Chamber’s McCoy sets retirement date
Published 10:03 am Monday, November 12, 2018
By Ken Stickney
Greater Port Arthur Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Bill McCoy has announced his retirement, effective Feb. 28. McCoy has served in that role since 2011.
“Bill has been planning retirement for more than a year,” Chamber Chairman Jeff Hayes said. “He’s had a great career as a chamber president, including in Jasper, Garland, Pasadena and Port Arthur.
“Fortunately, he and Nellie will continue to live in Port Arthur and we wish them well for a great retirement. We thank him for the good work that he has done.”
Hayes appointed Stuart Salter to chair a search committee to find a replacement.
“It was fun, but I’m just tired,” McCoy said this week. “They need someone better than me and they are too nice to look at it like I look at it.
“I still give it 100 percent but my hundred percent is not what it used to be.”
McCoy, 71, retired from the Pasadena chamber in 2007 and took a series of sales and managerial jobs before the Port Arthur position opened up in 2011. That enabled him to return to the work for which he was best suited, he said.
McCoy said Port Arthur’s was the first chamber for which he worked that wasn’t broke when he arrived. In Garland, he said he was given a line of credit for chamber expenses, but didn’t have to use it. In Pasadena, the board had to raise money to pay his salary. But Port Arthur, he said, was in better shape.
“We had some administrative cleaning up to do, we needed a full-time staff,” but the finances were in order, he said.
McCoy said the chamber has more than 600 members and four full-time staffers and has focused on supporting public education, working with the state legislature and championing improvements for transportation.
He said the successes the chamber has enjoyed should be attributed to the staff and to vigorous volunteers. Big steps forward include a revitalized Education Foundation and greater participation and activity among Hispanic business people.
The chamber has restructured its dues and operates on a $400,000 annual budget.
Challenges remain. He said the downtown area — the chamber moved to the 501 Building on Procter Street during his tenure — needs additional, off-street parking and larger lot sizes to lure more business there. He also said the chamber has sought improvements to the cloverleaf intersection at Highways 69 and 73. Bad roads and the lack of attractive land have also slowed investment.
“You hear ‘If you build it they will come,’” he said. “They will if they can get there.”
He said another challenge in Port Arthur is that its middle class is shrinking. Good jobs are available, he said, but active job seekers here aren’t nearly enough to meet the coming need, especially for construction jobs at new plants that are planned.
To help fill that need, he said, the chamber has been trying to host classes for prospective employees from this community, teaching “soft skills” like punctuality and resume writing.
McCoy said his first effort at retirement was “a failure” — he doesn’t golf and has no hobbies, he said, except chamber work. He and his wife, Nellie, will keep their home in Port Arthur, a community he barely knew before moving here.
In fact, he said, he visited once in college to drive a schoolmate from Stephen F. Austin University home and encountered gumbo, which his schoolmate’s mom taught him to cook. His second visit, some 40 years later, came after he drove home through Cameron Parish after visiting a Louisiana casino. The hurricane that had visited before him left a barge across the Southeast Texas highway where he was traveling.
“You don’t realize how big a barge is until it is sitting across your highway,” he said.
