Smith said, at least the jobs offer more security
than the tenuous employment associated with oil.

"These jobs aren't going away," he said. "Nobody is
closing prisons."

Prisons modern gushers for Beaumont
Oil derricks replaced by new guard towers

By RICHARD STEWART
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle East Texas Bureau

BEAUMONT It was oil that brought Beaumont into the
20th century. Prisons may usher it into the 21st.

From the morning of Jan. 10, 1901, when a blackcrude
gusher erupted out of a small hill called Spindletop,
Beaumont and the surrounding area have been identified
with petroleum. The oil brought refineries, the refineries
gave birth to petrochemical plants, and the area called
the Golden Triangle flourished.

But no area of Texas suffered more from the oil bust of the
1980s. Refineries cut back production or closed altogether.
Chemical plants modernized and needed fewer workers.
Satellite industries withered. Unemployment hit double digits,
and still usually leads the state, except for the TexasMexico
border areas.

But from the mid1980s when the bust had sunk to its
lowest, the area has slowly recovered. And nothing
symbolizes that recovery more than prisons.

Just south of where thousands of oil derricks once crowded
the great Spindletop field, there are new towers growing out
of the coastal prairie prison guard towers.

In the past few years Beaumont has become home to just
about every kind of lockup there is.

Standing shoulder to shoulder are a sprawling county
lockup, a Texas Youth Commission facility for juvenile
offenders and three state units ranging from a
minimumsecurity state jail to the maximumsecurity Mark
Stiles Unit.

In all, the county and state units have room for 7,880
prisoners and employ 1,972 people.

Not far away from the county and state jails, the first two of
four federal units have just begun accepting prisoners. Within
the next two years the complex will have everything from a
minimumsecurity camp to a maximumsecurity prison.

It will be the largest complex in the federal prison system
and will have a total capacity of 4,160 prisoners more
than twice the size of the prison at Leavenworth, Kan. It will
probably house even more prisoners, since federal prisons
are almost always overcrowded.

More importantly to the citizenry, the federal units will create
about 1,100 staff jobs 60 percent of them to be filled by
people already living in the Golden Triangle. Even more local
jobs will be created by medical and other services that are
to be contracted by the prisons.
"These are good jobs," said Brian Smith, vice president of
an economic development effort called Partnership of
Southeast Texas. "Many pay $32,000 a year."

While workers in the Jefferson County and state lockups
don't make quite as much as their federal counterparts,
Smith said, at least the jobs offer more security than the
tenuous employment associated with oil.

"These jobs aren't going away," he said. "Nobody is closing
prisons."

By contrast, he said, "Nobody is building oil refineries in the
United States anymore. They're being built in the Pacific

Rim, in the Mideast, but not in the United States."
Twenty years ago, said labor analyst Robert Crawley of the
Texas Workforce Commission, Texaco's sprawling Port
Arthur refinery employed 5,500 workers. Today, all the
refineries in the area together employ fewer than Texaco did
back then.

In 1981, just before the bust, refineries in the region
averaged a total of 14,050 workers. By 1985 the refineries
had about 8,500 workers. In April, the last month for which
statistics are available, that number had shrunk to 4,600.

Those statistics are somewhat misleading, Crawley said,
because many of the jobs once performed by refinery staffs
are now contracted to other companies. But while
contractors do the same work, they are usually paid less and
have fewer benefits and much less job security than their
counterparts did 20 years ago.

The Golden Triangle has a comparatively large number of
construction jobs now, Crawley said. Most of that
construction is on industrial projects like plant
modernization. "It is the nature of that kind of activity to have
periodic unemployment." he said.
As big construction projects at area plants gear up or finish,
construction employment goes up and down, Crawley said.

In 1981 the area averaged 12,950 construction jobs; by
1986 the number was down to 7,800. As of April, there
were 12,800.

It was in the summer of 1986 that the Golden Triangle went
through its worst employment times in recent years. That
June, the region's unemployment rate hit 18.3 percent. In
Port Arthur, unemployment hit 25 percent, Crawley said.

By April 1991, the unemployment rate had sunk to 6
percent. Although it has risen since then, it again seems to be
going downward. This April's rate of 8.1 percent is the
lowest in the past five years, except for October and
December of last year.

The number of jobs also is on the rebound, Crawley said,
although they have not yet reached the prebust level. In
April 1981, there were 166,000 jobs in Jefferson, Orange
and Hardin counties. By February 1986, there were only
136,800. Last April, there were 164,700.

Many of those jobs have come from things like health
services, Smith said. "America is getting older," he said.
Virtually every hospital in the area has expanded and there's
been a boom in nursing homes, assistedliving housing for
the elderly and home health nursing companies.

The chemical plants that were given birth by the refineries
also continue to do great business, Smith said. Typically, the
chemical plants take products from the refineries or from
the pipeline system built to supply the refineries and turn
them into myriad products.

Those plants have become so automated and modernized,
he said, that the days are long gone when a high school
graduate could count on getting a job turning valves. Now,
he said, most of the jobs are highly technical and require at
least two years of college.

The partnership, along with local chambers of commerce
and other groups, is always on the lookout for other
industries to lure to the area. One possibility, Smith said, is
"back office" operations.

His group is trying to lure a company into locating here and
providing 1,000 jobs for people answering telephones. The
phone operators would be dealing with everything from calls
about new car warranties to compact disc sales.

"Our big advantage there is that we're in the Central time
zone," he said. Since customers call in via tollfree numbers,
the facility could really be anyplace where there's enough
room and plenty of available workers.

Downtown Beaumont is already home to a large mail
encoding facility where hundreds of workers sit at video
terminals and type postal ZIP codes to be stamped on
uncoded mail. The workers are in what had once been an
optical company's eyeglass plant. The mail is almost 100
miles away at a facility in Houston and is viewed by
closedcircuit television.

Retail trade is also doing well in the area, Smith said.

And Beaumont, especially, is undergoing a sort of boom in
chain restaurants.

Smith credits Louisiana's casinos with much of that growth.
The gambling boats of Lake Charles are only an hour away,
and Smith said many Texans traveling Interstate 10 to and
from the boats like to stop in places like Beaumont for meals
or to spend the night.

Later this summer, local economic leaders will meet for a
twoday conference with officials of the Texas Department
of Commerce, said Beaumont attorney David Bernsen, who
is chairman of the partnership.

During that conference, the group hopes to put together a
program to attract all kinds of businesses.

"We have to have a comprehensive plan," Bernsen said. "In
the past we'd get together over lunch and decide that we
needed to diversify and everybody would say, `Yeah, we've
got to diversify.' Then they'd leave and nobody would do
anything about it."

There were efforts, he said, in which the area worked
together to "swing for a home run." In the past, for instance,
Jefferson County came up with two strikes when trying to
land a Saturn auto plant and an airliner maintenance facility.
A third swing, this one for prisons, was a clutch hit.

"We're going to continue to swing for home runs," Bernsen
said, "but we're also going to continue to look for smaller
development."

The best way to do that, he said, is to continually improve
the local quality of life, maintain advantages like plenty of
available water and good road, rail and port facilities and
work to overcome problems.

One problem the area has is that towns have been
competing, rather than cooperating to market themselves as
a region.

For example, Beaumont and Port Arthur both built civic
centers, and Beaumont and Orange both built performing
arts theaters in the 1980s.

"They each built their own little place," Bernsen said, "when
they could have had one giant regional facility."

Partnership Of Southeast Texas is attempting to expand its
focus to include even more than the traditional area of
Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties. An outgrowth of a
company called SET Inc., for South East Texas, the
nonprofit group now also includes Liberty, Chambers,
Jasper, Newton and Tyler counties, as well as the Bolivar
Peninsula of Galveston County.

Expanding the area will bring political and economic clout to
development efforts, Bernsen said.

One issue looming is a longrange plan to bring water from
the Sabine River to Houston and even to San Antonio. It's a
plan Bernsen and many other locals oppose.

"If they want our water for their industrial facilities," Bernsen
argued, "let them move those facilities over here or let them
buy the water in gallon jugs."

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