“One of those chicken and egg situations”

Office buildings. They are conspicuously absent in Kyle. Those three, four, five story buildings that house a variety of small business tenants — lawyers, architects, accountants, public relations practitioners. I’m sure we have Kyle residents in all those professions and most of them are probably commuting somewhere else each day to work.

But how do you approach this? Do you wait for a number of professionals to want to set up shop in Kyle and then construct a building to house them? Or do you employ the Field of Dreams approach: If we build it, they will come. That dilemma was at least acknowledged at last night’s city council meeting when Roger Dale, of the Natelson Dale Group, presented the group’s recommendations for an Economic Development Strategic Plan.

"That is one of the fundamental challenges Kyle has," Dale told the council in response to question on this very topic from Mayor Pro Tem David Wilson. "You’re talking about attracting industry but you don’t necessarily have a place to put them. It’s one of those chicken and egg situations. A developer doesn’t want to build something unless they know there’s someone that’s going to come there but no one wants to come there unless there’s somewhere to come. You kinda have to get off the fence on these situations. It’s not easy. There’s not a simple solution but the steps we believe you can take are Number 1, coordination with developers. And there are developers who would like to develop that space if they knew there were demand for it. That’s their long-term plan.

"What they say they need is better documentation that there is a flow of prospective tenants that would occupy their space," Dale continued. "We have some recommendations as part of our marketing program on how you create that information flow to the developers to give them some justification for building spec buildings and getting them financed and so forth. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s a challenge that’s always going to be there.

"The other thing that can help that is to have, if not buildings, at least shovel-ready sites. The infrastructure’s in place. The approvals are in place. So that if you can’t initially get a spec building, at least you can get a build-to-suit in a fairly quick period of time. That’s not as ideal as having a building ready. But get that there. Get the ball rolling. It’s one of those things that success begets success. You get the first deal in and you’ll have more success who ultimately want to do spec buildings.

"It’s a step-by-step process. I can’t say we have a magic solution for it, but I think the city is already taking some very good steps in terms of its coordination with the development community and its long-term vision in terms of infrastructure planning to make that eventually a very viable thing here in Kyle."

As I wrote earlier this week, Dale told the council it would be most "feasible" to concentrate the city’s economic development activities on attracting high-tech manufacturing firms to Kyle. But he also said other priority targets are "destination related recreational facilities (i.e., water parks, amusement parks) and professional and business services," such as those that would occupy the office buildings addressed above.