HARLINGEN — Two Valley manufacturers partnering with Texas State Technical College will be the beneficiaries of a Texas Workforce Commission grant of $276,789.
TWC Commissioner Julian Alvarez, a former staffer at TSTC and former president and CEO of the Rio Grande Valley Partnership, made the check award at the college yesterday.
“The skills development efforts are so important to us that across the state with TSTC, where we have 10 campuses covering Texas, we have set up dedicated teams of people whose job it is to find opportunities for Texas to strengthen our industrial employment situation through skills development grants,” said TSTC Chancellor-CEO Mike Reeser.
“Those would be un-doable without an extraordinary partnership with the Texas Workforce Commission, and Julian Alvarez, your commissioner from RGV, has been a tireless advocate for this kind of work in the RGV and across Texas,” Reeser added.
The funding will go to a manufacturing consortium consisting of TSTC, Portage Plastics Corp. and Rich Products Corp. to provide job training to 123 of their workers in Brownsville to enhance skills with instruction and training on processing and manufacturing operations.
Portage’s expertise is in extrusion and thermoforming of plastics for use in a wide range of industries, including automotive and food production.
Rich Products manufactures food and beverage containers.
Tony Cappella, plant manager for Portage Plastics in Brownsville, said his company was approached by three different organizations to partner with them on workforce development.
“We had a lot of problems with the other entities we were working with,” Cappella said. “They wouldn’t return the calls, they wouldn’t show up for the meetings, people got replaced, people resigned.
“But TSTC, from Day One, they have always been there,” he added. “All the time without exception.”
Alvarez was appointed to the Texas Workforce Commission by Gov. Greg Abbott to fill another commissioner’s term in February 2016. This year, the governor re-appointed him to a full six-year term.
“This government skills grant is going to have a $720,000 economic impact in the region, that’s the impact that this grant will have,” Alvarez said.
“There are so many people behind the scenes that you will never meet that will be on the receiving end of this grant,” he said. “Folks that you will have trained will also receive incentives, and they also will get an increase in their pay, and we appreciate that.”
