FORT WORTH With the debt deal now done, the focus is returning to job creation. We are still on shaky ground, with a growing number of Texans looking for work.
But there is a major effort to land new jobs in Tarrant County.
Over a 12-month span, 2,400 new jobs are expected to be created near Alliance Airport in far North Fort Worth.
Medical technician Daniel Lauer is happily clicking away at one of them. Very excited, he said. It presents all new opportunities.
Lauer works in a clinic just launched by Texas Health Resources, which will also open a new hospital in the fall next year.
We expect to start with, we'll create about 300 jobs, said hospital president Winjie Miao.
That's just the beginning.
Alliance started in 1989 with an industrial airport in the middle of nowhere north of Fort Worth. Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood Development Company has turned it into one of the very few economic hot spots in the nation.
Five-hundred of the newest jobs will go Deloitte University, a training center for the world's largest management consulting firm.
It's a hundred here; 200 here; 300 here; 50 here, said Hillwood Development president Mike Berry. Pretty soon it adds up to a great year.
Gross numbers? It's as high as we've ever had, Berry said, adding that the new jobs are spread out geographically, with a mix of white collar and industrial work.
General Electric announced in May it will turn a vacant building into a locomotive factory. The company expects to start the production line in 2012, hauling in nearly 500 more jobs.
That makes Alliance even more of an economic engine at a time when the nation's economy is stalled on the tracks.
E-mail jdouglas@wfaa.com
