Cortez: Prosperity Task Force is ready to expand beyond Hidalgo County

Hidalgo County today is the seventh most populous county in Texas. We have 254 counties, and we’re about number seven in terms of population.

There’s a lot of good things to say about Hidalgo County, but one that is not good to say about Hidalgo County is that for the last five decades we’ve had poverty in excess of 20 percent. In fact, today we’re at 28 percent. We think that if you count all the people that are not here as U.S. citizens, that number is even higher.

So, where do we go to complain and make that better? People in poverty don’t have the quality of life that they should have. And it’s also a burden for government to help them.

So, we’ve had this push down policy for many years. That we keep pushing money down to people. But it stays status quo. We continue to have the same thing year after year after year.

So, I thought that it would be a good initiative for us to say wait a minute, that is not satisfactory. We have to do something better. And everything takes leadership. So, I volunteered to provide that leadership to try to move people out of the welfare line into a taxpayer line.

So, how do you do that? You do it by creating human capital and matching it with a job. And if we create human capital, which we’ve done… we’ve actually a fairly good job in the past years. But we haven’t benefited from it totally, completely. Because when they (Hidalgo County residents) finished getting that human capital, getting that training, that special designation, the jobs are not here.

The jobs are not here. So, we lose some of that human capital somewhere else. And that’s bad because we don’t benefit from it. And we’re going to have to compete with it, because it’s no longer with us.

So, it was very important that we were good at something else. That we were good at bringing investment to this area. And when we got started… me being an old man, being at this business a while, it is very difficult to get a large group of people to agree on something. The smaller the group is, the easier it is to develop the concept. In fact, some of the best franchises, the best ideas, were started by one or two people, and now they’re multi-billion-dollar companies. So, I wanted to start with Hidalgo County.

The good news is that we attracted a lot of the business community. And the business community has been a great source for us, to give us guidance as to how we can best present ourselves so we can sell ourselves to someone else.

We need a good message, and we need a good messenger to deliver the message. But if I’m limited to the assets in Hidalgo County, then I’m really not justifying what I’m doing, because I’m cheating all of you, because we have more to sell than just Hidalgo County. And that was made very clear to me by some of the CEOs that came to see us. (They asked) why are you limited to just Hidalgo County?

I told them why we were limited to Hidalgo County – that we wanted to start and develop the model first and then share it with somebody else. But the time came that we needed to look at the bigger picture. So, through the advisory council of our business group we said we have a lot more assets in the four counties of (South) Texas and northern Mexico that makes us a very unique area.

So, today you’re going to hear about how the successes in other areas and from our people and other people that came up with an idea like that. But the Prosperity Task Force was, again, started as an Hidalgo County initiative. We’re now ready to start adding our neighbors to this process.

And I’m just so happy to see all of you here. Each one of you in this room is a piece of the puzzle. And I want to tell you that God loves us because every week he keeps sending us a part of the puzzle to fill it out. We’re building a championship team.

A championship team doesn’t win the championship in year one, but a championship team will eventually win the big one. Today, you all make part of that team. Thank you for being here.

Editor’s Note: The above remarks were delivered by Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez at a meeting held by the Hidalgo County Prosperity Task Force in Harlingen, Texas, on July 17, 2024. The meeting was held to explain the RioPlex marketing initiative and learn from similar projects that have been held elsewhere.

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