In early December 2003, San Antonio attorney Manny Pelaez went to McAllen to speak at a meeting of the South Texas Manufacturers Association.
Ten months earlier, Toyota had made the bombshell announcement that it settled on San Antonio as the location for an $800 million Tundra manufacturing plant.
Toyota’s first local hire was Pelaez, whom they picked to be their senior legal counsel in San Antonio.
Expectations ran high. Then-State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn predicted that 12,000 permanent jobs would be created on the city’s South Side by the time the Toyota plant opened. The common assumption was Toyota would thoroughly transform the South Side.
To get a sense of the excitement of the moment, consider the fact that 30 interested suppliers handed Pelaez their business cards by the time he left the gathering of manufacturers at McAllen’s Renaissance Casa de Palmas hotel.
“There’s a lot of hype being built here,” Pelaez told the group that day. “Half of my job is managing those expectations.”
Twenty years later, Pelaez, now a San Antonio city councilman representing District 8, recalls that Toyota executives worried at the time that people expected too much.
“One of my instructions from the mother ship of Toyota was to manage these people’s expectations,” he said. “Everybody was getting a little bit ahead of themselves, because the reality is nobody wants to live next to a manufacturing plant.”
He continued, “Everybody thought like, ‘Wow, this is going to be downtown Manhattan all of a sudden.’ And it’s not. It was going to be loud and stinky and lots of trucks coming in and out at night.”
Unreasonably high expectations inevitably lead to disappointment and that’s been an undercurrent of Toyota’s story in San Antonio.
But the recent announcement by JCB, a British company that is the largest privately-owned manufacturer of construction and agricultural equipment in the world, that it plans to build a factory close to Toyota on the South Side, served as a reminder that Toyota’s impact on San Antonio has been monumental. And, yes, transformational.
Without Toyota breaking the ice on the South Side, San Antonio wouldn’t be getting JCB, which plans to create at least 1,500 local jobs over the next five years.
It also wouldn’t have landed a $250 million, 900,000-square-ft. manufacturing facility from Navistar, a subsidiary of German automaker Volkswagon. Navistar opened the factory, which produces diesel and electric trucks, last year on the South Side near Mitchell Lake, with 500 employees.
Related: JCB to open manufacturing plant in San Antonio, hire 1,500; ‘impact will be far reaching’
Toyota not only brought infrastructure (a rail-line extension, road construction, pump stations for San Antonio Water System) to the area, it established that San Antonio had a workforce able to meet the demands of manufacturing.
“You’ve got to remember when we first brought Toyota, there were great concerns about our workforce,” said former Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who took the lead role in wooing Toyota.
“We had never had a manufacturing plant as large as that and there were concerns about whether they could really get the type of worker they wanted. So it was a sell to assure them that we did have a good workforce and they would produce.”
There were also industry concerns about the prospect of Toyota lengthening its U.S. supply chain.
A 2003 article in Automotive News said, in reference to Toyota’s decision to come to San Antonio, “There’s no question it’s an odd choice in locations.”
Wolff said he always knew there would be a ripple effect from Toyota, but he didn’t know exactly what form it would take or how long we would have to wait to see it emerge.
“Those things take time and there was not a lot of activity initially,” Wolff said. “There was no ready rush. I think it took time to prove that they could build a quality vehicle here, that they had the workforce to add to the 26 or so of their suppliers.”
More than 3,800 workers build Tundras and Sequoias at the Toyota plant, with on-site suppliers employing an additional 5,600 people.
Pelaez said time has proven Toyota to be the economic catalyst San Antonians hoped it would be.
“Except that it was a slow burn,” he said. “And we’re finally here.”
ggarcia@express-news.net