IF NOT LNG OR INDUSTRY, IS IT TOURISM? OR WHAT?

By Juan Montoya
 This question came up from Brownsville resident Letty Perez-Garzoria as the Cameron Cunty Commissioners Court was considering an item that would have granted Annova LNG a $25 million tax abatement on its proposed export terminal at the Port of Brownsville.
"Are we manufacturing area, an industrial area, or a tourist or agricultural area?" she asked. "Who are you? Who do you represent?," she asked commissioners.
In the absence of a cohesive answer to those very questions, the Brownsville area has seen its share of flim-flam hucksters like United Brownsville advance some self-serving ideas that the city should invest public money in developing "economic clusters" that just happen to fit nicely in some of its members commercial enterprises.
Foremost among them is United Brownsville's pushing for and something called the BiNED that seeks to pump pubic funds for studies to append this area's economy to the maquiladora industry across the Rio Grande.
You remember that industry. It is the main cause that the U.S. manufacturing sector (and jobs) have been moved to low-cost labor places like Matamoros, Reynosa, and Rio Bravo. There are also in-bond plants further into Mexico's interior and toward the west coast.
The basic premise of the maquilas is that they take advantage of cheap labor in Mexico, bring the manufactured good across the river and then compete for the consumer with U.S. industry that has not gone offshore. 
The United Brownsville movers and shakers and their counterparts in Matamoros and northern Mexico want to establish manufacturing "clusters" on this side of the border to glean whatever profit they can from servicing these runaway manufacturers and make a buck.
But they need the public entities to pay for the infrastructure through the funding of infrastructure and taxing districts that will make it easier for their private commercial concerns to enrich them.
They talk about industrial corridors, economic clusters, huge infrastructure projects – all to be paid by the public.
Now here comes these multinational LNG plants talking about multi-billion facilities on public land with hands stretched out to the poorest communities in this country asking that they be extended tax breaks in the millions of dollars so they can come here.
And if the local public entities like the schools and county government doesn't extend the tax breaks, tax breaks, does it mean that they won't come? They have already leased and got first refusal on thousands of acres at the port. And Brownsville is the cheapest place they can come and get all this land at a deep-water port with connections to their foreign customers.
They can't go anywhere else.
The tax breaks are just icing on the cheap empanada.
Garzoria is correct. We have to decide – not like United Brownsvlle's grab bag and wish list – what we want our region to be.
"This is a region that has lots of possibilities that have never been explored," Garzoria said.
Amen to that, sister.