Yates Plans $60M Eagle Pass Project

By Camelia Bulea, Associate Editor

A wide range of projects wait on the list of W.G. Yates & Sons Construction Co. in San Antonio and the cities surrounding it.

One is the renovation of the Hard Rock Café in the city center. Yates will begin working on this project in early September. The work calls for improvements to a total of 12,000 square feet of interior space, which includes the restaurant, bar and retail areas. The renovation of the exterior includes creating a new entrance and expanding the indoor dining space by enclosing the outdoor patio. The work is expected to be completed at the beginning of next year.

But a far greater project on Yates’ list is a $60 million project in Eagle Pass, located about 130 miles southwest of San Antonio. The project calls for building a 250-room hotel and expanding the Lucky Eagle Casino. Yates serves as the program manager for the first phase of the project, which is slated to be completed in 2013.

In other news, San Antonio is doing very well in creating new jobs in the retail segment. A new study conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the city among the top four in the United States for creating new retail jobs.

San Antonio added 96,100 retail jobs in the past five years, a growth rate of 4.12 percent. Actually, Texas cities occupied the top four spots in the retail report. The other Texas cities topping the growth-rate list are McAllen-Edinburg with a growth rate of 11.89%, Austin with 11.48% and Houston with 7%.