This is the final installment of my recent conversation with City Manager Scott Sellers to discuss his first year in office.
What has surprised you the most about your first year here?
I would say the amount of turbulence. It would be nice to just fly straight with minimal bumps. We’ve had a lot of turbulence this year.
What has caused that?
I think it’s growing pains. The political landscape is very turbulent here and that’s surprising. I think there are very entrenched viewpoints that don’t back down. You also have family, historic, legacy citizens — which is great to have — but as more people have moved in and a more outside approach and way of thinking has caused some of that turbulence also. "Do we grow? How fast do we grow? What does it look like?" versus "I don’t want to grow at all. This is not the Kyle that I knew." Growth, as we know, is inevitable. It’s just how we’re going to grow.
But there is also a resistance to change. "I want to live in the middle of downtown in a rural setting."
Pete, you called it. You’re right. A lot of that turbulence is from change. And the change is happening very quickly. If the change were to be slow, it would be far less bumpy. Change is scary. It’s necessary but it causes people to entrench themselves into their mind set, their philosophy. And, at some point and we’ve seen all this year a certain mind set wins out. It doesn’t matter which side that is. And so it leaves certain people very angry or bitter, so they re-entrench themselves. Or they lash out. I don’t want to over-generalize here, but I think you said it well. It’s change.
I will also say a blog, the newspaper, some of the other media we have competing philosophies on how we approach the media in this area. I can see that from a citizens’ standpoint where they would be confused and where it would add to that uncertainty of change. How are we changing? I’ve always said I think a positive press does more to bring a community together than anything else. Now I know we can’t artificially generate positive, for one, and, two, we have to report on the news. I absolutely get that. And I would never ask the press to not report on what is legitimately happening. I have learned over the years there is a way to report the news that it is either inclusive or divisive. And I would just love the inclusive. "Here’s what we’re going through and here’s the response. Here’s how we’re going to move forward. Here’s how we shouldn’t be afraid, citizens of Kyle. This is why we should rally together and come up with a common solution to the issue." Or "This is what is being done."
It’s never been my philosophy to purposely mislead or put something forward that’s going to be divisive. Everything that we look at, that we work on, we try to change is always to bring people together and move the city forward. Sometimes those are harder decisions. The tax rate increase was a hard decision. I think the council did a very good job at the end of the day navigating through that. They brought it down a little bit and that was great. But the decisions that we pushed forward from an organizational standpoint are meant to unify and move us forward.
At any time during the year did the thought ever cross your mind, if just for a fleeting second, "I should have never left Kilgore’?
(Laughs heartily.) From a professional standpoint, I’m going to say "No". And this is the reason: My work style and my work ethic is very fast-paced. I think that’s one of the reasons the council hired me, because change was happening at such a fast pace. So Kyle matches my style of leadership and pace. The other thing is that Kyle, although we’re not hitting our aggressive revenue targets as close as we’d like to, is financially healthy. And the upside potentially to Kyle is widening. Our community trajectory will be moving up for a very long time. That’s exciting to be a part of. Kilgore, for the last 11 months, has had negative sales tax, every single month in a row. The community was very strong. When I was there, it was very strong and I loved managing that community. But they were in a different place in their cycle. The problem was the oilfield declined and they are very predominantly depended on oil and gas. So I am very sad to see what they have gone through since I left. They’ve had really significant issues dealing with those sales tax funds. So I guess you could say I got out at the right time, but it wasn’t for that reason by any means.
But the council there was more stable and I go back to that change comment you made. Change was still happening there, fast-paced, but from a community growth and stability standpoint the community was a lot more stable because of the history of that community. They had weathered the oil downturn of the ‘80s. They had weathered the oil downturn of the ‘90s. So they had a lot of history that kept them a lot more stable and they understood the policies. They understood revenue decline. They understood the need to raise taxes when the time was right and they understood the need to lower taxes when the time was right. Kyle is essentially a new city and growing out of the newness are hard decisions to make. We don’t have the history of making those hard decisions. There’s uncertainty there about now knowing exactly who we are. Are we just a bedroom community? Are we bringing in this type of industry? While all those decisions are still being identified and locked down, we’re going to have the turmoil, the turbulence.
Do you see the need for Kyle to develop a long-term visionary plan. Where do we want be in the year, say, 2050?
The transportation plan is the 2040 master plan.
But taking a transportation plan out of an overall development plan never seems to make sense to me.
You’re right. I agree. Government sometimes get accused of going way overboard on the planning and those plans just sit on the shelf while life happens. I’ve been involved in the creation of quite a few plans. The thing that I have kind of learned is that ‘Yes, it’s important to accept a vision." The steps to get there, it’s good to throw that out there. But there’s a 99 percent chance those steps are going to change within the next five years. So the vision I totally agree with. You need to sit down and say "What does Kyle look like in 2050?" What does our road system look like. What does our economic development look like?
But really, shouldn’t we be asking "What do we want it to look like?"
You’re right. I think I mentioned clay on a potter’s wheel the last time we spoke.
So what do we want that vase to look like when we take if off the potter’s wheel?
You’re right. I’m absolutely with you. And we’ve had many of those conversations. We asked in the survey, but we’ve had multiple conversations as we’ve worked more specifically with the development partners from all facets of the development game. As we talked to the council about shaping the budgets. As we’ve talked to the consultants on the transportation side and the comprehensive planning side. What does this mid-term (comp plan) update look like and how does that shape us through the end of this decade? Yes, we need to put something together. What we look like at the end of the day is a fun question to ask. I think we need to answer a few more questions — interim questions — before we really say this is who we are in 2050. But we’re a lot closer. We really are. And it’s a fun, exciting conversation to have.
Something I’ve been advocating for a long time and it was magnified by the recent storms is putting more emphasis on storm water management and paying for it with a storm water fee so that a storm water could become an enterprise fund. Will you seek to include a stormwater fee in your next budget proposal?
You and I have talked about this in the past. There is a perception that comes with a storm water fee where that has been introduced and citizens have railed against it as another tax. Where it has been introduced and has actually been successful, it has generated much-needed revenue for a very serious problem. Would I welcome a storm water fee? Absolutely, I would. But it does have to be examined from the overall cost of living in the city of Kyle, with all the other taxes, fees and other taxing entities that are here and what they’re trying to do on their taxes and fees.
First of all, we’ve had two 500-year floods in the last year. I don’t know what that means. Are we going to see more of them? It was a very strong el Nino year. Are we going to see more of those? There’s uncertainty there. We did hire late this year a storm water management position. Her name is Kathy Roecker. She is another one of those who is an incredible hire for the city of Kyle. She came out of TCEQ’s enforcement division for stormwater. She knows how to put together a storm water management plan. She will be responsible for looking at the storm water for all development moving forward and insuring that the impact is what it is supposed to be. Moving forward with her, how can she help us with discharge into creeks, erosion control, all those things that go into storm water, she’s our go-to now. We have not had that. Ever. And so that is a huge, huge step forward. TCEQ was looking at our storm water and was asking "Now that you’re growing, what are you doing about storm water?" And that’s one of the reasons we hired her. She is a huge, huge step in the right direction for the city.
When we, as a city, have done our modeling, we’ve done our water model and we’ve done our wastewater model. There is a storm water model that also can be done. GBRA is looking at storm water regionally and so we’re waiting to see what that looks like, to see where we need to put our focus. At some point — I don’t know when, I want Kathy to help let me know on that — at some point we’re going to need to look more exhaustively at a storm water model. That will show us where our biggest offenders are with runoff, with pervious and impervious surfaces, and we can do more to our infrastructure at that point. We just haven’t started that and, honestly, it’s a General Fund expense. It’s not an Enterprise Fund. It’s part of streets.
We look at it now and we consider it in all of our street building and we have with our residential developers. There’s a section that they have to follow on storm water. So I’m not as concerned with our newer developments, but maybe our older developments that didn’t have to follow the same standard. We need to see what the infrastructure looks like from a storm water perspective and allocate funds for that just as we are for any other.
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