The Loser City: Corpus Christi’s Self Imposed Bad Rap

Editorial
A whole Council elected on a “Pro Growth” platform is now on the horns of their own dilemma.

One thing that is obvious after studying the City’s history for the last few years is, as each new “this will save the City” proposal is put forward and opposition occurs there has been no attempt to recognize legitimate concerns and seek compromise or adjustment in order to move forward, together. What has consistently happened instead is that the opposition is discounted as “anti-growth nuts.”

This has happened so often with each project drawing somewhat different opposition, that everyone in the City who has ever opposed any project is now considered anti-growth. By my estimation about 95% of us are now officially “aginners.” The irony of the situation can be seen when half of the “pro-growth” Council including two title company presidents, a banker and a Real Estate Agent Mayor, most who have been on the accusing side in the past are now called, “anti-growth” by Brass proponents.

Our own creation myth.
As I’ve shared with many folks, I wasn’t trained as a journalist, but as a historian. Since I moved here in 2002 when controversies came up I would try and make sense of them. Many times what I read in the paper or heard on local news seemed severely disconnected from facts I observed or they just wildly defied logic. In an attempt to better understand this I would discuss these issues with folks who had long been part of the community as politicians, activists, former journalists and observers. I started actually attending meetings and reviewing documents behind events when I started We the People News in March of 2006, sometimes literally reading bank boxes full of official files and records.

The more time I spent understanding these issues, one thing became evident. That was, that most mainstream print and broadcast media promoted what many times could only be called outright propaganda supporting special interests, usually large advertisers, many times against what most would consider the public interest. At other times they took a paternalistic regressive attitude, demonstrated by bullying and blaming the general public for the sad state of the City in the editorial section. The evidence they presented to prove that it was the general public’s fault, was people rejected their, or their advertiser’s, higher vision for the community. The result of these repeated accusations was an unseen consequence; they created the myth of Corpus Christi “the Loser City.”

Is Corpus Christi “Loser City” seems to be a fairly constant discussion with opinions ranging from always have been and always will be, to we are if we don’t do _______ (put in your pet project). One theory is that since Corpus Christi is at the end of the road, all of the people who reject change and growth have floated down here like flotsam and jetsam where they are imprisoned against the coast and become aginners. Another theory is that the high percentage of Aggies in positions of power in the local economy and government prevents any higher level critical thinking. That has been the limit of any real in depth discussion.

The fact that children and area college graduates move away for education and careers has repeatedly been trotted out over and over as a sign that we are a dying City. The idea that TRT, HEB and Whataburger have all moved their corporate headquarters is discussed as if we were the deserted party in a divorce for another suitor. We feel abandoned by those who have made it big from our City (Why doesn’t Eva Longoria shout out in the middle of Desperate Housewives, “I lived in Corpus Christi”). The Columbus ships and the old County Court House are trotted out as signs of sure incompetence.

The history of failed attempts to develop the bay front and allowing the Coliseum to fall into disrepair by three consecutive councils has been become the official symbol for all that is wrong with Corpus Christi. According to some, you would expect Corpus Christi’s reputation to be so bad among developers that City employees would avoid going to represent the City at conferences for fear they would be pointed out and laughed at for being from such a City. Surely staff must react as if they if they were being forced to hand out little plastic bags with the City symbol on it filled with dirty diapers at such events.

Lucky for us most of this is hogwash.
Other than allowing the Coliseum to fall into disrepair (unfortunately maintenance of anything seems to be a major problem.), many of the other storied developments were never real in the first place, but continually circulate in the community. While Seaworld and Schlitterbahn were never coming here, there were two failed water park developments in 2006. While Brass Pro Shops had some exploratory interest, they were never interested in the Coliseum as a location. Crossroad Commons failed because of the economy, nothing the City did.

The Columbus ships situation was created by a group of citizens, who because of their position in the community, succeeded in dumping their mess at the City’s door. The old County Courthouse is something the City has little control over, it is the County Courthouse. If it were in Robstown, how many people in Corpus Christi would care if it were falling down? The reality is that almost every real proposal that actually was made failed or was rejected for good reasons.

Children grow up, go away to school and don’t come home, it happens all the time, all over the country, even in cities who are growing rapidly. Companies move all of the time when they grow, ask Michigan and the other Midwest states, their companies are currently all moving to China and India. Their shortcoming? The inability to offer third world wages.

There were legitimate financial and community reasons to reject the Landry’s developed out of a public consensus. The 2006 resort fight over closing the beach to traffic culminated in a community vote that said the tradeoff wasn’t acceptable. That is democracy, accept it, move on.

Then there is, of course, the Coliseum. Look at the real reasons for the failure of the three contract negotiations to rehabilitate the Coliseum. In each case the negotiations failed because of issues on the side of the bidder. The TRT proposal was a sixty year lease on the Coliseum site (which was to be torn down) to create a year round carnival on the Coliseum site. The proposed contract could be changed to any other “entertainment” use (including gambling) without returning to the City Council for approval of a new use.

When it was revealed to Mayor Henry Garrett that the Request for Proposal (RFP) evaluation process seemed to be rigged to create an outcome favorable to TRT, Garrett expressed ignorance and shock. Shortly thereafter negotiations ended, TRT owner Robert Rowling reportedly stated opposition to a proposed Ferris wheel and other aspects of the carnival made him decide to withdraw. No attempt was made to get other bidders who wanted to preserve the Coliseum back to the table.

Next, the last Council issued a RFP and Leisure Horizons won the right to negotiate a contract. WtP revealed that City staff had failed to thoroughly investigate Leisure Horizons CEO Joseph Prevratil and his management of the Queen Mary at the city of Long Beach, California who was in the process of suing him. When Mayor Henry Garrett became aware of the problems, he requested financial assurances from Leisure Horizons and additional investigation. Leisure Horizons missed multiple deadlines to prove financial capability and the RFP process was restarted.

Candidates for City Council including Mayor Joe Adame, who promised a 120 day resolution of the issue, made political hay of the failed deal by turning it into votes. The new Council immediately moved it to the front of the agenda, disregarding previous Council actions, studies and input from various committees. Adame appointed his own committee with himself as the chair until he had to step down, after WtP revealed that Adame owned the Whataburger building and property across from Sherrill Park. He has now tried to justify a reversal of that status.

Even the cautions and caveats of Adame’s Committee members were ignored as the new Council jumped on what seemed an easy solution, Brass. The Brass proposal fell apart for one reason, during the RFP selection process they promised they could do anything, but once selected for negotiations, Brass refused to guarantee any of the things they promised in the RFP process except apartments (See Brass’s Brass main page).

On top of a limited number of real deficits, Corpus Christi has covered itself with unlimited imaginary ones. Attempts by different groups to defame opponents along with inappropriate comparisons to other Texas cities that have totally different dynamics providing their growth have distorted this history. Self serving amplification by newspaper and sometimes radio/ television media has inflated our negatives to mythological proportions.

The Unintended Consequence: We have met the enemy and it is us. (Pogo)
This has not gone unobserved by outside examination. In Alan Lessoff’s (Illinois State University) report Corpus Christi, 1965-2005: A Secondary City’s Search for a New Direction published in the November 2008 edition of the Journal of Urban History, he points out that City leaders had adopted this self defeating self image creating a civic anxiety with its own self perpetuating outcomes. In the report he stated it is, “… at first jarring to encounter the anxious tone of Corpus Christ’s civic and political leaders, who displayed an intense, even overstated awareness of sluggishness.”

He attributes this anxiety as having “its own hazards.” He goes on to state “In this atmosphere of foreboding and frustration, commercial and civic activists talked themselves into backing promotional and public works schemes whose prudence they might have questioned in a less worried state of mind.” Opposition by those with a more detached evaluation were quickly dismissed by the proponents as being “anti-growth”. Proponents refused to consider these to be citizens with legitimate concerns to be discussed and resolved.

Lessoff discusses this anxiety over the role of growth in fueling conflict in the community. He states, “Commercial and civic leaders came regularly to express suspicion that a large segment of the Corpus Christi population was infected with short- sighted obstructionism. This fear of obstructionism fed a tendency among commercial and civic leaders to dismiss criticism of their schemes, even when that criticism had merit.” He went on to declare that this string of controversies “…pushed growth-minded civic and political leaders into unreflective, even at times petulant, support for proposals that in a calmer climate might have been rejected as ill-considered or modified to satisfy objections from other local interests.”

This mix of mythological projects, misinformation and distortion and blame of opponents for the lack of growth has created a terribly self destructive self image. One of the most obvious results is that if you ask any local about our history, they will tell you all about the “loser city” myth. This has grown in proportion to the point where it is hard to read a string of posts on the Caller-Times websites without dirty diapers being mentioned in some parking lot at least twice. I can tell you that in the seven years I have lived here, I might have seen incidents of these mythological diapers twice during the whole time. If you listen to radio talk shows and read the posts, you would think that there must be at least one dirty diaper in every parking lot all day every day.

This frenzy of self flagellation has finally come to a head over the Coliseum. It shows itself in a general psychotic reaction of “we must do something” no matter how detrimental to our City, just to prove to some unknown outsiders that we can do something. If you read the posts on the Grow Corpus Christi facebook, talk to the proponents, the vast majority 1) know very little about the details of Brass, or previous Coliseum deals, 2) have bought the “loser city” hook, line and sinker and 3) just want anything done.

We’re like the drunk who is so ashamed of his behavior the night before, he starts to drink again just to forget, or the compulsive gambler who totally forgets the outcome of his last sure thing bet. Both go back to the same behavior by blaming someone else for the outcome. First we must stop digging. The Mayor, City Manager and City Council were perfectly right not to put the Coliseum on the agenda. Everyone just needed to stop and take a deep breath.

Let’s start from here and do the right thing, all of us, together.
Ironically long dead City fathers may have saved us from continuing this internecine war by designating the land public parkland consistently back to the 1940’s. That history being unearthed because of the Brass proposal puts the whole “lets develop the public bayfront” argument to an end. Any development that involves a long term lease or sale, necessary to obtain financing would require a vote of the people. That means that the Coliseum can be leased out for under twenty years without a vote, something not likely to meet any lender’s requirements for a large development of any kind.

The Brass deal is dead and while the Ice Rayz or the Swim Center would be possible, those choices are thin reeds with their own problems to overcome. If neither of them is, as I suspect, possible that leaves us back at tearing down all or part of the Coliseum and turning the area into what has been planned since at least 1987 and funded last November, a festival park area. That park area must contain a suitable rebuilt memorial for veterans, either there or by expanding the veteran’s memorial in Sherill Park, which may be more appropriate. More important, it should also be a process that heals Corpus Christi and gives a new narrative to our own history.

Memorial Park and Plaza.
Imagine a park that stretches from the Solomon Ortiz Center through the museum district all the way to McCaughn park full of history, art, recreation, and examples of science and technology. That is the historic community vision going back to when the seawall was built and has always been seen as a source of economic development. We have planned, voted, spent and continued on that path for over fifty years, why would we change it now?

Look at Chicago’s lakefront park 17 miles, New York City’s Central and Battery Parks, the Boston Common or closer to home, Austin’s Town Lake. It is the large open common areas that promote dense, twenty four hour environments every developer says they want to see. In those Cities, the most expensive property values in those cities are to be found surrounding these large commons. Not just in the first row, such as when the access is private, but for blocks back.

Other parts of our narrative need to be rewritten as well. Instead of saying we lost HEB, Whataburger, TRT and that all of our young people move away because we are a loser City, maybe we should look at ourselves as a City who has and will continue to make great contributions to the world through our home grown businesses and talent, a place where ideas are born and shaped into reality that we give to the world. Maybe we ought to see ourselves as people who want to live here (certainly most people don’t live here for the high wages) and are very picky about what we are willing to accept.

A historical memorial park with new monuments stretching from the Christ statue in front of the United Methodist Church past the giant wind vanes and the new windmills and water features north of I-37 stretching all the way to museums and Water Garden Corpus Christi would be public blessing, a tourist draw and a source of City pride. It is time to connect history, art, business and commerce in a tribute to our town and all of its citizens. Corpus Christi has a long an diverse history, we need to rewrite our story in a to reflect the diversity, the courage and the perseverance of Corpus Christian’s to build their Sparkling City by the Sea.

To create a new narrative Corpus Christi, must create a new vision of itself, the best and easiest way to do that is to look to its own real history. What if South Memorial Bayfront Park as it is called in many master plans, became a memorial park dedicated to the history of the City. It’s a heck of a story. Much of our history is not evident. Where is the monument to those who lost their lives in the 1919 hurricane, where is the monument to Roy Miller and others who pushed the development of the Port and the seawall. Acknowledging that at one time Corpus Christi was part of Mexico and was disputed until the Mexican American War, Zachary Taylor, the Buffalo Soldiers and slaves, the Civil War bombardment of the town by the Union, Spanish exploration, settlement, the wrecks of Spanish treasure galleons along with community contributions to the military and defense efforts throughout our history to the present. These are all things capitalized on by other cities, like Galveston.

Appoint Murphy Givens to head of a committee of local historians and designers to suggest educational and monument type exhibits to create an educational experience which can give us a sense of place and history. Design a memorial plaza using part or all of the old structure to provide shade and supplement the large grassy area proposed for a festival area to the north. Put quality landscaping, walking paths, amenities and small vendor opportunities throughout its length from Buford to the Ship Channel. Let’s make it the united purpose we have to change our history and our future.