background: Is the Port of Brownsville contemplating providing potable water to the SpaceX project? Will public funding be required to extend water lines out to the site and make the project viable? And how much and in what form?
So far, we have received no answers to these questions. There is no question that some sort of "incentives" will be provided by the state and by local governments to try to make this project happen. But if the quality of answers that we received when this project was introduced does not improve, we can only surmise that local officials and development corporation executives are trying to sell us another Playa del Rio at our expense.