Imagine downtown Kyle moving 4½ miles due north

Some day downtown Kyle could look something like this

Thanks to a request by council member Daphne Tenorio, City Manager Scott Sellers put on a presentation Wednesday on the subject of Shared Municipal Facilities. This is a concept somewhat like having members of the Army, the Navy, the Marines and the Air Force all living in the same barracks.

"When I was hired by council, I was asked to bring forward new and innovative ideas to the council," Sellers said. "This is an idea that may not be so new, but I think is fairly innovative and something the council may want to look at, which is why I brought it forward as an idea. It has also been tried by several cities in Texas.

"So this concept basically involves sharing municipal facilities with other public and/or private entities in a larger development either surrounded by larger development or in some way flanked by development including retail and residential use," he said.

He told the council five cities in Texas had looked into this idea — Bee Cave, Cedar Hill, Pflugerville, Southlake and Sugarland — and then shared information he discovered on the web sites of those cities or in actual conversations with officials from those cities. He said the city of Bee Cave shares its city hall with the city’s library and it is located in the middle of a shopping center.

Cedar Hill’s City Hall, Sellers said, "is the only facility in the country that was conceived from the beginning as a way to efficiently provide improved services by co-locating the city and Cedar Hill ISD as well as the police offices all under the same roof. This facility raises the bar for customer service by providing a single location where citizens can transact all their business with the city and the school district. This long-term relationship is expected to reap additional efficiencies benefitting taxpayers." He added that the partnership between the city and the school district "saved taxpayers over $4 million in construction costs and of course building one larger building instead of two smaller ones will produce additional operational and maintenance savings.

But the one that really knocked me out was the Sunshine Development, pictured above, that’s coming to fruition just a couple of miles up the road in Pflugerville.

"This is a 120-acre mixed-use development at the intersection of highways 45 and 130 adjacent to Hawaiian Falls and Adventure Park," Sellers told the council. "This development will include 1,500 residential unit apartments and condos, approximately 500,000 square feet of retail and 1.9 million square feet of office buildings. There are four planned hotel sites, 22 restaurant pad sites and a town center with 120,000 square feet of space."

The first phase of the three phases of this development, expected to be completed by the end of next year, will include two hotels, five restaurants, city hall, retail and some residential.

"The city council has stated the goal of transitioning Pflugerville from a bedroom community to a traditional urban suburb and that means having a great place to live and job opportunities nearby," Sellers said. "This project is expected to add $2 billion to the city’s assessed valuation."

Sellers also discussed Southlake, a community I am extremely familiar with since it is located in Dallas-Fort Worth area where I lived for almost 40 years and where several of my corporate clients were headquartered when I had my own media and crisis consulting firm. One of those was a startup called PCS Primeco that is now better known as Verizon and another was Sabre, a software company without which airlines could not operate. The most popular place to meet with them was in Southlake’s Town Center, whose town hall building houses city hall, county offices, and the library.

The fifth and final example Sellers brought forward was Sugarland, southwest of Houston. Although he seemed to be reading from a promotional piece prepared by the city of Sugarland, Sellers said that city’s project began in 2003 when planners partnered with the city to create "a unique downtown destination where Sugarland residents could live, work, shop and gather. And that’s exactly what has happened. Anchored by Sugarland City Hall, the town square has reshaped the landscape for the city with a multitude of delicious dining options, fantastic store fronts, stylish condos and a world-class hotel."

Sellers then said he would like to move forward with bringing such a complex to Kyle and that would involve meeting with "the ISD, the fire district and the county as well as any others" to explore the idea of partnering in a venture that would produce a single facility they could all share.

But perhaps the most intriguing part of his presentation came when Sellers said, following a developers’ conference held in February, at least one developer "has stepped forward with real interest in the project. And in subsequent conversations with the developer we realize that there was enough interest that we could possibly make this work."

But here’s the million dollar question. If this does indeed come to pass, if the city does decide to develop a shared facility like the one in Pflugerville pictured above, where would it be located? The consensus seems to be, Sellers said, at the intersection of Kyle Parkway and Kohlers Crossing. That would become the new heart of this "urban suburb."

Hey, I’m not idealistic enough to believe this is going to happen in my lifetime. But it sure sounds and looks like a fascinating scenario for the future of Kyle and, until someone convinces me otherwise, one worth exploring.

Especially since Sellers told me confidentially after his presentation that all the government buildings located in this town center would be LEEDS certified.