“How do you get to Mexico with $2 million in your pocket?” asks Luis Escobar, sitting across from me at a spartan conference table. I dutifully await the punchline. “First,” he smiles, “come to San Antonio with four million.”
This is the latest in-joke circulating among local wealthy Mexican emigres, and it elicits a laugh from me, though I am chuckling over tragedy: real people who have relocated to San Antonio in search of a new life, only to see their fortunes sucked down the drain along with their dreams. They are the unheard victims drowned out by the buzz around the massive influx of financial, human and cultural capital pouring into upscale neighborhoods such as the Dominion, La Cantera, Stone Oak and Sonterra, which have earned monikers like Monterrey Norte, Little Monterrey, and Sonterrey.
Migrant headache: Mexican entrepreneurs struggling in SA
- Tuesday, 12 April 2011 15:01
- Jeffrey Wright
- Enterprise
Diminished returns: recession hits Perry's pot o' gold
- Wednesday, 06 April 2011 04:03
- Greg Jefferson
- Enterprise
The Texas Enterprise Fund is the pocket from which Governor Rick Perry has drawn nearly $426 million since 2003 to “close the deal” for companies looking either to expand in the state or move here. He dug deep for Rackspace Hosting in August 2007.
The fund announced a grant of $22 million – by far the biggest of the 2006-7 fiscal year, accounting for 29 percent of all the money it awarded that period – to the homegrown web-hosting company. Like all TEF grants, it had to have the unanimous approval of the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and the Speaker of the House. It was a huge inducement for Rackspace to stay in the area and refashion the defunct Windsor Park Mall’s 67-acre site into a campus buzzing with purposeful, high-paying activity.
In return, the publicly traded company signed a contract pledging to create 4,000 new jobs over the next five years.
A pipeline of discontent
- Wednesday, 02 March 2011 04:39
- Greg Jefferson
- Enterprise
Three years ago, Uvalde’s water-war veterans had good reason to worry. A deep-pocketed company called Southwest Texas Water Resources had started quietly building its case for a $250-million water pipeline from Uvalde to San Antonio, and had hired two marquee names in Texas water politics: former State Representative Robert Puente and lobbyist Marc Rodriguez.
But Puente, a soft-spoken and dapper attorney who’d retired from the Legislature and the chairmanship of the Natural Resources Committee in January 2008, wasn’t on the job for long. He became interim CEO of the San Antonio Water System less than two months after going to work for STWR, the brainchild of a California water consultant named Rodney Smith.
How to do business in San Antonio
- Wednesday, 12 January 2011 01:00
- Greg Jefferson
- Enterprise
To land InCube Labs and its Silicon Valley founder Mir Imran, City Manager Sheryl Sculley junked the regular means of attracting companies to San Antonio. Instead of doling out tax abatements and other giveaways, she proposed placing a high-risk, multimillion-dollar wager in hopes of juicing the local life-sciences industry, and the City Council happily went along, voting unanimously for the deal in June.
Breaking with tradition, the City acted like a venture capitalist, agreeing to invest $6 million over the next five years for a slice of ownership in biotech companies that the San Jose, Calif., company incubates here under the agreement. It also brought along the County and three other taxpayer-supported entities, which will contribute a combined $4 million. The state kicked in another $9.2 million from the Emerging Technology Fund in September.
