By Lauren Etter
Bloomberg News
AUSTIN, Texas — In Rio Grande City, named for the river that splits the U.S. from Mexico, footpaths cut from the brush by drug-smugglers and illegal immigrants have a new look, rehabbed into family-friendly hike-and-bike trails.
The town of 14,000, seat of the poorest county in Texas, put $80,000 into the project, and is spending $125,000 on a new park. It bought a vacant building for $1.3 million Monday that will become the new City Hall. Everybody knows where the money’s coming from, because they’re everywhere — the border-patrol agents who crowd the most popular taco trucks at lunchtime and get their shirts starched over at Comet Cleaners.
Now that the state has authorized $800 million to ratchet up security on the Mexico line, more troopers are on their way to deliver another shot to what might be the biggest stimulus program this needy part of Texas has ever seen. Even some critics of border-defense spending have changed their tune.
“We’ve quit fighting,” said Steve Ahlenius, president of the Chamber of Commerce in McAllen, who has opposed a buildup of forces as a misdirected waste of money. “We’ve finally just come to the conclusion that we’ll welcome the investment — and treat it as an investment.”
A background worry is what could happen when enthusiasm for the policing fades. Meanwhile, people on the 1,200-mile border are taking Operation Strong Safety to the bank.
For Ricardo Hinojosa, owner of the Mezquite Grill & Country Store in Rio Grande City, that means brisk sales of chicken fajitas and rib-eye steaks. “More security is better for us,” he said from his restaurant, decorated with mounted deer heads.
Economic development isn’t exactly what Gov. Greg Abbott and lawmakers had in mind when they decided to pour a record sum into border defense, stepping up because, Abbott said, “we are tired of seeing our state sovereignty and the rule of law ignored by a federal government that refuses to secure our border.”
In any event, Starr County can use the help. Per capita income is $21,000; only eight U.S. counties are poorer. And the local economy took a hit when the Mexican cartels’ war for control over the drug trade flared up in 2010, playing out just a few hundred feet from Rio Grande City.
The publicity made the Lower Rio Grande Valley seem like a dangerous place, according to locals, and they said its war-zone image got worse when then-Gov. Rick Perry deployed 1,000 National Guard soldiers in July 2014 in a headline-grabbing phase of Operation Strong Safety.
Then locals realized all those soldiers came not only with guns, but credit cards.
The calculation’s simple, said Rick Reyna, a broker with Pegasus Realty. “They’ve got to eat somewhere, sleep somewhere, live somewhere.” That’s a boon for his brother David, who makes custom houses with terracotta roofs that go for up as much as $250,000 — rich in a county where the median home value is $65,000. He said he builds about 50 a year, roughly a quarter of them for border agents.
At Rio Motor Co., sales have nearly doubled since 2013, and owner Billy Canales just opened a new lot on an 8.5-acre parcel that used to be a brush-covered passage for migrants. He employs 57 at the new place, up from 37 at the old one.
So many U.S. border agents and state troopers were checking into local motels last fall that there weren’t enough rooms for the birders who visit to catch sight of the hook-billed kite or black-bellied whistling duck, said Elisa Beas, Rio Grande City’s deputy city manager.
People in town can tell how important the border forces are to the economy, Beas said. “We see those guys sitting in all the best taquito places.”
Still, Ahlenius, the McAllen chamber president, said the Texas border surges are maddening because they throw money at problems that are no as longer pressing. Apprehensions of illegal immigrants from Mexico were a record low 230,000 last year, down from 1.6 million in 2000, and marijuana busts are down 24 percent since 2011, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.
Texas is “fighting the wrong battle,” Ahlenius said. Abbott, the Republican governor, declined to comment. Republican Rep. Dennis Bonnen, who sponsored the border-defense bill, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Some cost-benefit studies suggest border towns won’t come out ahead because deployments discourage tourism and cross- border shopping. But Pia Orrenius, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said they’re a stimulus, “bringing in a lot of highly paid positions into what’s a low-wage economy.”
Since Operation Strong Safety began in 2013, the Rio Grande City general fund has grown 38 percent, though David Saenz, the finance director, also credits local oil-drilling. Monthly sales tax revenues nearly doubled to $510,000 in July 2014, the month Perry deployed the 1,000 soldiers, from the previous year. The National Guard squad has since been drawn down to around 200, and the sale tax generated $390,000 in May. It could bring in more again under Abbott’s surge.
That will put 250 state troopers permanently on the border, build and maintain three security-training and intelligence centers and hand out $40 million in grants to local law enforcement departments.
As it is, there are so many troopers around that residents drive very carefully, said Rio Grande City Police Chief Noe Castillo. That means his cops can focus on more important tasks.
Founded in 1848, Rio Grande City is connected to Camargo in Mexico by a 591-foot bridge. The Texas town is so close to the one across the river that the sound of the occasional gunshot in Camargo can be heard on Rio Grande City’s bougainvillea-lined streets.
On Wednesday, there will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new City Hall, which will replace an aging structure constructed in 1877 from the remains of sunken riverboats.
“That’s a historic moment for a small town like ours,” said Saenz, the municipal finance director. He figures there could be more in the future, because the troops will be sticking around. “The border always seems that it has a long way to go before it gets to wherever it needs to go.”
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