Speakers address economic concerns

“We need to create a climate of entrepreneurship and innovation,” Bishop said. He called this climate “economic gardening,” the main ingredients of which are education, information and interaction.

Bishop said the key to the region’s economic development is identifying those key industries and entrepreneurs, “our champions,” and giving them the support necessary to make them successful at selling goods and services to people from outside the region.

The southeast portion of Harris County faces daunting challenges as well as enormous opportunities in its future economic development. That was the consensus of a group of speakers from diverse fields at an economic development summit Wednesday.

By Ken Fountain
Baytown Sun

The summit, hosted by Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Sylvia Garcia, was held at an auditorium at San Jacinto College’s Pasadena campus. More than 200 guests from academia, business and the public sector (including several city of Baytown officials) listened to representatives of several key industries give their perspectives on the economic realities facing the area.

Peter Bishop, a nationally known “futurist” who chairs the graduate program in Studies of the Future at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, was the keynote speaker.

“Economic growth is a very simple process,” Bishop said. “It comes from increasing productivity — doing more with the same resources.”

Bishop drew a historical timeline of how productivity has increased since the Industrial Revolution in what he calls “waves of creative destruction” — factories taking over the manufacture of goods from skilled laborers, railroads replacing wagons and barges as freight transportation. The first two-thirds of the 20th century was driven by the petroleum industry and related fields, and the last third by information technology, he said.

This last “wave” has completely changed society, blurring the boundaries between work and home, between types of industries, even between cities, states, and nations, he said.

But, Bishop said, the country’s education system, oriented toward producing employees in the old economy, has not changed with the times.

Bishop said the key to the region’s economic development is identifying those key industries and entrepreneurs, “our champions,” and giving them the support necessary to make them successful at selling goods and services to people from outside the region.

“We need to create a climate of entrepreneurship and innovation,” Bishop said. He called this climate “economic gardening,” the main ingredients of which are education, information and interaction.

Dean Eshelman, site manager for Shell Oil Company’s Deer Park Chemical Plant and chair of the East Harris County Manufacturers Association, said that the Houston area’s petrochemical industry has faced “very challenging” times in the past few years.

Much of that challenge has to do with the fact that the industry is particularly keyed to the national and international business cycle. Local industrial facilities have faced rising prices for raw materials, and increasing competition around the globe.

In the long term, the local petrochemical industry faces the challenges of maintaining a viable presence in the global market; making more than $3 billion in capital investments to help the region meet federal air quality standards; keeping up with evolving security standards at its facilities; maintaining credibility with the surrounding communities (particularly emergency communications and addressing concerns of industry impacts on communities); and making sure there are enough qualified young people to hold the jobs necessary to sustain the industry.

H. Thomas Kornegay, executive director of the Port of Houston Authority, told the audience that the region’s economic development depends in large measure on the multi-component transportation industry — shipping, rail, trucking and the airport system.

“Precinct 2 is not in competition with the rest of Harris County. It’s in competition with the rest of the world,” Kornegay said.

He said the entire region must do what it can to improve the infrastructure of the transportation sector, including going forward with the controversial Bayport container terminal.

Demographic trends show increasing numbers of Americans moving to the nation’s coastal regions, particularly the South and the West.

“The transportation network must grow in order to keep up,” Kornegay said.

Gerard J. “Jordy” Tollett, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, tried to infuse the summit with a little optimism after several downbeat presentations.

Tollett said that despite a downturn in travel following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the tourism industry shows signs of rebounding. And the entire Houston region as well as Precinct 2 has the opportunity to attract a greater number of leisure travelers.

Tollett touted such amenities as the Kemah Boardwalk, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and water recreation in the Clear Lake area as parts of a concerted effort to promote tourism. He said that Norwegian Cruise Lines’ new “Texarribean” cruises will also become a huge boon to the area Precinct 2, with the San Jacinto Monument and Battleground and Battleship Texas, can also benefit from the growth of “historic tourism,” he said.

But Tollett blasted the State of Texas for not allowing tax dollars to be spent to promote Texas tourism within the state itself.

“We have the attractions. But we must develop the infrastructure,” Tollett said.

William Lindemann, chancellor of San Jacinto College, underscored a theme running through many of the presentations — that economic development in the area is dependent on educating a qualified work force, which is a particular challenge given the area’s changing demographics.

Noting that everyone in the audience is descended from immigrants, Lindemann remarked how in the past three decades the area has gone from having a large white majority to now having a majority of Hispanics, most of whom are first-generation immigrants from Mexico. By the year 2040, between 75 and 80 percent of the Houston region will be Hispanic, according to the state demographer, Lindemann said.

And because most of those new immigrants face the same obstacles to gaining education that previous generations of immigrants did, the Precinct 2 area will need to work very hard to ensure that its children learn the skills necessary to work in an ever more technical workplace.

“This is an issue we have to address. We can’t wait three or five years,” Lindemann said.

http://web.baytownsun.com/story.lasso?WCD=13330