Rockport (KIII news) — Rockport may still be on the road to recovery, but its economy is said to be booming.
A team of volunteers are in Rockport trying to get the city all cleaned up and straightened out. The volunteers are from Oregon, Washington state, College Station, the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and California.
"We're here helping this couple with two small girls and trying to get them back in their home," said June Rezentes, Northwest Volunteer working with Texas Baptist Men.
The work now involves getting the sheetrock up.
While some volunteers will be heading home on Friday, there is already a list of another 2,000 people who have signed up to spend part of their summer in the Rockport area helping in the hurricane recovery effort.
"We also have people coming in to do roofs and sheetrock, paint, ramps, and we're just not helping Rockport, we're helping all the counties we can," said Cyndi Powell, Volunteer Reception Center Coordinator at First Baptist Church.
The city has seen an army of volunteers come in since Hurricane Harvey hit.
City Manager Kevin Carruth said there is now so much construction activity going on that the economy is not suffering on the sales tax end -- surprising since only 46-percent of hotel and vacation homes are open for business in Rockport.
"The surprising thing is that our sales tax is actually higher than at the same time last year, and that's recovery spending primarily. And that's obviously not sustainable right now. We're running about 15-percent ahead of where we were," Carruth said.
3News was informed that it is going to possibly take up to five years to make all the repairs necessary to making Rockport whole again.
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