We gathered together for a cocktail reception on Thursday evening at The Fort Worth Club to recognize “The 500” and honor Ross Perot Jr. and Mike Berry as co-Person of the Year.
Close to 300 attended for happy hour and short program. Among them was Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, who addressed the gathering.
She spoke to the common denominator among “The 500” honorees: grit, which is shared, she said, by all of Fort Worth’s people.
“The 500” celebrates the city’s most influential leaders across business, government, philanthropy, education, and culture.
The Fort Worth Inc. Person of the Year recognition honors individuals whose leadership and vision have had a lasting impact on the city’s business community and future growth.
The recognition of Perot Jr. and Berry, Hillwood’s chairman and president, highlights the pair’s leadership in developing AllianceTexas, the 27,000-acre master-planned development in north Fort Worth that has become one of the nation’s most significant logistics and industrial hubs.
Anchored by Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport — one of the country’s largest inland ports — AllianceTexas has helped position Fort Worth as a global center for trade, transportation, and corporate investment.
Under Perot and Berry’s leadership, Hillwood transformed what began as a bold vision for an industrial airport into a development that today serves as a major economic engine for North Texas and a national model for public-private partnership.
Perot first pitched the industrial airport concept to Fort Worth leaders four decades ago. Of the project, a city planner said then that there wasn’t “a city in America that wouldn’t give its eyeteeth for this project.”
Perot soon recruited Berry, a longtime friend from their days at Vanderbilt University, to help lead the effort.
“This is the only man on the team who I knew I had to have,” Perot says of Berry. “No. 1, I trusted him. We were great friends. And he was deep, deep Fort Worth. And I thought it was really important to have a deep Fort Worth leader run this program.”