CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The City of Falfurrias continues the expansion of its Economic Development Accelerator with a $500,000 United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Business Development Grant (USDARBDG).
The grant is for the city to use to bring business into the community. The city plans to turn part of the old Bealls into an urgent care center.
There will be 10,000 square feet available, with one half the facility for small businesses who are looking for production and retail space. The other half will go towards the urgent care center, the first the city has had.
The closest medical centers to Falfurrias are hospitals in Kingsville and Alice.
"A two way trip is easily an hour and a half to an hour and forty five minutes," Falfurrias City Manager Andy Garcia said.
Community member Marcella Huerta said that drive can be difficult in itself, let alone the wait.
"There’s a lot of people in this community specifically that don’t have means to travel to those sites to get the help they need. There’s a high need for medical services in our communities," Huerta said.
Garcia said because the city has no urgent care center, EMS gets tied up transporting patients to other cities for minor and severe injuries, and aren't as readily available in the area.
Falfurrias is already struggling to find EMS workers and hope that an urgent care center will help both community members and workers.
"The EMS we’re hoping is going to be available to be able to transport them to Alice and Kingsville because we’re trying to offload the high capacity or the high stress on our EMS system by allowing our urgent care to take care of some of those minor injuries," Garcia said. "The benefit to community members is that they have something here that's two-three minutes away."
There used to be a hospital in the city years ago, but it was difficult to sustain with declining population in the city. Money spent on workers, materials and space also made it hard to keep up.
Garcia said an urgent care center is more appropriate with the given population and resources.
The city is already speaking with three interested systems for the urgent care center and are sending out requests for proposals to others.
The chosen provider will get free leasing space as long as they can comply with the agreement to offer critical social or healthcare services. The provider who leases the space will still have to pay materials, labor and utilities.
"It doesn’t hurt the city but it doesn’t help the city financially. The city kind of said the health of our constituencies are more important than making a buck," Garcia said.
If funds go over the $500,000 grant given to the city, Garcia said they will look into applying for more grants to pay for the extra costs. Funding is usually limited to $300,000 for the USDARBDG, but the city showed they were qualified for more by showing how they used other grants for economic development.
Garcia said the city has seen exceptional growth from their Economic Development Center and expect success to trickle down into the next part of the project.
The city is waiting for an architect to be selected. The next step will be the design of the floor plan. The building space will be prepared by next year.
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