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Gilberto Salinas, who left the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation six years ago after two years spent building the economic development organization from the ground up, is back as GBIC’s new executive director, starting Oct. 14.
Salinas, a native of Brownsville, got his start in economic development with the now-defunct Brownsville Economic Development Corporation, where he worked from 2006 to 2016 and served as executive vice president. SpaceX’s decision to locate in Cameron County started with talks with Salinas and other BEDC officials.
GBIC at the time served as BEDC’s funding arm, before the decision was made to transform it into an economic development organization in its own right. Salinas was hired on a two-year contract to carry out the task, which involved amending the organization’s bylaws, hiring staff and essentially creating a new structure — a lot like setting up a new business, he said in a recent interview.
GBIC’s new focus was on growing local business and industry, and developing workforce. Salinas went from there to the Kerrville Economic Development Corporation, where he’s served as executive director for the past six years, commuting to Central Texas from Brownsville on a weekly basis. He’s racked up some big wins for Kerrville in that time, he said.
“It was an organization that needed a lot of help,” Salinas said.
It took about a year for the organization to get a firm sense of what economic development entailed, and two years to start landing projects “and for them to understand what economic development really looks like,” he said.
Salinas’ job involved making the organization more efficient, promoting the city outwardly to attract inbound investment, growing local business and industry, and generally making Kerrville a more competitive city, though in actuality the KEDC serves all of Kerr County. In the process, he was able to expand his own network of business and economic development connections, he said.
“We recruited 13 companies in the span of six years, small to mid-sized companies, all which were primary job generators, which tend to be in manufacturing, logistics, supply chain — everything that adds to what would be considered a primary employer,” Salinas said.
Three of those projects (in aviation, aerospace and advanced manufacturing) he describes as “game changers.” Salinas said he intends to do much the same with GBIC in terms of working to bring more investment and jobs to the city and region, in order to take things to the next level.
Brownsville’s economic gains in recent years will make his job easier in one sense but harder in another, since going after bigger and bigger projects means much tougher competition, against communities with deep-pocketed economic development organizations, he said. Brownsville is “turning a corner” in that it’s gone from landing projects in the millions of dollars, to projects in the billions of dollars, Salinas noted.
“To me, it’s like Brownsville has arrived,” he said. “For a mid-sized community to large size city like Brownsville, those projects are very hard to come by. Guess what? We’re there. That to me is very exciting.”
The foresight of the city’s voters in the mid-1990s approving a sales-tax carve-out to support economic development organizations like BEDC and GBIC, and later the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation, laid the foundation for the economic growth apparent today, Salinas said.
“The success Brownsville is having today under its leadership is no accident,” he said.
Salinas pointed out that economic development organizations like GBIC are not government entities, but rather operate in the realm between government and industry.
“The general public sometimes can be very skeptical of economic development, and I don’t blame them,” he said. “It’s our job to make them aware of what economic development is and (show) some examples of success and how that positively impacts the local economy. That’s our job, to make sure that they understand and they see that.”
Meanwhile, Salinas said he’s thrilled to be back in Brownsville full time and again have the opportunity to indulge his passion for economic development in his hometown.
“My heart is in Brownsville,” he said.
