Business View Civil and Municipal | June 2022

50 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6 SEGUIN, TEXAS a warm climate, Seguin has an average of 226 sunny days per year. “We have hot and less hot as seasons,” adds Mayor Dodgen, “We are not seasonal at all, but really, it’s lovely, and the springtime is beautiful.” Reporting a population of approximately 30,000, Steve Parker, City Manager since January 2020 shares, “We’re seeing expansive growth here. The year before I started, we had 200 new residential building permits. The following year, we had about 500. Last year, we had 1,003. This year we could easily hit 1500 to 1800, which puts us up there with the fastest growing communities in our surrounding area.” Although the majority of these permits are for single family residential, Parker reports that there is growing interest in multi-family units. He explains, “We’ve had three or four rezonings here in the last six months, so we know more multifamily is coming. We’ve had an influx of duplexes as well.” A lower price point has been part of the attraction. A home built in nearby New Braunfels would cost approximately $60,000 more than the exact model in Seguin, although this is starting to change. A surging population and an ideal location on the I-10 corridor create an ideal situation for new business attraction. As Josh Schneuker, Seguin’s Director of Economic Development, explains, “It really bodes well for business not only to have the logistical infrastructure to leverage and get the product in and out to the customer, but also to have access to that growing population. It gives them the ability to tap into a growing and expanding labor pool. One of the biggest things all businesses right now need is access to people. We’re fortunate to be located in the part of the U.S. where we are growing exponentially.” As a small community, Seguin spent many decades avoiding growth. The opening of a Caterpillar manufacturing plant in 2010, was, what Parker describes as, “the first big economic win.” He recounts, “It was kind of the mark of ‘Hey, we are open for business, we do want to grow’ and then we started landing others. We added Niagara Bottling, Teijin Automotive Technologies and United Alloy came to town. We had several economic wins, one after another, and everybody