Write a new simple attractive title based on the title from Opinion: San Antonio must jump on drawing of opportunity zones and dont use quote marks

As a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, one of the first lessons I learned as a legislator is that the money moves whether or not you are at the table. The only question is whether your community gets a seat.

Right now, the largest pool of community-accessible investment capital in a generation is being deployed into Texas through a federal program creating investment opportunity zones across the state.

The decisions about which municipalities will receive this money will be made this summer. If the mayors, county judges and city managers of South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley and our border counties do not act in the next several weeks, that money will flow somewhere else for the next 10 years.

Here is what is happening.

President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year in July. Among many other things, the law made the federal opportunity zone program permanent. Opportunity zones are census tracts that the federal government designates as eligible for major tax benefits.

Investors who put their capital gains into projects inside those zones get to defer the tax, reduce the tax and in some cases pay no tax at all on what their investment earns. The result is that capital flows toward the zones. Development projects are built. Businesses open. Jobs follow.

In the first round of designations in 2018, Texas got roughly 628 opportunity zones. Some of them did very well. Others sat untouched because no one fought for them on the front end. By the time the federal map was set, the chance to influence which neighborhoods made the list was already gone.

We are about to do it all over again this summer. The Texas Economic Development & Tourism Office, an arm of the governor’s office, will pick approximately 605 new opportunity zones this summer.

To be considered, a local community has to nominate its census tracts. The deadline for those nominations is June 26.

This time, the law contains a bonus for rural communities.

Investments in rural opportunity zones get triple the tax benefit and half the construction requirement of urban deals.

Deals that may not have made economic sense under the first opportunity zone program are now economically viable. The capital is going to come looking for these communities.

If you are a mayor, a county judge or a city manager in a Hispanic-majority community in Texas, here is what you need to do right now to have a chance at bringing this capital to your community.

First, find out which census tracts in your jurisdiction qualify. The rules have changed. Tracts that qualified in 2018 may not qualify today.

Second, document the local tools you are already using to support those tracts. Programs like tax abatement agreements, sales tax economic development corporations and tax increment financing districts are the standard incentives Texas cities and counties use to attract investment.

Third, find your project. A named developer, a named investor, a real proposal for housing, a hospital or a small manufacturing site makes your nomination dramatically stronger than merely a proposed idea that is not shovel-ready.

Fourth, find an advocate in Austin who knows how the process works. The selection will not be made on a pure scoring system. It is a political and policy decision made by a state office that answers to the governor.

As someone who knows what it looks like to miss out on federal dollars for my community, I want to make sure that Hispanic Texans living in the southern part of the state don’t get left behind.

Five weeks. That is what we have. The next nomination window does not open until 2036. Call your mayor. Call your county judge. The time is now.

Jason Villalba served three terms in the Texas House of Representatives. He is a Dallas-based partner at FBT Gibbons LLP, and the founder, chairman and CEO of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation.

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