Tom Whitehurst

Sunday, October 8, 2000

What a difference a year makes. On Sept. 22, when Edward H. Harte delivered the startling news that he was giving $46 million to Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, among the audience was investment adviser Charles Kaffie Jr.
   Last year, Kaffie wrote a despairing Letter to the Editor, lamenting the city's economic malaise and the flight of its best and brightest young people to more promising locales.
   A year later, Kaffie was among the estimated 200 people who heard firsthand that Harte would bankroll six of the best scientists money could buy to study the Gulf of Mexico. That's six salaries in the $250,000 range, plus two research assistants apiece, plus the students likely to be lured here, plus whatever amazing discoveries result from the research, plus economic development resulting from those discoveries . . .
   'Bullish on the city'
   There was excitement in the room and Kaffie shared it. Quite a contrast to the frustration that Kaffie revealed a year ago, when he expressed what was on the minds of many Corpus Christi residents and business leaders.
   Kaffie now says that he had his moment as a naysayer, and he's through with it. He was a supporter of the Nueces County bond election that had failed, and he took that defeat hard. Now he's in support of the Nov. 7 bond and sales tax package for infrastructure improvements and economic development, and he has high hopes that it will pass.
   But that's not the point. The point is that things are looking up.
   "I'm very bullish on the city," Kaffie said last week. "When I go out my front door and look at what we have, everything's real positive right now."
   World-class future
   Kaffie attended Harte's announcement partly because his company is the investment manager for the A&M-Corpus Christi foundation.
   "And I was there because I think the university is probably the best thing that has happened to this city since the port. I'm so excited about it. (Harte's gift) is going to turn it into a world-class institution."
   Last year, Kaffie lamented a brain drain and made the perceptive suggestion that we look at the wedding announcements that appear in the Caller-Times as an indicator of our college-educated youth leaving the city.
   We did that, focusing on the traditional wedding month of June, and found that 90 percent of those who had left Corpus Christi had been to college, while 68 percent of those who stayed had been to college.
   This year's wedding announcements show improvement, with 76 percent of the locals indicating that they had been to college, compared with 93 percent of those who have left or married a resident of another city.
   Just like last year, 31 couples stayed and 25 left. But in several cases this year, the non-Corpus Christi couples were still enrolled in college elsewhere, or were military couples not stationed here. And among several of the Corpus Christi couples were college-educated new spouses from other cities and states - in other words, a brain infusion rather than a brain drain.
   A strong buy
   Perhaps the most painful of Kaffie's observations in his letter of a year ago was this: "I do not think I will encourage my children to return to Corpus Christi to start a career or raise a family. At this time it would not be prudent advice."
   He has since revised his assessment upward and rated Corpus Christi a strong buy.
   What a difference a year makes.
  
  

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