For construction and engineering firms, the billions of dollars in construction projects approved this week in Texas elections couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.
With rising interest rates cooling off the real estate market, new publicly-financed projects in Dallas-Fort Worth and across the state will mean long-lasting and lucrative work for thousands with trades and technical expertise.
The proposition to pay for a new downtown Dallas convention center and renovate six venues at Fair Park got most of the pre-election hype. But voters in several school districts, including Plano and Austin, also approved ballot measures to spend billions on school projects. Nationally, some $37 billion in state and local government projects went before voters.
Dev Rastogi, vice president and Dallas executive of construction engineering firm AECOM, said the passage of the Dallas projects will be transformational because of their social impact on the city.
“We’re very excited to see that project being able to move forward,” Rastogi said. “Those projects are really important to this community.”
The voter-approved increase in the city’s hotel occupancy tax is expected to bring in $1.5 billion over 30 years, with $1.2 billion slated for a replacement for the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and up to $300 million to renovate Fair Park’s Cotton Bowl, Coliseum, Automobile Building, Band Shell, Centennial Building and Music Hall.
Various studies reinforce the value of infrastructure investment in generating economic growth through productivity and job creation, Rastogi said. A Business Roundtable study that her firm cites concluded that every $1 invested creates about $4 in economic growth over 20 years.
Chad Schieber, chief marketing officer of The Beck Group, said the community betterment projects arrive at a time when privately backed deals are becoming more difficult to finance.
“The timing is really good,” Schieber said. “When your private work is down, you need to have more institutional work.”
Construction was one of Texas’ economic sectors with the most job losses from August to September, falling from 785,900 to 783,300, according to the latest data released by the Texas Workforce Commission. Experts said it was partly because construction is an interest rate-sensitive field where higher costs lead to lower demand.
Schieber said he thinks it’s important for work on projects approved by local voters to be spread out among local firms, especially ones that team with minority- and women-owned businesses. He touted The Beck Group’s connection to the original Cotton Bowl, the iconic sports venue at Fair Park in line for upgrades.
“There’s a nice synergy with our history,” Schieber said.
The convention center and Fair Park upgrades are “catalyst projects” that will create secondary opportunities for new hotels, retail or office space, he said.
“These projects not only are good in themselves in terms of work, but they spur economic development right around them,” Schieber said. “You need some of this publicly financed work in order to really draw the folks in.”
