Manufacturers welcome: Ground broken on Brownsville ‘Tech District’

The Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation held a ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday for the first phase of its new industrial park, dubbed the Greater Brownsville Tech District.

The 86-acre phase one segment, made up of 13 separate plots, is part of a 730-acre parcel at FM 511 and Paredes line Road that GBIC intends to eventually build out. GBIC Executive Director and CEO Gilberto Salinas told The Brownsville Herald prior to the ceremony that earth-moving equipment began preparing the 86-acre segment two weeks ago, and that the project should take 16 months to complete.

The project involves building roads, curves, guttering, drainage and installing utilities so the plots are completely ready to go when a buyer comes along, Salinas said.

“In our field we call that shovel-ready,” he said. “So when a prospective client company, a manufacturer, is looking at the area they know we have a shovel-ready site that, once they purchase the property, they can start building on it immediately.”

It’s a tool GBIC can use to help recruit industry — light industry in this case — and advanced manufacturing, Salinas said. Combined with the Port of Brownsville’s 118-acre business park, which broke ground almost two years ago and is suitable for heavy manufacturing, GBIC’s Tech District will make Brownsville more competitive with other cities trying to recruit the same companies and the high-paying jobs they provide, he said.

“We’ve been doing a bird’s-eye view of real estate that’s available in Brownsville, and although we do have a lot of open land, we don’t have enough land that’s zoned for industry,” Salinas added. “That’s what we’re working to do here, which is convert some of this land for industrial use.”

GBIC is getting ready to start marketing the Tech District and has already received letters of interest from some companies, and site selectors, location advisers and a few speculative builders taking a look at not just phase one but the whole project, he said.

“That’s encouraging, that it’s already getting some traction,” Salinas said.

Ideally, GBIC will sell a few lots before phase one is complete, he said, while development of the second phase could start soon depending on the level of interest in phase one. The Tech District site is two miles from I-69E, eight miles from the port, 10 miles from the Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport, 13 miles from Veterans Memorial Bridge and 27 miles from SpaceX at Boca Chica, GBIC noted.

The park will also feature rail access, lies along a heavyweight truck corridor and is located within Foreign Trade Zone No. 62. FTZ’s are legally considered outside U.S. customs territory, so manufacturers inside the FTZ aren’t required to pay customs duties on merchandise brought into the zone, helping them reduce costs.

A view of the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation Hi-Tech Industrial Park District Thursday, May 22, 2025. (Miguel Roberts | The Brownsville Herald)

Brownsville Mayor John Cowen Jr., who spoke at the Thursday ceremony, said in a recent interview that breaking ground on the Tech District was “a great day for GBIC.”

“One of my campaign initiative when I ran for mayor was to increase our industrial development footprint, to have more capacity,” he said. “It’s still an issue now that Brownsville has very little space when it comes to industrial availability. We’re in this growth phase of our city, trying to attract new business, and we don’t have the capacity to immediately activate spaces.”

GBIC’s North Brownsville Industrial Park, which sat empty for at least 10 years after being developed, is now almost full, Cowen noted.

“I remember going to that ribbon cutting,” he said. “Fast forward, that park is basically 100% sold. I would say half of it is under construction and the other half is going to be under construction. It’s on its way to being fully built out. I would say it will be one and a half to two years before it’s fully built out.”

It shows that Brownsville has hit its stride in terms of business recruiting, with phase one of the new Tech District being the natural next step, Cowen said.

He noted that the city was in the process of acquiring approximately 55 acres next to the GBIC park for a new public safety complex, where offices for emergency management, police, fire and cybersecurity will all be together under one roof.

Cowen called that project “transformational for public safety.” Meanwhile, GBIC’s new park is proof the city is making progress in its effort to correct the historic shortage of commercial/industrial compared to residential land use, he said.

“You’re already seeing the impact of all this growth in the sense of diversifying our economy and diversifying our tax base, making sure our residents aren’t bearing the brunt of paying for all the services that are being provided,” Cowen said. “The industrial and commercial are now leveling (that) out.”

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