Business owners, civic leaders and community members filled the Hill Country Youth Event Center on Feb. 26 for the Ninth Annual Hill Country Economic Summit, hosted by the Kerrville Area Chamber of Commerce. The event ran from 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., with lunch provided by Acapulco Restaurant, and covered everything from flood recovery finances to artificial intelligence in the workplace.
Mayor Joe Herring opened the morning with a moment of recognition before diving into updates.
“We must acknowledge what this flood cost this community,” Herring said. “Lives were lost. Two individuals are still missing. That search continues. We remember those who are gone. We remember those who wait to be found.”
Herring outlined where the city stands. Bridges are reopened and guardrail repairs are largely complete. The G Street waterline is about 75 percent finished. Emergency response costs in the first weeks after the flood totaled approximately $951,000, and the city is working through the FEMA reimbursement process.
He was straightforward about how federal assistance works. “FEMA operates as a source of last resort,” he said. “That means insurance and other funding must be applied before federal reimbursement. A lot of paperwork.”
Herring said the city is focused on moving forward alongside recovery.
“We are moving from stabilization to resilience,” he said. “We are strengthening systems so we are better prepared for the future.”
He pointed to the new public safety building now open and serving the community and golf course improvements that have increased revenue year over year.
“Kerrville is rebuilding thoughtfully, deliberately,” he said.
Assistant City Manager Michael Hornes followed with updates on housing.
“Habitat for Humanity is building 47 homes in the Mariposa subdivision and helping with rebuilds for folks displaced by the flood,” Hornes said.
Hornes announced that the City of Kerrville is expanding upon its initial 130-home housing project.
“The second project will have an additional 490 homes. You have probably seen all the infrastructure and construction out by the middle and high schools,” Hornes said.
Julie Davis, president and CEO of the Kerrville Convention and Visitors Bureau, told the room that tourism numbers for 2025 ended up telling a different story than it looked like they would mid-year.
Davis emphasized that hospitality is the region’s second largest employment sector, supporting roughly 1,100 direct jobs and generating close to $83 million in visitor spending in 2024. The first half of 2025 was uneven. Then July happened.
“July through December, despite what I would have said in July, actually dramatically changed in a way I didn’t see,” Davis said. Visitation for that six-month period rose nearly 10 percent compared to the same stretch the year before, and the average length of stay increased from 3.3 days to 3.5 days.
Davis said the CVB shifted its messaging quickly after the flood, launching what it calls the “Hope for Kerrville” campaign. The approach was intentional, community-first and honest about what was open and what was not.
“The best way you can help Kerrville is to literally come back and visit,” she said. “We’re very forward focused.”
Davis also announced a first-ever regional campaign built in partnership with communities across the county. The goal is to get visitors to stay longer by exploring the whole region rather than just one town.
“Tourism isn’t just about marketing,” she said. “It’s actually economic infrastructure.”
Representatives from Travel Texas shared statewide data showing $97.5 billion in direct travel spending in 2024, the highest ever recorded.
Locally, tourism helped each Kerr County household save on taxes in 2024.
“$551 was saved per household in Kerr County directly affected from tourism related spending,” Davis said. “That’s a lot of breakfast tacos and cups of coffee from tourists contributing directly to our community’s economy.”
Austin Dickson, CEO of the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, set the stage simply.
“On July 4th, everything changed for our area,” Dickson said. “What began as a localized disaster of traumatic loss and grief quickly revealed itself also to be a regional economic shock affecting homes, businesses, livelihoods, mental health, workforce stability and civic infrastructure.”
The foundation made a deliberate choice early on about how to deploy donations.
“Nationally, only 12 percent of disaster philanthropy goes to long-term recovery,” he said. “In the California wildfire of January 2025, 80 percent of all donated funds were spent in the first 60 days. We decided early that we would invert that model, spending 15 percent on emergency needs and investing the rest for the long-term rebuild.”
In the immediate aftermath, the foundation moved fast.
“Through that fund and through related efforts, in the first few weeks we moved $15 million in emergency grants quickly to financial assistance to individuals through local nonprofits and churches,” Dickson said. “We made cash grants to businesses, emergency cash grants to 17 volunteer fire departments, and we made emergency grants to school districts to make sure they were ready for the first day of school on August 18.”
On housing, he was direct about what the aftermath of flood displacement looks like.
“As of this morning, 146 households made up of 318 Kerr County residents woke up in temporary housing due to the community foundation’s investments,” he said. “There is not one FEMA trailer in Kerr County.”
He described what steps are being taken toward permanent recovery.
“Over 30 families are already back home in safe, stable and permanent housing through community foundation programs,” Dickson said. “There are another 50 families who have move-in dates already on the calendar, and there are 100 families actively working with their case manager and local partners on a path home.”
Mental health, he said, cannot be treated as secondary.
“Trauma that goes untreated will show up later,” Dickson said. “It will show up in missed work. It will show up in marriages. It will show up in classrooms, and it will show up in the courtroom.”
He closed with both honesty about the scale of the challenge and confidence in the direction.
“There is no amount of money, none whatsoever, that can ever replace the lives that were lost during this disaster,” he said. “The recovery work is not finished. But neither are we.”
Todd Bock, executive director of the Kerr Economic Development Corporation and board member of the Kerr Together Long-Term Recovery Group, and John Dunn, board president of the Hunt Preservation Society, outlined the work of county-wide recovery.
Bock told the room that long-term recovery does not happen on its own or quickly.
“Long-term recovery is just that, it’s long,” Bock said. “This organization will go on and continue forever. A long-term recovery group will forever now be a part of our emergency management and will always sustain Kerr County.”
Kerr Together oversees 16 working groups and now operates out of a disaster relief center at 98 Coronado. Businesses and individuals in need can visit the center for case management, financial assistance through the Lift Fund and emotional support services.
Dunn described Hunt as ground zero for the flood and said the people around the table have been the driving force behind progress.
“If I had to identify any one thing that has accelerated our recovery, it is the talent and intellect and passion in this group,” Dunn said. “We are backed by an absolute world class team of over 200 community leaders and problem solvers.”
A community preservation and revitalization plan is seeking $3 million to help get camps and businesses across the board ready in time for summer.
“There is opportunity through recovery,” Dunn said. “In fact, there is amazing opportunity through recovery. As business leaders, it is up to us to capitalize on these opportunities to ease the suffering of our communities.”
Chris Hughes, chair of the Kerr Together Business Recovery Group, shared survey results from 330 affected businesses across the county. Seventy-two suffered direct physical damage. Twenty-eight remain closed.
Hughes stated that nationally, 40 to 65 percent of businesses close within a year of a disaster. In Kerr County, the current failure rate sits at 6 percent.
“We are struggling, but we are beating the statistics,” Hughes said. “Shop local. Make your three favorite restaurants your regular spots. Go tell everybody you know to come visit this amazing place.”
Tara Bushnoe, general manager of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, reported that a geospatial analysis found a significant loss in vegetation along the Guadalupe River.
“We used geospatial tools to compare pre and post flood imagery along the South Fork and the main stem of the Guadalupe River,” she said. “Overall, we found a 52 percent loss in vegetation across that 30 mile stretch. That may actually be an underestimate, since the imagery was taken before a lot of the debris removal.”
A five-year initiative with the San Antonio Botanical Garden will replant approximately 50,000 native trees, with a thousand trees already replanted last week.
On flood warning systems, Bushnoe referred to a $14.7 million grant awarded to KPUB that will help fund the backbone of a cellular network just for critical infrastructure.
“All of the new and existing technology is going to communicate over that network. We envision the total system cost at about $22.2 million,” Bushnoe said.
The afternoon keynote was delivered by Glen Guyton, founder of GuyStar Enterprises and a Certified Speaking Professional with more than 20 years of leadership experience across the U.S. Air Force, national nonprofit organizations and Fortune 500 companies.
His message was direct: artificial intelligence is not going to replace people, but shift industries.
“AI is going to reposition people,” Guyton said. “You heard it here first.”
He used the cotton gin as a historical parallel. The invention did not eliminate labor, it shifted it and created entirely new demands. He argued AI is doing the same thing now, reshaping how people work, how businesses operate and even how infrastructure is built.
“AI is going to create new industries, reshape existing ones and yes, eliminate some jobs,” he said. “But some technologies have the ability to reshape society, and I do think AI is one of those technologies.”
Guyton cautioned against jumping in without a plan. He compared buying AI tools without a clear purpose to wandering around a hardware store without knowing what you are building.
“Don’t just start buying AI,” he said. “Go in with a purpose. Figure out what outcome you want, then find the right tool to get you there.”
He walked the room through practical ways AI can take weight off employees and put it where it belongs.
“If you are an attorney, you want your employees working on billable hours,” he said. “You use AI to help cut the administrative drag. You don’t have to cut people, but you use your people in more strategic ways because now you have an AI tool that can write reports, summarize information and take notes at meetings pretty effectively.”
For businesses in tourism and hospitality, he pointed to customer engagement as a natural starting point.
“If you want better customer service and fewer missed calls, you can utilize AI tools such as chatbots to answer the phones at the end of the day,” Guyton said. “Just make sure you eventually have a human in the loop. Someone needs to be able to reach out and get in touch with a real person.”
He said workforce planning is another area where small businesses can see immediate benefit.
“If you want fewer last minute scrambles, better employee morale and more predictable operations, utilize AI to help you with workforce planning and scheduling,” he said. “You don’t have to use spreadsheets anymore.”
Guyton balanced the opportunity with an honest caution.
“AI will lie to you,” Guyton said. “It will tell you what you want to hear. These tools don’t replace human judgment. You have to double-check AI, just like a regular employee.”
He closed with a thought that tied directly back to the flood recovery presentations that had filled the morning.
“When it was time to rebuild this community, you didn’t turn to an algorithm,” Guyton said. “You turned to your neighbors. Resilience comes from people. Please make sure that human strength continues to drive what you do in this community and not technology.”
The Hill Country Economic Summit is presented annually by the Kerrville Area Chamber of Commerce. For more information about future events, visit www.kerrvillechamber.biz.
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