Coastal Bend Transportation Network Ensures Convenient Commerce
Published Oct 07, 2008
Vessels entering and leaving the Port of Corpus Christi pass beneath the city’s soaring Harbor Bridge.
Under the cloak of night, Ruben Aguillon’s colleagues serve customers when nearly no one notices. Each night, nine trucks emerge from the Alice dispatch center that McLane Co. Inc. opened in 2008. The drivers restock Stripes convenience stores in the Coastal Bend and Rio Grande Valley with merchandise arriving daily aboard double-trailer shuttles from Temple, where Aguillon manages human resources.
All this - the dispatch center, the staggered shipments, the nighttime deliveries - happened because Stripes owner Susser Holdings Corp. wanted not to inconvenience its shoppers. And McLane wanted what its customer wanted.
“They expressed a desire for us to deliver at night,” Aguillon says, “so that deliveries wouldn’t impact their ability to service their customers throughout the day. I think our motivation was to partner with them and find a way to spoil our customers: That’s our motto.”
It might be a motto for the Coastal Bend, where highways, a dozen airports, rail terminals and the nation’s sixth-largest port create a web of convenient commerce.
Cargo from the Canal
The Port of Corpus Christi “will become a container port,” says Tom Ballou, environmental manager for Sherwin Alumina Co., which employs 600 people locally. “The rest of the container facilities in the country are literally overflowing, so we think it has huge potential.”
Ballou is chairman of the San Patricio County Rural Rail Transportation District that oversees a 26-mile track supporting 2,000 jobs at five chemical plants. His board is working with track owner Union Pacific, the neighboring Nueces County Rail Association, the Texas Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Planning Organization to prepare for the port’s $350 million La Quinta Trade Gateway Terminal planned on 1,100 acres near the railroad.
The first La Quinta phase could open by 2011, and it is expected to bring 700,000 containers a year to a port that now generates $2.2 billion in annual personal income.
The port completed the $51 million Joe Fulton International Trade Corridor along the city’s Inner Harbor in 2007. It offers 11 miles of new roads and seven miles of rail connecting to freight lines that include BNSF, KCS and Union Pacific.
Such projects should harness a cargo boom as the Panama Canal expands its capacity through 2014, says Fred Babin, the port’s manager of transportation. (Corpus Christi is the closest U.S. Gulf Coast port to the canal.)
“We see a tremendous potential for economic and industrial development,” Babin says. “We have continued to focus on being certain we’re not congested here from the standpoint of access to the port for both vessels and land transportation. And that has been rewarding.”
Highways and Airways
Certain to benefit the Coastal Bend is the state’s hiring of a private firm to plan $1.5 billion in reliever toll roads and expedite U.S. 77’s conversion into toll-free Interstate 69, the future Mexico-to-Canada NAFTA corridor.
I-37 gives drivers a vital link to San Antonio, but Corpus Christi International Airport encourages passengers to choose convenience and gas savings, says airport spokeswoman Amy Gazin. Aided by a $20 million terminal expansion, the airport conveys nearly 900,000 passengers annually on Southwest Airlines, American Eagle and Continental Express.
Meanwhile, Gazin says, the 61-acre Corpus Christi International Airport Business Centre is getting its first tenants.
Story by Gary Perilloux
Photo by Jesse Knish
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