ODESSA, Texas — The slogan in Odessa is "The right place in Texas," and with early conversations surrounding a sports complex coming to town, along with the Odessa College downtown entertainment area just weeks away from opening, one could make the case for it.
The Odessa Development Corporation met on Thursday afternoon. Vice President Jeff Russell shared where things are right now in the community and where they are headed.
“Yeah, this year so far we’ve seen a lot of activity," said Russell. "We have a lot of grant activity. Also, as we heard in our financial report, our sales taxes are up significantly — about 25% over year-to-date last year — so, again, just some really robust activity in our area.”
As ODC met for their monthly meeting, some members gave reports during the session.
Russell spoke on the latest roundtable discussion ODC held among the taxing entities, conversations to keep county, city, education and medical in the loop.
“Just cooperation; I think there [are] a lot of opportunities where we get to, when we know what someone else is doing, we can say, ‘hey, we might be able to help you with that, we could do this for you, we could do that,’ so I think it just helps everybody, just kind of try to help each other out," said Russell. "We’re a community. We want everybody to work together.”
Work is happening as the city is currently building a new branding strategy called "Only Odessa."
“That will be driving our advertising for it as we go out across, really, the nation and promote Odessa as a great place to live, work and to be, and, so, that’s our new branding, and so new website design for the ODC, new commercials, just a whole new theme because we really think there [are] a lot of things that Odessa is just the best place to be," said Russell.
As ODC goes through that transition, it’s goal moving forward is to stay busy.
“We just want to keep — large and small — we just want to keep attracting businesses here [and] we want to help the businesses that are here to continue to grow," said Russell.
There are a couple of big groundbreaking events coming up in the area, with a carbon capture plant and mental health hospital.
Russell said that community growth is breeding new projects.