Most Port Arthur and Mid County businesses that struggled through Hurricane and Tropical Storm Harvey and its aftermath have stabilized. At least that’s what Greater Port Arthur Chamber of Commerce membership rolls suggest.

President and CEO Bill McCoy said membership has held in the 600-620 range, about where it was before the natural disasters of late August devastated the Texas Gulf Coast.

“Our businesses picked up and went on,” McCoy said this week. “I don’t know anyone who flat closed. There must be some. But they didn’t tell us.”

McCoy said some members have closed their businesses since, but those closings were not necessarily related to the storm. Some owners were ready to retire or business had declined. Some simply changed locations.

Port Arthur Chamber membership director Paige Snyder said attendance at the chamber’s Jan. 24 annual dinner was robust, the best in years. The event, held at the Carl Parker Center of Lamar State College Port Arthur, drew a packed house.

Immediate Past Chairman Marian Ruiz said in a January interview that the Port Arthur chamber changed its focus when the storm hit. Up until late August, the impetus had been on increasing membership. After the storms, the focus turned to serving current members and helping them keep their doors open.

McCoy said Snyder and volunteer Ron Fletcher contacted numerous businesses to see how the chamber might assist them. McCoy said the chamber moved money out of its investments funds and into operations to help where members needed it.

He said dues collections were delayed until members could afford to pay them, but few members took the chamber up on the offer.

Nonetheless, McCoy said, there were winners and losers in the storm.

Contractors never stopped working, he said. They rehabbed houses and businesses and still have never stopped to take a breath.

Hotels had hits and misses. Some lost their first-floor rooms due to flooding — that might have included their kitchens and meeting rooms, too — but kept their upper floors full with repair crews and with displaced residents whose rooms were paid by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That FEMA money lasted into the spring.

“Valero and Motiva, those people rented a lot of rooms,” he said.

Car dealers did well, he said, as flooding destroyed thousands of cars in the county, vehicles that had to be replaced.

In Nederland, Chamber of Commerce President Diana LaBorde said membership was at about 320 last week, up from last year. Membership, she said, can be cyclical.

“Some of our merchants took on water,” she said, mostly in shops close to Highway 69.

But lots of businesses sandbagged, too, and kept flooding at bay.

For the most part, business damage was minimal. But that didn’t hold true for business volume.

“The flood is taking a toll on the clientele, and that is affecting some of our businesses all the way to today,” LaBorde said last week.

Some customers left town, some struggle for help since the storm. That’s kept discretionary income, if any, in the customer’s pocket until their individual circumstances improve.

It used to be, she said, the effects of storms would last a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months. Harvey created different conditions for the economy.

“I don’t think we’ve felt the last of this,” she said.

This story appeared in Volume 3 of The Port Arthur News Profile, April 22, 2018