{"id":40404,"date":"2015-08-17T16:15:56","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T21:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=40404"},"modified":"2015-08-20T09:47:55","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T14:47:55","slug":"in-some-texas-oil-towns-this-downturn-feels-more-like-a-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2015\/08\/17\/in-some-texas-oil-towns-this-downturn-feels-more-like-a-bust\/","title":{"rendered":"In Some Texas Oil Towns, This &#8216;Downturn&#8217; Feels More Like a &#8216;Bust&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_40455\"  class=\"wp-caption module image center\" style=\"max-width: 620px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-large wp-image-40455\" alt=\"A box at the Alice Food Pantry accepts prayer requests. Many people in Alice have lost jobs since the prices of oil dropped.\" src=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/praryer-request-cropped-620x442.jpg\" width=\"620\" height=\"442\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/praryer-request-cropped-620x442.jpg 620w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/praryer-request-cropped-300x214.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Mose Buchele<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">A box at the Alice Food Pantry accepts prayer requests. Many people in Alice have lost jobs since the price of oil dropped.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Even before oil prices plummeted last year, the town of Alice, Texas was feeling the paincaused by a restless oil industry. Some oilfield service companies had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.caller.com\/news\/local\/alice-trims-budget-ups-tax-rate-as-oil-companies-move-equipment-ep-610393485.html\">moved operations<\/a>\u00a0from Alice, located near Corpus Christi, to places deeper in the Eagle Ford Shale. That cost the town jobs and tax revenue. Then, starting around Thanksgiving, the value of Texas crude dropped by more than half. More layoffs came, the\u00a0real trouble started.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A lot of people are in depression right now. And in denial,&#8221; says Bonnie Whitley, volunteer coordinator at<a href=\"http:\/\/www.alicevolunteers.org\/\"> the Alice Food Pantry<\/a>.\u00a0&#8220;They just can\u2019t come to grips with what\u2019s happened. So there\u2019s depression and we really need some good counselors down here. Which we don\u2019t have\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/219670942&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" height=\"166\" width=\"100%\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The Food Pantry is a busy charitable outfit off the old main street. Volunteers push creaky carts of canned goods, bread and tortillas from a small warehouse to cars waiting in the alley. Whitley says, lately, she&#8217;s been seeing a different kind of client come in for food.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMen come in which is very unusual, usually the women come in,\u201d says Whitley. A\u00a0lot the men are unemployed oilfield workers.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A Life of Booms and Busts<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Carlos Garcia is one of the first time visitors Whitley is talking about. He was raised with\u00a0the ups and downs of the oil business. His dad worked as a roughneck. When the last big bust hit around &#8217;83, his family was not spared.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_40460\"  class=\"wp-caption module image right\" style=\"max-width: 300px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-40460\" alt=\"Carlos Garcia is an out-of-work roughneck. &quot;Everybody's suffering&quot; he says. \" src=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_7768-300x200.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_7768-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_7768-620x413.jpg 620w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Mose Buchele<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Carlos Garcia is an out-of-work roughneck. &quot;Everybody&#39;s suffering&quot; he says.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&#8220;We lost out,&#8221; says Garcia. &#8220;My dad lost his home he had just built, and I lived through it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now he&#8217;s living through it again. Garcia followed in his dad\u2019s footsteps.\u00a0He\u00a0did well for himself working on oil derricks until last year. When prices dropped he lost his job. He lost his truck, his phone got cut off. He thinks he&#8217;s going to lose his car.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We always expect [the boom] goes for two, three, five years and it stops. But this time I feel it&#8217;s stopped for good,&#8221; says Garcia.\u00a0&#8220;Right now\u2026 \u00a0I\u2019m just putting everything in the Lord\u2019s hands. Looking for a little work. My wife is working a part time job. It ain\u2019t making the bill. They\u2019re fixing to turn my lights off here.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why Garcia and his daughter stopped by the Food Pantry. He says he&#8217;s doing what he can to \u201cpinch every penny we got. Just eat here and eat at my moms.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ripple Effect<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>But the need to save money is causing the pain of low oil prices to spread beyond the energy sector.\u00a0Tanya Hinojosa has worked as a waitress in Alice for 15 years. She says she normally made between $65 to $100 a day in tips.\u00a0Now, because people like Garcia are out of work and eating in, she\u2019s sometimes clearing just 25 bucks.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_40463\"  class=\"wp-caption module image left\" style=\"max-width: 300px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-40463\" alt=\"Lidia Escobar says business in her store has dropped off. &quot;It's like a ghost town,&quot; she says. \" src=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_7778-300x200.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_7778-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_7778-620x413.jpg 620w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Mose Buchele<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lidia Escobar says business in her store has dropped off. &quot;It&#39;s like a ghost town,&quot; she says.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>\u201cI have never ever made 25 dollars in a day. It was always more than that,&#8221; she says. That&#8217;s why she came to the food pantry for some help.<\/p>\n<p>It was nearing triple digit heat on the day she was there, but she biked thereto save money on\u00a0gasoline.\u00a0Hinojosa has moved with her two kids back in with her mom. And she\u2019s scrimping in other ways.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe try to buy five dollar shirts for school\u2026 Shoes 30 dollars. No more 80 dollar shoes. No more excessive spending,&#8221; she says.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s hurting business at Kid&#8217;s Korner clothing store down the street from the Pantry.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt feels like a ghost town,&#8221; says Lidia Escobar, who runs the cash register. &#8220;On Saturdays here it\u2019s even worse. You can tell People just don\u2019t have jobs right now and the extra money to spend on stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8216;Everybody is Involved&#8217;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Proprietors at a paint store and a car\u00a0dealership said the same thing. \u00a0While some places have benefited from lower gasoline prices,\u00a0the drop in economic activity is hurting city budgets in Texas oil towns.\u00a0July receipts were down almost fifty percent from from the previous July in Alice. Cumulatively, <a href=\"http:\/\/comptroller.texas.gov\/taxinfo\/allocsum\/cities.html\">sales tax collection<\/a> in Alice is down 18 percent from this time last year, raising concern over how the town will complete costly projects its initiated during the boom.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_40465\"  class=\"wp-caption module image right\" style=\"max-width: 300px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-40465\" alt=\"Penny Gordon and Bonnie Whitley work at the Food Pantry. \" src=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_6347-300x200.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_6347-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/08\/IMG_6347-620x413.jpg 620w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Mose Buchele<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Penny Gordon and Bonnie Whitley work at the Food Pantry. Whitley says many people are traumatized by the sudden drop off in jobs. <\/p><\/div>\n<p>Lower oil prices are also expected to affect state budget estimates.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Before I was a business owner I have to say I never truly understood the impact that the oil business had.\u00a0But now that I&#8217;m a\u00a0business\u00a0owner I see the trickle down affect.&#8221; says Able Perez, owner of RBV&#8217;s Downtown Freeze frozen yogurt shop, &#8221;\u00a0\u201cEverybody in Alice is involved in the oil business whether we like it or not.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So everyone keeps tabs on oil prices, hoping they rise again quickly. Back at the Food Pantry, Carlos Garcia \u2013the unemployed roughneck- says it\u2019s hard to believe how fast things seemed to fall apart. Faster even than they did in the 80s when his father lost his house.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI mean it was going good, everybody was making money and everybody was spoiling themselves you know. And I can hear the cry all over town now. Everybody\u2019s suffering,&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n<p>He has a message for the young people of Alice: &#8220;Stick to school. Like I\u2019ve always said, &#8216;we chose the industry, it didn\u2019t choose us&#8217; and we\u2019re paying for it now.<\/p>\n<p>Except, in a place like Alice, there don&#8217;t appear to be many other options.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re talking about cheaper gas,&#8221; says Bonnie Whitley, the Food Pantry manager. &#8220;Everybody tends to celebrate that, except in Alice. Because if it\u2019s cheaper gas then people are losing jobs&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even before oil prices plummeted last year, the town of Alice, Texas was feeling the paincaused by a restless oil industry. Some oilfield service companies had moved operations\u00a0from Alice, located near Corpus Christi, to places deeper in the Eagle Ford Shale. That cost the town jobs and tax revenue. Then, starting around Thanksgiving, the value [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[59],"tags":[21],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40404"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40404"}],"version-history":[{"count":73,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40480,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40404\/revisions\/40480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}