Some startling, almost unbelievable numbers and what can be done about them

It claims right there on the masthead of Community Impact Newspaper that "everybody gets it" and I have absolutely no reason to doubt that. I wonder, however, how many people read it. If you don’t, you ought to because you can find a trove of wonderful, useful information in there. You can also find information in there that, I, for one, not only had trouble wrapping my head around, but I almost found totally incomprehensible to the point of being unbelievable,

Specifically what I’m referring to is a table on Page 20 of the current issue called "Driving Kyle’s Economy." The subtitle of this particular table is "Kyle’s Commuting Problem." Here’s what I had a problem with. This table claims more Kyle residents — 132 more to be absolutely correct – commute to Dallas to work than work right here in Kyle. You’ve got to be kidding me! I simply can’t imagine them driving 500 miles daily to work in Dallas and spend the night in Kyle. I can’t even believe that many more rush out to ABIA every morning to catch a Southwest flight to Dallas. Perhaps many of them fly up on Mondays and came back here for the weekends. But 928 of them? That’s a little over seven plane-loads.

But there’s more. According to this table, almost three times as many Kyle residents commute to Houston to work than work where they live. Huh? But that’s what this table claims. It says 696 persons are both employed and live in Kyle while 1,727 Kyle residents commute to Houston to work. That simply doesn’t make sense to me and if someone can help me find these Kyle residents that are working in Dallas and Houston, I would really like to talk with them.

The paper quotes the sources for these numbers as Kyle Economic Development, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Center for Economic Studies. I have reached out to all three to see if one or more of them can confirm these statistics for me, but I have yet to receive a reply.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not casting aspersions on the Community Impact Newspaper. I’m simply trying to get my head around numbers I personally find quite astonishing. I’m wondering if many of these so-called commuters are actually individuals who have relocated to Dallas or Houston, but maintain a Kyle address on their driver’s license or perhaps are renting their Kyle residences while living and working in Dallas or Houston. Could some of them be students whose official residences are in Kyle but attending school at Rice University, the University of Houston, Dallas Baptist or the University of Texas at Dallas? But that doesn’t wash, because the table specifically refers to these people as "commuters."

The table in which these numbers appear accompanied the newspaper’s lead story for this issue, a story on Kyle’s economic development plans. The second paragraph of the story begins "Could Kyle achieve the same level of economic development prosperity as the city of Plano, a fast-developing Dallas suburb?" Go back to the table on Page 20 and, according to it, 290 Kyle residents commute to work in another Dallas suburb, Irving, and nary a one commutes to Plano. Now I’m betting that when they are referring to Irving, what they really mean is Las Colinas (where Exxon among others has its headquarters) and, truth be told, it would be preferable for Kyle to pattern its economic development after Las Colinas than Plano. The proverbial bloom is off the proverbial rose in Plano. That city’s once bustling shopping center, the Collin Creek Mall, is now practically a ghost town and if you drive around Plano the first thing you will notice are all the vacant strip shopping areas. The story mentioned Toyota relocating to Plano, but all those corporate headquarters like Toyota’s that are located there are on the city’s extreme northern border and all the dollars from those headquarters are not flowing to Plano, but to communities to the north such as Frisco, Allen and McKinney.

But this table also gave me a clue about what might be done to rectify this situation and spur Kyle’s own economic development in a way that’s already aligned with its current development initiatives. According to this table, 22.8 percent of Kyle’s commuting workforce is employed in "educational services and health care." I know this sounds "pie in the sky" and even perhaps utopian, but I would like to see Kyle’s economic development leaders and gurus pull out all the stops, do whatever is necessary, to get a medical school here in Kyle or what is also known as university health science center. Texas Tech has one in Lubbock and one in El Paso. Why not one in Kyle? There’s the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Why not a Baylor College of Medicine in Kyle? There’s the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in College Station. Why not one located in the city the bears the name of its football stadium? Makes sense to me. What other city has not only the space but the pre-existing medical infrastructure to support such a facility? I guarantee you Plano doesn’t.

Call me a dreamer, but if you’re going to dream, why not dream big? And then perhaps we can change some of these outrageous, incomprehensible and, truth be told, shameful numbers like on the ones in that table on Page 20 of the Community Impact Newspaper.