Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport has been everything and more that its visionaries anticipated more than 35 years ago, becoming the dominant logistics hub for the southwestern U.S.
That was all part of a report released last year by the Texas Comptroller’s Office, which showed that AllianceTexas accounted for $834.6 million in trade in 2024, up 550.7% from 2016.
This vast inland port serves as a vital link in the nation’s supply chain, channeling freight from Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Houston via intermodal rail to Mexico’s nearshoring operations — and moving more than half of all U.S. freight tonnage that passes through Texas.
None of that would have happened without the villages in Austin, Fort Worth, and Washington.
Ross Perot Jr., chairman of Hillwood, the company that oversees AllianceTexas, is fond of calling former Fort Worth Mayor Bob Bolen the father of Alliance.
“If Alliance has a mother, it’s Kay Granger,” Perot Jr. said to us this spring. “I mean, she was truly here from the beginning.”
First as the chair of the city’s Zoning Commission, which changed the land use at the site in north Fort Worth. She was supportive as a member of the City Council and then mayor for four years, and, finally, 28 years in the U.S. Congress, including tenure as the chair of the Appropriations Committee.
“She knew the project and what it needed,” said Mike Berry, president of AllianceTexas. (Perot Jr. and Berry were the Fort Worth Inc. co-Person of the Year in 2026.)
Granger died on Sunday at the age of 83. Granger was the Fort Worth Inc. Person of the Year in 2025.
“I knew Kay Granger for the better part of 40 years,” said Fort Worth state Rep. Charlie Geren on Facebook. “When she came to Congress in 1997, she took the seat my brother Pete had held, and from that first day to her last, she represented Fort Worth the way Fort Worth ought to be represented: with grit, with grace, and with results.
“Fort Worth has never had a fiercer or more effective advocate, and it may never have one like her again. Kay never had much use for the spotlight. She measured her work not by the credit she received but by what actually got done for the people she served. That is rarer than it ought to be, and it is the standard she set for all of us who followed her.”
Most recently at Alliance, Granger helped secure funding for the 2018 expansion of its runways, a $260 million project that enabled the airport to accommodate larger cargo aircraft.
The project was funded through the Federal Aviation Administration, along with state and local agencies. Berry said the runway expansion would not have been completed without Granger’s leadership.
That expansion spurred new growth and development, said Berry, pointing to FedEx’s expansion and Amazon’s arrival.
Perot Jr. noted that Alliance got off the ground because of political leadership in Washington and Austin.
“You had double speakers on top of this real estate,” Perot Jr. said, referring to U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright and Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis. “Anything we needed politically we could go to our speakers.”
Perot Jr. recalled that when the Alliance Airport project was first proposed, the Federal Aviation Administration had no funding category for an industrial airport. He brought the problem to Wright, who assured him it would be handled.
“He said, ‘Ross, don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it.’ I said, ‘I’m worried.’ He said, ‘No, Ross. I’ll take care of it.’
Shortly before the legislation came to a vote, Wright added funding for Alliance Airport through an earmark, clearing the way for the project.
“Boom! Gets voted on. I learned the power of politics at that very moment,” Perot Jr. said. “If you get the right leaders, you can get stuff done.
“Now I’m not big on earmarks and all that stuff, but,” he jokes, “this was like the greatest earmark in U.S. history.”
It might indeed have been the biggest one in these parts.
Since its inception, AllianceTexas has attracted $16.3 billion in total investment — $15.2 billion from the private sector and $1.1 billion from the public sector — and has supported approximately 137,000 jobs statewide.
The project has also generated $4.17 billion in cumulative property taxes since 1990, including nearly $344 million in 2024 alone, benefiting cities, counties, and school districts across Tarrant and Denton counties.
Those figures are only growing by the day.