HARLINGEN — The new Cardone Industries Inc. distribution facility planned for the city’s industrial park will bring more than 500 jobs and, over 10 years, shower hundreds of millions of dollars in wages on local workers.
Investment in the new facility by Cardone will total $50 million, which includes not just the construction of a facility with as much cubic footage as the Astrodome, but equipping and furnishing the mega-project, too.
Yet like the sunken underside of an iceberg, much of the economic impact of such a significant addition to the city’s commercial sphere lies under the surface.
Here is what lies beneath.
Jobs and employment
The new Cardone facility is expected to lower the city’s and possibly even the county’s jobless rate with the addition of 550 new jobs when it opens, and 750 new jobs when fully ramped-up.The Harlingen-Brownsville jobless rate for October stands at 5.5 percent, and it’s about the same in the City of Harlingen.
Statewide, Texas’s jobless rate is 3.9 percent. To forecast just where these new workers will come from, we can look at the makeup of the workforce at Cardone’s current facility in Harlingen, which has been operating for 11 years.
The Cardone workforce is overwhelmingly from Harlingen and Cameron County, with 38 percent of Cardone’s workers living within
IMPACT
Harlingen zip codes, and another 20-something percent coming from San Benito.
The rest of the workers are from elsewhere in Cameron County, or from Willacy and Hidalgo counties.
“Cameron County should expect, because of construction, because of spinoffs of what’s going on here, for our unemployment rate to continue to go down,” said Raudel Garza, chief executive of the Harlingen Economic Development Corp., which sealed the deal to bring a second Cardone facility to the city.
“We’ve been behind McAllen and Edinburg for a long time, but this kind of announcement, and some other things that are going on, will start closing that gap,” he added.
The multiplier effect
The addition of direct jobs expected to start at $8.50 to $9 per hour at the new Cardone (pronounced car-DOAN) facility is the most immediately visible benefit. But behind those jobs will be an army of local residents who will benefit financially from siting the distribution center here.
The new facility will need cardboard and plastic wrap to box up its remanufactured items, many from its brake operation in nearby Matamoros. Then there will be fuel and maintenance for the 32 tractors and 50 trailers which will be operating out of the new center.
Landscapers will be needed, along with plumbers and food service companies.
“They’re buying fuel locally, they’re buying tires, and they’re repairing those vehicles locally,” Garza said. “That has a ripple effect. They outsource a lot of their maintenance, their airconditioning, and all of that ripple effect is an economic multiplier.”
Another source of good-paying jobs not to be discounted will employ local construction workers, engineers and maybe even architects to build the facility.
“At 920,000 square feet, that’s about 20 acres or so under-roof, and all the dirt work they’re going to have to do for the 60-acre tract is going to require a lot of people, and a lot of equipment,” Garza said. ““So they’re going to reach out to as many local subcontractors as they can.”
