At the October 7 Rotary Club of San Antonio luncheon, Jim Perschbach, president and CEO of Port San Antonio, described how the former Kelly Air Force Base became one of the region’s largest economic engines and what he believes San Antonio must do next to keep growing.

Perschbach joined the Port in 2014 and leads development of its 1,900-acre Tech Port campus, home to more than 80 organizations and 19,000 workers in aerospace, defense, cybersecurity, manufacturing and space technology. He also chairs Mayor Jones’s Economic Security Advisory Group, though he stressed that his remarks were his own.

His talk covered three themes: the premium strategy behind the Port’s growth, the warning signs in San Antonio’s economy, and the industries where the city can lead.

Stop Selling Cheap

In a 2015 speech, Perschbach urged the city to stop calling San Antonio a cheap place to do business. Rather than incentivize jobs that do not pay enough to live here, he argued, the region should grow the high-value businesses it already has.

When he became CEO, the campus employed about 13,000 people and generated an economic impact of roughly $5.7 billion. Since then it has added 10,000 jobs — only 50 of them with public incentives. One company alone added 4,000 jobs, each paying more than $100,000 a year. A state comptroller study now puts the campus’s annual economic impact at $20 billion, with an average wage above $111,000.

By comparison, he said, the city still incentivizes jobs paying about $18 an hour — roughly $36,000 a year — in a community where a family needs about $75,000 to get by.

Warning Flags

Perschbach pointed to a Federal Reserve analysis showing San Antonio as the only Texas metro without positive job and wage growth over the past two years. He also cited the recent departure of Army North and Army South as proof that military missions can leave without a formal base-closure round.

The 16th Air Force, which has been in San Antonio since 1948, works in a building last maintained in 1982. If it fails, he warned, the mission could be moved temporarily and never return. The Port has offered a greenfield site next to the JBSA-Lackland Annex, along with nearby childcare, grocery and health care services, and asked members to make that case to their congressional delegation.

Where San Antonio Can Lead

Perschbach sees opportunity in computing and artificial intelligence, advanced air mobility, biomedicine and space manufacturing. Kelly Field’s long runway and controllable airspace make it a place to test AI-assisted air traffic management before it reaches busier airports. He is less interested in four-seat air taxis than in quiet 40- to 50-passenger aircraft that could move crowds to stadiums or between San Antonio and Austin.

At the Boeing Center at Tech Port, students in grades 8 through 12 helped build a 12-foot 3D printer alongside engineers developing robotic construction for the moon — the kind of remote assembly that future space-based power systems will require.

During questions, a longtime member who published a newspaper at Kelly recalled the shock of the base closure in the 1990s and said its transformation exceeded anything the community imagined. Perschbach credited the 19,000 people working there and said the lesson was to heed warning signs: “You have to compete every single day to keep what you have.”

Chair of the Day Sherry Dowlatshahi, the City of San Antonio’s chief diplomacy and protocol officer, introduced Perschbach. The Port’s revenue, he noted, is now more than 140 percent higher than when the strategy began — evidence, in his view, that the same approach can work for the city.