As executive chairman of El Paso-based Hunt Companies, a conglomerate with 6,500 employees nationwide, Woody Hunt is one of the city’s most influential businessmen.

And as chairman of the Hunt Family Foundation, he is also one of the city’s most influential philanthropists. The foundation granted $7.7 million in 2017 and made commitments totaling $13.5 million.

Sitting in a conference room at the company’s Westside headquarters on a recent Thursday, Hunt presented an argument for how to claw back the city’s 50-year economic slide. It’s a vision he has single-mindedly pursued since at least the early 2000s when, he says, the El Paso economy hit bottom.

There are three overall objectives: improve education outcomes to raise the skills – and incomes – of El Pasoans, recruit companies to the region so graduates don’t have to leave for jobs, and improve the quality of life to make El Paso attractive to top talent.

Hunt is a founder of CREEED, a nonprofit that is working to increase the number of young El Pasoans who attend college. In October, he announced a $12 million commitment to the nonprofit.

Hunt and his wife, Gayle, donated $10 million to Texas Tech for a new building for a nursing school, which was completed in 2015. Hunt followed that with a $25 million commitment in 2016 to establish a dental school in El Paso.

In 2015, Hunt chaired the committee that wrote the state’s higher education plan, called 60x30 Texas.

Hunt is founding chairman of the Borderplex Alliance, which works to promote the region and recruit companies. He is also behind The Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness. Housed at UTEP, the think tank is the intellectual arm of his effort.

Most controversial is Hunt’s support of taxpayer-supported projects like the Downtown ballpark and planned multipurpose center, better known as the arena. Hunt says El Paso has to make public investments in quality of life to be competitive with other cities and attract top talent.

“There’s a political tension that plays out time and time again between those who want to invest public dollars to create a better quality of life so you have the conditions for higher incomes and those who say we can’t afford it,” Hunt says.

Hunt Companies has partnered with WestStar Bank to build a new headquarters in Downtown El Paso for its 180 El Paso employees and executives. The 14-story, $70-million office tower will be the first such tower built in Downtown El Paso in 40 years.

Hunt grew up in the Lower Valley, attending Ysleta High School. Hunt’s father and uncle were naval officers during World War II. After the war, Hunt’s grandfather bought a small lumberyard in El Paso, creating jobs for them during the postwar boom years.

After finishing graduate school, Hunt returned to El Paso where he found a temporary job working for the family business. The temporary job turned into a permanent job, and he rose through the ranks to eventually become CEO.

Today, Hunt Companies is a holding company that invests in businesses focused on the real estate and infrastructure markets. It is the largest military housing owner in the country with about 52,000 homes on 49 military bases.

In December, Hunt received the Richard W. Weekley Public Policy Leadership Award from the Texas Business Leadership Council.

Hunt sat down with El Paso Inc. at the company’s headquarters and talked about El Paso’s biggest economic challenges, the controversial arena project and his future plans.

Here is an edited version of that conversation.

Q: What is the biggest challenge facing El Paso?

We have a very low unemployment rate right now; it is below the state and the country. I can’t remember it ever being this low. That is extremely positive.

But we have low unemployment and low incomes. So the biggest challenge we have now is how do we move up the skills ladder and up the income ladder.

Q: In some neighborhoods, more than 40 percent of El Paso households live in poverty. El Paso’s median income remains among the lowest anywhere. What is it going to take to move the needle?

There’s no silver bullet to go from low incomes to high incomes. It’s going to take investment in a more competitive quality of life, which gets back to the political equation.

If we are not willing to invest in ourselves to have the quality of life that is necessary to attract and retain higher income jobs, then we are essentially making a decision that we are always going to be poor.

There’s a political tension that plays out time and time again between those who want to invest public dollars to create a better quality of life so you have the conditions for higher incomes and those who say we can’t afford it.

Whether it’s the ballpark or the arena or any other quality of life investment that is supported by tax revenues, you have that dialogue.

Q: Can we afford it? Isn’t that a fair question?

It is a legitimate debate.

History tells us that we haven’t always been poor. We lost our competitiveness, but if we had it at one point, there’s no reason to think we can’t get it back.

There’s no magic pill that’s going to take you from less competitive to hyper competitive within a short period of time. So it’s a culmination of multiple decisions, public and private, over time, that creates a hyper-competitive region.

Q: Other cities are also investing in themselves. Is El Paso moving fast enough?

Competition is great because it forces change that wouldn’t otherwise happen. It makes it harder for those who say we can’t invest because we’re poor to prevail. That’s not a decision to preserve the status quo; it is a decision to continue to lose competitiveness.

Q: The effort that began in the early 2000s to reverse El Paso’s economic decline has resulted in a health sciences center, passage of the quality of life bond and a Downtown ballpark. Community leaders helped secure the $6 billion expansion of Fort Bliss. What’s next? What other ‘big thing’ can El Paso pursue?

The Borderplex Alliance has a strategic plan, which has multiple components in it. The medical device industry is one of them.

We have to operate as a region and look at our comparative advantages. Juárez is certainly much better connected to the world economy than El Paso. They are essentially driving our competitiveness in many respects by participating in the world economy.

They have 300,000 people employed in manufacturing that is selling right into the world markets. That’s a huge advantage that we need to continue to leverage. That’s why the outcome of the NAFTA negotiations is so important for the border and for Texas, which is the largest exporting state by far in the country.

Q: What could the NAFTA negotiations mean for El Paso?

It’s certainly been a very bumpy road. I’m very hesitant to be optimistic. I do think it is a compelling argument that the state of Texas needs NAFTA. I mean, 40 percent of our exports go to Mexico.

The stakes are very high to get an outcome that hopefully makes us more competitive. There are more than 100,000 workers that work in the auto industry in the region. Some disruption to that supply chain would hurt. That’s a major risk factor.

Q: When you look at all the various risks along the border right now, how high do the NAFTA negotiations rank?

Based on the amount of time and resources I have spent over the last 15 months, I would put it at the top – as far as a risk factor.

Q: What time and resources are you investing?

It’s basically been an effort first to organize the border and then to communicate with the rest of the state. The border can’t do it by itself, so it has to convince the state of Texas and the political leadership that NAFTA is extremely important.

All of the business leadership in the major metropolitan areas and the state’s largest firms need to be engaged in the process.

Q: What’s a specific example of that?

The Borderplex Alliance and its CEO Jon Barela have led the effort here. It ultimately developed into the Texas-Mexico Trade Coalition. Jon sits on the executive committee. They’ve engaged a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and Jon has testified there a couple of times.

Q: How far has El Paso come and how much farther does the city have to go?

The benchmark I usually use is post World War II census data. El Paso was 12 percent above the state in education for post-secondary attainment and 14 percent above for median income.

By 2000, on both of those measures, we were 30 percent below the state. It doesn’t mean our education levels and incomes didn’t improve, but clearly we had lost our competitiveness.

Q: El Paso improved but not fast enough.

Nowhere near fast enough.

In the mid-1990s, there was an increasing focus on changing those circumstances. How do we become more competitive? That is an ongoing process.

Q: What about Downtown?

Clearly it hit bottom, and we are getting momentum on the upside. There are still a lot of pieces to accomplish there, but the sense of momentum is certainly there.

There is an increasing general recognition that to attract and retain human talent, you need a quality of life that is competitive. That means our city government and county government need to be engaged in the type of investments that will make us more competitive by improving the quality of life.

You might be able to bring in jobs but you aren’t going to attract jobs that are going to move your income level unless you have the quality of life.

The best thing to do is not lose your competitiveness in the first place because turning it around is not an easy task. And when you let it continue to decline for 50 years you end up with a gap. The path back is probably going to take that long.

If you measure 2000 as the bottom, you would hope that by 2050 we would have a city that is comparable in terms of quality of life, education and incomes to other cities.

Q: How well is El Paso doing with the rollout of the 2012 quality of life bond initiative?

Obviously, the signature project – the arena – which was about $180 million of the roughly $470 million in the bond has not gone very far and is now trapped in multiple lawsuits.

The children’s museum is moving forward but has not started construction, although there is a location for it.

The Mexican American Cultural Center has not been successful at raising money. A lot more progress has been made on the smaller projects like pools and parks across the community.

The ballpark was passed in 2012, too. And we opened for our first game in April of 2014. If you contrast that with the arena, children’s museum and cultural center, there is a dramatic difference in outcomes.

Q: How significant is it that the large projects are not off the ground yet?

You want to make sure you get it right. There are fewer resources in El Paso, and if we are going to spend them, we have to make sure we spend them well.

Getting it right is more important, but if we are trying to attract and retain human talent that can earn high incomes, you have to deliver at some point.

Q: The multipurpose center has sparked a lot of controversy, particularly the proposed location.

It is a legitimate debate to discuss what we are going to use the arena for and if we have enough uses for it. I would say we spend too little time about that discussion and way too much on the location.

Q: Fewer than 19 percent of El Paso eighth graders go on to college or earn a credential within 11 years. What is it going to take to move the needle?

Our best data show that 21 percent of eighth graders will not graduate from high school. We have to change that.

The numbers today are that about 70 percent of those that go to community college need some sort of remediation and a third that go to UTEP.

The focus of CREEED has been: How do we create more high-quality seats? And the definition of a high-quality seat is one that produces graduates that don’t need remediation.

Q: How do you do that?

Once again, there is no silver bullet. One of our first initiatives was to help fund scholarship money for teachers to earn the credentials needed to teach dual credit. The data is very clear that the more credits you have in high school the much higher probability you will go to college.

We have also looked at public charter schools. IDEA, a charter school network that was started in the Rio Grande Valley in the late 90s, will open four schools in El Paso in August. That’s part of a 10-campus, 20-school commitment that by 2024 will create about 1,400 seats.

Q: Do charter schools help or hurt local school districts?

They help because they force them to compete and be better.

Q: Will that be true here as more charter schools expand into El Paso? Very few students attend charter schools in El Paso.

We have the lowest percentage of charters in the state and probably in the country. About 2.5 percent of students here attend charters. What percentage does it take to really drive a more competitive environment? I don’t know. I’ve heard 10 percent.

Q: More than 80 percent of UTEP engineering graduates leave the region. It’s positive that graduates are nationally competitive, but negative that so many have to leave El Paso to find good jobs.

We did a 2007 study looking at brain drain. It’s pretty old now, but we found El Paso is an exporter of talent until you hit those who had not graduated high school.

I think it’s better today than it was then. If we don’t offer competitive compensation and competitive quality of life, we won’t be able to retain and reduce the brain drain. Hopefully, the recruitment efforts of the Borderplex Alliance will begin to balance that over time.

Q: Hunt Companies is likely the largest private company headquartered in El Paso. You are a national company now. Why do you stay headquartered here?

Less than 10 percent of our overall profits and capital, probably closer to 5 percent, are here, so it’s a personal choice to stay in El Paso.

Because incomes are lower in El Paso, we also have fewer charitable dollars than other communities. So the question is do you want to be engaged where the need is greater or not.

Q: Can El Paso attract, or grow locally, more headquarters like Hunt Companies?

Usually, when you’re recruiting companies to a region, you’re not bringing the top-level executives; maybe they’re opening a new plant or facility. The only way you can do that is by growing local companies, which is increasingly technologically based.

So how do you create an ecosystem of innovation and venture capital and startups where everybody wants to do that? There are efforts to do that, and the Medical Center of the Americas Foundation has really been the leader there.

Q: The Hunt Family Foundation donates millions of dollars every year. How do you pick the programs, causes and organizations to support?

We budget about 45 percent for higher education, 30 percent for K-12 education and 25 percent for art, culture and economic development.

The higher education funding is almost all for proactive projects that we are personally involved in, meaning we are proactively trying to accomplish something. The Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness at UTEP is an example.

That was another piece of our effort to make El Paso more competitive. So you’ve got the Borderplex Alliance; you’ve got CREEED. The institute is the intellectual piece, creating data and then policy options from the data. I have high hopes that they will continue to do a better and better job of doing that.

Q: Why give back?

I would hope everyone would consider, based on their talents and their resources, to participate in trying to make the environment in which they and their children and grandchildren live a better, more competitive place.

In my case, it’s just a matter of having financial resources and a sense of responsibility that they need to be used to try to improve the condition in which we live and operate.

Q: Everything you’ve talked about circles back to the same thing: El Paso’s competitiveness. Where do you think your passion for economic development comes from?

I was a part of the 1950s census that showed El Paso was way above the state and the nation. I was also part of the 2000 census. I guess I shared some level of responsibility for this downward trend we found ourselves on and, I guess, a bigger responsibility to reverse the direction.

Q: Not everybody geeks out over data and reports. It’s very nerdy.

I read a lot of reports.

In our business, it’s part of our culture. We are data driven, so it wasn’t too hard to transfer that to looking at the economic competitiveness of the region.

Q: How do you decide which candidates to support and who you hold fundraisers for?

The ethics question is always very important and that they don’t have some sort of personal agenda. What you want are people who are honest and have a history of making good decisions – and then you let them go make the decisions.

I don’t have much interest in telling political leaders what they should do. I do have an interest in getting people who, once they are in office, have the right motivations and the skill set to make competitive decisions.

Q: It’s hard to know who somebody really is inside – if they are ethical and what their motivations are. Do you interview them?

Most of the time. It’s a personal discussion. And you look at their bio and try to determine what their skills are and their motives.

Q: What is the latest on the WestStar Tower project?

We should be under construction in June of this year and expect to finish early to mid-2020 with tenants moving in as the year goes on.

We bought that property in 2014, around the time we were opening the ballpark. We had a sense of responsibility that we needed to be one of the contributors to downtown renewal.

We looked at what we could do, and moving our 180 people down there seemed to be where we could make the biggest impact.

Q: Some have questioned why the project needs city tax incentives?

The rents in Downtown do not support the cost of construction. That’s why there hasn’t been an office tower like this built in 40 years. So we have to make a decision: If we want to make a charitable transfer, do we want to make it on an office building?

In a sense, when you’re doing that, you’re making a charatable transfer to your tenants. If market rent only covers half or two-thirds of the cost, you’re going to have to bear the rest of it. I’d rather make a charitable transfer to UTEP or Texas Tech than a prospective tenant.

And at the end of the day, the city has expanded the tax base. I mean, they’re giving back taxes they wouldn’t have otherwise collected. So it’s a win-win situation.

Q: What is the next big project?

(Laughs)

Q: Businessman Paul Foster has talked about a soccer stadium.

I can’t preempt any planned press releases or anything like that. I’ve got partners.

I can tell you that MountainStar has taken an interest in soccer and the FC Juárez Bravos. We are committed to looking at other opportunities whether it be soccer or other sports, getting back to how do we drive a competitive quality of life.

Q: I was surprised El Paso did not pique the interest of Major League Soccer as they added teams last year with all of the soccer fans on the border.

We had several discussions with MLS. We also did a data-driven study – It’s something we did with Triple-A baseball – but the reach was just too big for MLS. We just don’t have the incomes and the corporate headquarters.

Q: What was the turning point that propelled Hunt Companies from being a local business to being a national powerhouse?

Very early on, we had an outward view and were willing to compete outside of El Paso. So very early on, we created offices in Albuquerque and Phoenix.

We’re talking about a long timeframe here, so it was a slow process of going from local to regional and then regional to national. In our case, it was really military housing that we thought we could compete on nationally. That really scaled us.

A lot of it was making day in and day out decisions consistently a little bit better than average over a very long time.

Q: You make it sound a little boring?

(Laughs) Right, right.

Q: How do you hold a family business together?

I had to make a decision almost 15 years ago: Is this a sustainable business absent me? Once you make that decision then you are into succession planning. You’ve got to decentralize and disperse so everything isn’t concentrated in one person.

Source: http://www.elpasoinc.com/news/q_and_a/woody-hunt-executive-chairman-hunt-companies/article_99e21b90-14ed-11e8-b5a2-77eb219ce290.html