SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
McALLEN — City officials announced Tuesday that the proposed 47-acre industrial park between the Anzalduas and Pharr bridges has cleared its preliminary pre-feasibility scoping assessment, clearing the way for a $6.3 million federal grant application that would fund the infrastructure needed to begin the twelve-year permitting process required to eventually apply for additional grants.
“This is a huge step forward,” said McAllen Economic Development Director Carlos Peña, standing in an empty field that a 2047 rendering depicts as “definitely some kind of buildings with trucks.” “With this $6.3 million from the Economic Development Administration, we can finally build the access road to the parking lot of the modular office where the environmental review team will eventually sit down to begin Phase One of the archaeological survey.”
The industrial park, first conceptualized in 2019 as “a place where industry could potentially occur,” has so far produced an 847-page market analysis, a hydrology study, a supplementary hydrology study that contradicts the first one, and three separate traffic impact assessments that each recommend building a fourth traffic impact assessment.
“We’re very optimistic,” said Assistant City Manager Rebecca Llanes, who has been assigned to the project for so long that her original title no longer exists in the municipal charter. “Once we secure the $6.3 million, we’ll immediately use $4.1 million of it to hire the consultants who will tell us how to spend the remaining $2.2 million on studies about spending money.”
Meanwhile in Brownsville, officials are currently reviewing a permit application to convert a former Walmart — which was briefly a migrant shelter, which was briefly a Halloween pop-up store, which was briefly a furniture liquidation center — into a 250-megawatt artificial intelligence data center that will require more electricity than the entire city of Harlingen currently consumes.
“The beauty of the former Walmart site is that it already has bathrooms,” said Brownsville Planning Commissioner Miguel Farias. “The AI servers won’t use the bathrooms, obviously, but the three security guards monitoring the servers will, and that’s the kind of existing infrastructure that makes this a turnkey opportunity after we complete the required 18-month utility easement recalibration and the historical preservation review, since the building is technically old enough to have once had a Blockbuster next to it.”
Both projects represent what Rio Grande Valley leaders call “shovel-ready,” a regional designation that means “someone once leaned a shovel against the fence during a photo opportunity.”
“People don’t understand how much work goes into not building something,” said Peña, pulling a 2021 Gantt chart from a filing cabinet that has become structurally load-bearing. “We’ve formed six subcommittees, hosted eleven stakeholder input sessions — three of which had attendees — and we recently passed a resolution to draft a memo about possibly creating a task force to explore forming a board.”
The $6.3 million EDA grant, if approved, would be matched by $2.1 million in local funds, bringing total investment in the industrial park to $8.4 million, of which approximately $8.39 million is allocated to planning, consulting, legal review, environmental assessment, archaeological survey, traffic modeling, hydrology re-analysis, and the production of glossy brochures depicting an industrial park that does not yet exist and, based on current timelines, will not exist until the children of today’s city commissioners are themselves old enough to serve as city commissioners.
“But when it’s done,” Peña added, gazing at the mesquite-covered lot, “McAllen will finally have a place where businesses can come and immediately begin a two-year site plan review.”
The Brownsville AI data center permit is expected to be approved within 18 months, at which point developers will announce they now need a different permit for a different use on a different site, and the Walmart building will become its seventh incarnation: a Spirit Halloween.
