Holly Malish

What we talked about

Why barbecue counts as economic development

Lockhart is the barbecue town, and Holly Malish treats that as an economic asset rather than a piece of local color. She counts six or seven barbecue restaurants in a city of roughly thirteen thousand people, several of them long-established family businesses, and several written up in Bon Appétit and the New York Times.

Her argument is about where the money lands. Barbecue draws visitors from around the world, those visitors spend money in town, some of those trips become overnight stays, and the sales tax generated by all of it is what funds the EDC in the first place. LEDC has actually commissioned an economic impact study of barbecue and was re-checking its numbers at the time of the interview. She expects the figure to be larger than the organization assumed, which is why we are not printing a number here until the study is final.

The same logic runs through the arts. She points to Courthouse Nights and the Texas Women Singer Songwriter Festival, then in its second year, and to Austin musicians playing shows in Lockhart. She frames all of it as authenticity rather than programming, and as part of the reason people who work in Lockhart also want to live there.

What is actually landing in Lockhart

Two projects come up. Hill Country Food Works, a local company, is moving out of a 10,000 square foot building into roughly 62,000 square feet and adding product lines. Sensei Ag backfilled a 286,000 square foot greenhouse and is doing robotic farming in it.

Malish notes the pattern: food and beverage is the sector growing and thriving in Lockhart, which is a reasonable outcome for a town whose identity is already food. Both of these are the kind of win she is most interested in, which is an existing local company expanding rather than a distant company relocating.

The job is convening, not just recruiting

The most useful stretch of the conversation is about a meeting. LEDC held its first manufacturing roundtable a few months before we talked, and Malish says it was the first time many of the manufacturers in town had met each other. Some of them were in the same industrial park.

What happened once they were in a room is the whole point. One manufacturer mentioned having empty metal vats sitting around; another said they could use them. Someone asked about trucking and toll road fees and someone else turned out to know all of it. She has since started inviting people who are adjacent rather than identical: the school district’s career and technical education director, an accelerator representative, people from a local prototyping shop.

She traces the instinct to her own training. Early in her career she worked for a chamber president who was a certified economic developer, and convening was simply how the job was done, so it became innate. In practice it looks like a lot of introductions. She describes having lunch with a new real estate contact working the SH 130 corridor, running through the industrial brokers he did not know, and promising to send a lot of emails.

Austin Community College, and the school district nobody asks about

Austin Community College bought Lockhart’s historic Ford dealership building and moved up its own timeline to do it. Lockhart was annexed into the ACC district, which means students in Lockhart can now attend ACC tuition-free, and the building offers programs in trades including construction, automotive, and welding. She describes it as a five-year arrangement that will then be reassessed, and notes ACC reports enrollment is up.

Her observation on employers is more interesting than the facility itself. The manufacturers in Lockhart do their own highly proprietary training in house, and have been self-reliant long enough that they are not asking for help. Her expectation is that ACC matters most for the next wave of students, and that it starts to matter to employers as advanced manufacturing and robotics arrive.

She also flags something she has not seen in other cities she has worked for. Elsewhere, prospective businesses always asked about the school district. In Lockhart, not one of them has. She checked with someone handling home sales locally and got the same answer, and the working theory is that people moving to Lockhart are often moving back, near grandparents, and already know what the schools are.