In front of a packed crowd Monday, Port Arthur’s Economic Development Corporation board members killed the hopes of a company that would like to bring a meat processing facility to new acreage in the city’s business park.

About 75 to 80 people mainly from the El Vista-Montrose and Port Acres areas of Port Arthur attended Monday’s EDC meeting to voice concerns that a meat processing plant — or slaughterhouse as most called it — was not the kind of business they wanted to locate in their community.

The board was to have met again in two weeks to further consider a proposition by Riceland Farms of Beaumont to build a state-of-the-art meat-processing facility in Port Arthur that would slaughter cows, sheep and goats.

“We don’t want it. We don’t want it in our neighborhood, in our area,” Verna Dennis, 65, of El Vista, said

Dennis, who lives about five miles from the proposed site, spoke what most in the crowd were there to express.

“I don’t care what they say, we have enough odors already with the refineries,” Dennis said.

“The smell, the inhuman way they slaughter them, the sewer cannot take it all, not at all, not period,” Wilma Sonnier, 84, of Port Acres, said.

Norma Hutchinson, 72, of Port Acres, said she was worried about her property values plummeting if a slaughterhouse was built in a portion of the newly acquired 141 acres of the Jade Avenue Business Park.

Though the meeting was scheduled to discuss three items only: covenants and restrictions of the property, an application for rezoning from agricultural to industrial, and an application to replat the property, the board, led by member Langston Adams, opted to go ahead and settle the matter.

EDC Attorney Guy Goodson recommended the board use restrictions and covenants drafted for the existing business park in 2005 for the new property.

At Adams’s urging, Goodson said there is nothing to prohibit the board from including a restriction that would prohibit a slaughterhouse from being built on the new property.

The vote passed by 5-1 with one abstaining.

Board member Richard Wycoff cast the lone vote against the restriction.

“I have been on the EDC board for the past 11 years and one of the things we have done successfully is to follow our covenants,” Wycoff said.

He questioned why the board would want to eliminate a potential new business without hearing their full business proposal, while noting that attracting manufacturing concerns and creating new jobs was one of the EDC’s main functions – especially in a city with chronically double digit unemployment rates.

“One of the things I look at in the next generation is the creation of jobs,” Wycoff said.

Tom Bronnon, 81, of Port Acres said he was very satisfied with the vote, though a bit surprised the matter was settled so soon.

“I was hoping, half-way expecting. But, there was lot of people here and that made a difference. We have power in numbers,” Bronnon said.

E-mail: sherry.koonce@panews.com

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