I had the very good fortune to sit down and chat recently with City Manager Scott Sellers to discuss his first year as Kyle’s chief operating officer. What follows is only the first segment of that conversation, a segment in which we talked primarily about his goal of making Kyle a "destination city." During the course of this conversation, he hit me with a fact I wasn’t aware of — that the proposed Hampton Inn scheduled to be built immediately south of the Hays Surgery Center just off the northbound I-35 access road will be a first for Kyle not only because it will include a meeting room with a capacity for 200 persons but will also be the first hotel in Kyle with its own self-contained restaurant.
What follows is the first installment of this conversation. My remarks are in boldface to easily distinguish my ramblings from the information provided by the city manager. Additional installments will appear soon on this blog.
Right after you came on board as city manager we talked and you told me at that time "We don’t want to be just a bedroom community. We want to be a destination, a leader in Central Texas and the state. We want to put together programs, services and policies that are looked upon as being innovative and forward thinking, that set us apart from other communities." So what "programs, services and policies" have been put in place during the last year to achieve that?
There is a list. Part of setting ourselves apart means we have to get the right team in place. We’re as good as the individuals who are advancing those programs, policies and procedures. 2015 was a year of team development. As we look at the critical positions that have come onboard during this last year I think we can see that. For example, the planning team development director, Howard Koontz, That search was exhaustive, We had many, many good candidates, qualified candidates, but part of the interview process was talking about that next level — setting the bar a little higher. We knew as a team that we didn’t want just any candidate. We wanted a candidate that could exemplify that raising the bar. Howard Koontz is a great example of that from just that one position. I could go down the list.
To set the bar as far as information — and to tell our story while we’re setting the bar — we needed a good communications specialist. We have Kim (Hilsenbeck), an editor at the paper, that came on to help.
As we developed the budget, we developed it with positions in mind, that were bar-raising positions. The events coordinator: How do we set ourselves apart as the destination? How do we, not only through policies and programs, how do we bring people out through image, through offerings to the community? And having someone internally that could help us develop those events and the quality-of-life attractions that we didn’t have prior. Someone dedicated to developing that quality-of-life attraction for us. Same thing in the interview process. We knew this was a bar-raising position for the city. So we made sure that as we went through our candidates and vetting them — and we had quite a few — that we found the right person with the experience necessary to raise the bar here.
Speaking of that, in the conversation we had this time last year you discounted the idea of events and festivals as a way of making Kyle a destination. You even referenced a chili cookoff in Kilgore and you said, even though it attracted a number of visitors, Kilgore never became well known for its chili festival. You said events were not the magnet you were looking for. Have you changed your mind?
No, I haven’t. Here’s the difference, because I appreciate you bringing that up. The chili cookoff, for example, was a three-day event and that was it. So for three days, it brought in about 10,000 people. It was a shot in the arm. So for those three days it was good. People came in. They shopped local. They stayed in hotels, but then they left. The community itself obviously took advantage of that event. There’s no doubt. For that, the event was very important. But what I would like to see as a quality of life is a community being known for attracting more than just once per year for a signature event. I would like to see more than four or five times. I would like to see constant built-in programs and events, Yes, the events coordinator probably will be looking at more of those signature events, but definitely more than once a year.
But I probably did discount it because do not think just events will set Kyle apart as the quality-of-life, raise-the-bar city that becomes elite to Central Texas? No, I don’t think events alone will do that for us. I think it’s totally a broad spectrum of all departments. When I put on my lens of citizen that what sets us apart is image, a healthy economy. As a homeowner, I can conveniently find in my city what I need. When I say "image," I mean everything from attractive signage to well manicured rights-of-ways. I’ll take that all the way to political and governmental image, just of who we are as a community. I’m even going to rack in communication to that. What sort of information is coming out of the community? People outside of Kyle who read about us, what do they think about the city? That, to me, is a package. Events are a part of the package but they’re not the final draw — they are just a piece.
So let me return to your previous question. Some of the bigger ones, the board and committee reorganization that we did during the year. I think that by the City Council moving forward to more of a board (structure) from a committee standpoint legitimized certain boards. It put control of policy back into the City Council’s court where that was diffused through a variety of committees — a dozen-plus committees. It also removed a layer of bureaucracy. It streamlined things to happen easier. I think that was a big step forward because it makes doing business with the city easier. Things don’t have to be scrubbed through a committee first — they can go straight to the decision-makers. It does streamline the processes. That was big and, as you know, somewhat controversial. But so far, we are kind of in the infancy stage of what that looks like. In the most recent council meeting, we still made amendments to that. But we’re seeing good things from that.
The PID policy was another one. Of course, it’s related more to large development but we have five or six major developments that are looking at a Public Improvement District right now. And with me walking in right in the middle of the Bunton Creek PID lawsuit, it really pushed back some of the larger developments until we could, from a city standpoint, demonstrate that we knew what we were doing and we had a policy that was going to be clear so we wouldn’t get into the same predicament that we got into with Bunton Creek. Resolving that Bunton Creek lawsuit was not easy. There was a lot of time invested in that, a lot of time. But it was resolved very well, very fairly to the homeowners. It knocked down the assessment value by $1,000 a lot, which was very big. It gave reimbursements back to those who had paid it. It set very strict standards for future PIDs that would come into the city. So now these large developments that are asking for special consideration through a PID or a MUD or whatever, they know there is additional scrutiny. But I think that helps them, too.
The charter. That was big. The Charter Review Commission, how it was put together, the things that they talked about. I think they did a very good job. The submission was good. Within the next month we’ll set the election for the charter. I think that whole process and the things that were identified for moving forward to the public were very good. I enjoyed that process.
One more thing on policy — the council rules on procedure. Those were tightened down where the council could hold themselves more accountable and, at the same time, have more latitude to move things forward and advance them on the agenda. I think it helped to remove some of the personal differences for things that were brought forward at the council level. It formalized the procedure at the dias, And hopefully, even though there’s still been evidence of disagreeing on the dias, I think now the process is more formal and more respectful. I would say it’s more open. People have can debate on how they’ve seen those changes. But I think it’s brought the council up a level.
One thing that we did do that actually has helped us internally was the citizens survey. We had a lot of good information from that. We made some pretty good decisions because of that already. We have used that in our economic development attraction. We used that, obviously, with our budget preparation. We took those citizen survey results and used them to prioritize the budget. So that was big. We created internally what I call the "brown-bag brainstorming group." That brings people together from all facets of the organization and we talk about how we can move the city forward to the next level. And we use those survey results to help guide those discussions. The KYAC (Kyle Youth Advisory Committee) group — we gave them the survey and helped them develop their survey. I wish I could say there was a direct asset — a physical feature — on the ground because of those efforts. But there will be.
In the last year on the economic development front, we have brought the community together in a way I would like to say has not been done before. We’ve had a couple of summits. I’ve relied a lot on the Strategic Plan. I’ve relied on the restructuring of the boards. But we have brought our development partners together to look at and solicit their feedback on our development regulations. We’re moving forward with more of a formalized process that we can unveil publicly to future developers. We’ve had some private discussions with developers on how to, not relax those standards, but how to make those standards conform more to the needs and wishes of the development community while at the same time preserving what we need to preserve as a community for our residents. It’s definitely a balancing act. I think that over 2015, the developers saw from the city that we were making great strides forward to be more welcoming to development as opposed to having a bureaucratic approach, a process approach, a red-tape approach. So those barriers, we have slowly been knocking down and will continue to do so.
On the Greater San Marcos Partnership, a year ago we did not have representation. We now have two people from City Hall that sit on the board. I sit on the board and Diana (Economic Development Director Diana Torres) sits on the board. We have a representative also from Austin Community College that sits on the board that did not otherwise.
Is that bearing fruit?
I think it is and the reason I was just a few minutes late to this meeting was that we were doing a retention visit with one of our local companies. And the Greater San Marcos Partnership was present. Those types of meetings were not occurring prior to 2015. And the fact that they are now is a huge step forward, not only for the city of Kyle but for the region, for the county.
ACC is big. We’ve had several conversations with them over the last year. We’re bringing them more to the table. Getting them a seat on the Greater San Marcos Partnership board was big for their presence. But they also have a seat on our Economic Development and Tourism Board. And as part of reaching out and bringing them closer in and developing a relationship, we talked about workforce development. We talked about their campus expansion and accelerating some of those plans. So developing the relationship with Austin Community College has been a really big part of 2015 that will definitely yield fruits in 2016 and years to come.
The hotel study is another big one. For many years now, Kyle has had two hotels. That was something we identified very early on in 2015 as being a problem. Trying to spark that additional hotel growth and development was important, but knowing how to do that we ultimately landed on performing this study with Jeremy Stone because of his prior work and the relationships he’s had with the hotel lodging industry. That study was very well done and we were able to take that and shop it around to different hotels. And I’m not going to say that because of that study we have another hotel that just decided to come but I do think it helped.
But that study also said Kyle could sustain a hotel that contained meeting rooms and an in-house restaurant and offer average nightly room rentals of at least $150 a night. Do you see anything like that on the horizon?
Yes. Hampton Inn is a perfect example of that. On the property where the Hampton Inn is locating they were able to very comfortably fit in one of those smaller models. Because of that hotel study and what we were saying they had to get special permission from corporate to put in one of their larger models. And we had to work with them internally on some of our regulations, loosening some of our standards. One was coming to the City Council to remove the height restriction. They will now put their larger model in there that has a large break-out room — capacity for 200 — and a restaurant. So that was a direct response to that study.
There’s another hotel right on the line. I wish I could tell you about it right now. And there are several others that are looking at us. So that was really, really an important step.
We resolved most of the lawsuits we were plagued with in 2015. There’s still a couple of others — the Aqua lawsuit — we still are working on resolving that. But we did split off the wastewater treatment plan acquisition, which was extremely valuable to the city of Kyle in 2015. We’ve been in some kind of billing dispute with Aqua since 2011 and we have not been able to control our development destiny because of that. Being able to separate the billing dispute from the plant operation was extremely important and it took some time to do. But finally we were able to separate it, purchase the plant outright and we’re now operating it. We’re working right now on looking at expansion for 2016-2017. Hopefully this billing dispute will be resolved here in this fiscal year. That, plus all the other lawsuits we’ve known about — and we’ve been fairly lawsuit heavy — most of those are off the table now. There are a couple out there still, admittedly. But by bringing that number down, we’ve removed the perception that we’re unfriendly, that we’re a city that’s litigious or have policies that are antiquated. And because of all this we’ve been able to examine our policies and make sure that they are modern, up-to-date and that they are extremely welcoming to developers. And when I say "developers," I mean economic, industrial/commercial and residential.
(The next segment of my conversation with City Manager Scott Sellers will highlight his approach to economic development. That part of the conversation — and more — will appear here soon.)
No comments:
Post a Comment