Santa Ana late last month beat out rival cities in Southern California and Texas in a bid to host Mexico’s first U.S. trade center, which is set to open later this month.
The city was picked over Los Angeles and San Diego for the center, as well as Houston and Dallas. New York and Chicago also were in the running.
“It’s a big coup for us,” Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido said.
Mexican President Vicente Fox made the decision to put the center in Santa Ana a couple of weeks ago, according to Pulido, and plans to visit Santa Ana later this month to open the California-Mexico Trade Center.
The center, at 900 N. Broadway in the city’s downtown, is set to eventually host representative offices from Mexico’s 32 states, providing an intermediary between California and Mexico companies.
“In our presentation to Mexico, we said ‘look at the economic engines here in Orange County and look how close we are to both Los Angeles and San Diego as well as Mexico,'” Santa Ana city council services manager Jill Arthur said.
The city plans to rent the entire 10-story building for three years and lease space to the Mexican government for a token $2 a year. The city’s monthly cost is pegged at $17,000.
Arthur said the city didn’t encounter opposition to the plan and believes the spending stands to boost economic development. Santa Ana officials expect the center to attract more businesses to the city, she said.
The city started talks with Mexican officials in 1998 when then-governor Fox visited Santa Ana seeking trade opportunities for Mexico’s Guanajuato state.
During that visit, Mayor Pulido told Fox that California-Mexico trade was underdeveloped compared to the country’s commerce with Texas.
“It was going to be either Texas or California” Pulido said. “Fox last year set a target to establish the first-ever trade center in the U.S. within his first 100 days in office.”
The Mexican president late last year told Gov. Gray Davis that Mexico planned to locate the trade center in California, according to Pulido. Davis in turn recommended Santa Ana, he said.
Pulido said Fox picked California for the center partly because he shared the mayor’s belief that the potential for growth in trade was bigger here than in Texas or any other part of the U.S.
OC’s growing trade with Mexico was a key selling point: In 1999, Mexico surpassed Japan as the county’s top export market, buying about $2 billion worth of local products annually. Much of the county’s trade with Mexico ties into maquiladora plants clustered on the border.
Still, California lags behind Texas in trade with Mexico.
“Texas now outperforms California four-to-one in terms of Mexico bilateral trade, even though Texas’ economy is only half the size of ours,” said Pulido. “On a per capita basis, Texas outperforms us 8-to-1 in Mexico trade.”
Pulido himself was born in Mexico City, which he said gives him an affinity with Mexico’s decision-makers and may have helped accelerate discussions.
And Santa Ana’s large Hispanic community should help smooth out many of the cultural and lifestyle adjustments for Mexican trade officials staffing the new center.
Santa Ana’s plan to cull together various trade agencies also advanced the city’s bid, according to Arthur. The World Trade Center Association of Los Angeles-Long Beach plans to move its OC Trade Development Center from another Santa Ana building to same one as the Mexico trade center.
“Our proposal included the creation of a centralized area of trade-related services,” Arthur said.
Santa Ana also is courting the Export-Import Bank, Department of Commerce, Small Business Administration and the California Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency to set up offices in the same building as the Mexico and OC trade centers.
“We also want to bring in the private sector,” Pulido said.
While Santa Ana squared off against bigger Southland cities for the Mexico center, it got support from the mayors of 20 cities statewide, including those of OC cities as well as Long Beach, San Bernardino, Fresno and Oakland.
The new center calls for 6,500 square feet of exhibition and office space on the building’s first and 10th floors. As more Mexican states set up shop in Santa Ana in the next year, the city plans to refurbish the seventh through ninth floors and additional ones as needed.
The center’s first phase will include representative offices from six states of Mexico, with all 32 states housed in the center within successive phases in the first year of the center’s operations, Pulido said.
The Mexican state offices are set to coordinate activities as well as work on behalf of their own industries, regions and products, according to Pulido. n
