El Paso's poverty rate fourth-highest in U.S.
Leaders: Education will reverse trend
By Erica Molina Johnson / El Paso Times



El Paso continues to be among the poorest counties in the nation, census data released Tuesday show, and local leaders said education is the key to reversing the trend.

El Paso County tied with Bronx County, N.Y., for having the third-highest poverty rate in the nation at 29.2 percent. Cameron County and Hidalgo County in South Texas had the higher rates, respectively, 41.2 percent and 41 percent.

"The bad news is El Paso continues to be one of the most impoverished economies in the United States," said Tom Fullerton, an economist at the University of Texas at El Paso. "The goods news, however, is standards of living continue to improve in El Paso, just not as rapidly as they are improving in the United States as a whole."

The figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday also show that El Paso County has among the lowest median incomes in the nation at $30,968.

Fullerton said the contributors to El Paso's poverty include lack of education and geographic location.

"The biggest reason El Paso has fallen behind the United States economy in its entirety is that the high-school dropout rate in El Paso is above the national average and has been for ages," Fullerton said. "Income is a function of productivity, and productivity is a function of education."

Many leaders in the city agreed that education is one of the answers to the poverty problem.

"Our number one challenge and opportunity is education for our kids," County Judge Dolores Briones said. "It is absolutely clearly the answer, and that should be our number one priority."

Sidney Alvarez, spokesman for Upper Rio Grande @ Work System, said, "You can't attract high-paying jobs and a high-skilled employer without having a high-skilled labor force."

He said the agency is working to combat the problem by educating and training El Pasoans and by reaching out to them while they're still in high school.

"To fix this problem, you have to start younger," Alvarez said.

Data from the 2005 American Community Survey show that 29.2 percent of people in El Paso County live in poverty, a slight decrease from the 32.3 percent recorded last year, but still higher than the 27.4 percent in 2003.

Stella Ruiz, an El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization leader at All Saints Catholic Church, said the group has long advocated for companies to pay El Pasoans a living wage.

"We are striving to do something about it, and one of the things they came up with was Project Arriba," she said.

So far, 400 graduates have completed the program and 500 others are in the pipeline, receiving training that will help them land better jobs.

"People are waking up and realizing something has to be done," Ruiz said. "We're losing our youth because there are not jobs here."

But education is not the only reason El Paso has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation.

"Our geographic location does hamper us in several ways," Fullerton said. "One is that El Paso historically has been an area that is popular with economic refugees out of Mexico, and most of those migrants who come here because of economic reasons É arrive without secondary or post-secondary evels of educational attainment." Briones agreed.

"The closer you get to the border, the more depressed the economy is," she said. "We have a very young population in El Paso, and we do have depressed wages because of our proximity to Mexico."

But the border cannot take all of the geographic blame for the poor economy, Fullerton said.

"Historically, El Paso is far enough away from both Washington and Austin that infrastructure investment locally has lagged behind what it is in other regions of the country and the state," he said.

He added that the city's distance from other parts of the country also hurts its economy in that the city is slower to adopt new ideas and technology.

State demographer Steve Murdock in San Antonio said the border area is historically high in poverty.

"This is not new," he said, adding that the state has been high in poverty for at least 20 years.

"We would hope that the circumstances would change, but what we have to face is the reality we still have some substantial challenges," Murdock said.

The high poverty rates are not entirely bad news for the city, said El Paso Independent School District spokesman Luis Villalobos.

"The census report would indicate that the numbers are growing for students that would qualify for assistance from the federal government, whether it be reduced price for lunch or entitlement funds," he said. "The census trend will obviously benefit the school district."

He said more than 70 percent of the district's approximately 64,000 students now qualify for free or reduced lunch.

"Generally, this is good news because it qualifies more students for more services through entitlement funds," Villalobos said.

Briones said local government must confront the poverty.

"Since we do know that our families have huge economic stress, we do try to be vigilant towards taxpayer money and how we pay for the services we offer. That's why we've tried so hard to pull down state and federal grants," she said. "That's why we keep fighting with the federal and state governments to stop forcing us to implement unfunded mandates."

But experts said the region's poverty and economy are not a lost cause.

"If the dropout problem and the infrastructure problem could be addressed," Fullerton said, "those two things alone would go a long way towards beginning to reverse the income gap between El Paso and the rest of the country."

Erica Molina Johnson may be reached at emolina@elpasotimes.com; 546-6132.

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