The Port of Brownsville on Thursday held its annual “State of the Port” luncheon for the first time since 2019, and port officials had good news to report despite economic ripples from the pandemic.
Sergio Tito Lopez, Brownsville Navigation District chairman, reported to the dozens of attendees seated at tables inside the Rancho Viejo Convention Center that the port set a new record for tonnage and had “robust operating revenues” for fiscal year 2021.
According to unaudited results, the port surpassed $30 million in operating revenues for the second consecutive year and moved 13.8 million short tons of cargo in 2021, breaking a previous record of 11.6 million short tons in fiscal year 2020, he said.
“We have not only remained open for business, but we have also grown,” Lopez said. “As vessels continue to bring more cargo, more jobs are created and sustained. We continue to invest in the port to attract new industries and support economic stability to ensure good-paying jobs.”
In 2021, 1,855 vessels called at the port, compared to 1,671 for 2020. The port’s Brownsville & Rio Grande International Railway, operated by Denver-based OmniTrax, handled a record 65,865 railcars in 2021, a 22 percent increase over 2020. The port registered approximately 438,000 truck movements through 2021, an average of 1,200 movements per day, Lopez said.
Eduardo Campirano, port director and CEO, noted that the credit-rating company Moody’s Investors Service ranked the port third among U.S. ports for financial resilience in the face of pandemic-related economic impacts, rating it among the most stable in the country in terms of the port’s ability to “weather the pandemic’s unique economic challenges.”
“We are fortunate and grateful to this day that, thanks to the board of commissioners’ thoughtful and prudent financial stewardship, the port has weathered the storm successfully and continues to stay the course for regional progress and economic stability,” he said.
The luncheon’s keynote speaker was Ray Perryman, president and CEO of the Perryman Group, a Waco-based financial analysis firm, who noted that Brownsville’s recovery from the economic crisis caused by the pandemic has outpaced much of the rest of the nation. Unlike self-inflicted recessions of the past, the pandemic and its economic fallout “like a ton of bricks,” he said.
Compared to the Great Recession of 2008, when the United States lost 9.4 millions over 14 months, when the pandemic hit the country lost 23.5 million jobs in just two months — over 20 million in April 2020 alone, Perryman said.
“We’d just never seen anything fall like that, fall that quickly,” he said.
Texas saw 11.2 percent of its jobs disappear, not as severe as the national average of 14.7 percent, Perryman said. While the United States is still 2.1 million jobs short of getting back to where it was before the pandemic, Texas jobs bounced back to their previous level and surpassed it by November 2021, he said.
“Brownsville, you went down about 11 percent also,” Perryman said. “You came back in 13 months to pass your prior level. I think that’s one of the shortest times in the entire country. … You have really shown resilience and the port was a big part of that. … This area has come back very well.”
He predicted economic growth of 3.3 percent and unemployment of about 2.1 percent for the region over the next five years.
“Both those numbers exceed what we expect for the country has a whole,” Perryman said.
A space-industry study recently released by The Perryman Group found that the industry contributes about 100,000 jobs to the state and 1.7 million jobs to the nation, he said, adding that the space industry in Texas is growing 130 percent faster than the nation as a whole.
“We think by 2040 that 100,000 jobs is going to be 400,000 jobs,” Perryman said. “We’re not going to be 6 percent of the space economy. We’re going to be 15 percent of the space economy, and 80 percent of that growth is coming from the private sector. This place is on the forefront.”
