(Updated 1:17 p.m. Saturday to reflect Kyle Chamber CEO Julie Snyder's comments on BR&E within that organization.)
This is the second part in a three-part series detailing my recent conversation with City Manager Scott Sellers. My questions/comments are in bold face, not necessarily because they are particularly bold, but simply to set them apart from the city manager’s remarks.
You told me last year that economic development was one of your major passions. How would you grade yourself in the area of economic development over the last year and what would you like to accomplish in this area in the coming year?
"It’s hard. I have too hard of a time answering that. So if I can answer that from the city’s perspective. I think the City of Kyle, even though we didn’t land a large prospect, we put together the framework to so in 2015. So on that side I would say we get an A. From the Greater San Marcos Partnership, from renegotiating deals like with HPI. They own the property north of Home Depot, along Dry Hole Road and Kyle Parkway. Nothing had been happening on that property for quite some time even though there was an existing 380 agreement with them. We worked with them to move that forward. So we put in place a lot of the pieces to move forward.
Economic development now reports directly to me in the system. We will land the big industry at some point, but we didn’t have to to give ourselves an A this year. Maybe in general we don’t have to give ourselves an A, even though that’s typically publicly how we’re graded. If we don’t show that big hitter people think we’re not doing anything. But we really are working very hard behind the scenes. It’s still just a passion of mine today as it was this time a year ago.
One of the things we have talked about internally is the incubator approach. That’s something we will need to do. What we’re talking about here is economic gardening, where you take the homegrown business. And it’s a lot easier to grow up from within than attract from without. Sometimes we spend so much time and resource to bring the big hitter here when that can be applied right here in our backyard. That’s through what’s called BR&E — business retention and expansion. As part of restructuring internally and with the Greater San Marcos Partnership, that’s been a big facet of what we’ve talked about. In fact, I believe even the Chamber of Commerce is trying to get more into the BR&E approach within the chamber also. (Editor's note: Chamber CEO Julie Snyder subsequently told me "The Kyle Chamber Board of Directors, at their most recent planning and goal setting session, discussed BR&E. Understanding that the Greater San Marcos Partnership and the Economic Development team with the City of Kyle has a BR&E program in place, the Chamber's Board believes it's important to learn about those programs. The goal is to be a resource for our businesses, have information to assist them, and communicate with them. Learning about current programs will assist us with that goal.") So that’s something I think we all recognize.
In July of last year you made a presentation to the City Council on shared municipal facilities. Has anything progressed along those lines?
Yes, it has. From that conversation, we have met with representatives from Plum Creek since they had designed their "uptown" years ago to be that city service and school district facility. So we have talked with them several times very specifically about what that would look like. They, on their part, have brought in several development partners that have worked on comparable projects elsewhere. But it’s one of those things where the fit has to be right. Projects like this are long-term projects. It’s much more than putting a city hall on raw land. You have to have all the adjacent retail and office space to be complimentary. I would say a couple of things on that. We’ve talked to some consultants who have worked on some big projects like that to help Plum Creek re-look at the way they have that initially designed. Those conversations have been very good. Plum Creek has done some internal reorganizing and I think that’s going to be very healthy. I have a meeting with them (that was due to take place this week) to talk about this very same concept.
Internally we have done some things to help us move toward a possible relocation. For example: What does a design look like for city hall? To date, I can’t answer that. But I do know there are designs — office designs — that are very modern and that are re-shaping the private sector quite a bit. Like the Open Floor Plan design where things inside are very modular, very mobile, that allows for teams to come together or come apart as they need to, allows for synergies between departments. This building, for example, is designed from a very compartmentalized approach. You’ve got planning over here, admin and finance over there, you have police in a separate building. That approach is a common approach, but it is an historic approach. It’s not a modern or a future approach.
This goes back to how we move Kyle forward and become a thought leader. Well, what if we had a facility that was a true one-stop shop under one roof so you have the opportunity for walk-in traffic to get their building permit taken care of at the very same time as they pay utility bills at the same time they take care of something with the court or a police record?. Now we’re not sending citizens all over the place to get things done with the city but we’re bringing them under one roof. That also brings in major efficiencies in operation because if you have staff services in one big room, for example, now instead of needing six, seven , eight copy machines, you need one or two. All the things we do to keep departments separate, all the different cameras and routers from an IT standpoint and instead of having all those segregated, you bring them together. You have a very integrated system. So we’ve been talking about "Does that make sense for this organization?" And, if it does, what other things technologically may make sense for the city? Does telecommuting make sense for certain positions so we can cut down on our footprint? How does that cut down environmentally on our footprint? How does that save taxpayer dollars long-term? All that needs to be baked into those conversations and we are having them right now. So it wasn’t just something I arbitrarily threw out by any means. It’s something that we’re very serious about. If we’re going to relocate, how can we maximize the potential to the citizens and to the organization while reducing the costs and saving taxpayer dollars?
Have you had any talks with the county, the state — any other governmental entities — about collaborating with you on this project?
Yes, we have. But to the extent of making it a completely all-in-one governmental center we haven’t. The county built Precinct 2 offices several years ago and put themselves off on (Highway) 2770. So they’re kind of out there, but they’re in their own facility. Are there departments or facets of the county we can incorporate and I think the answer is "yes." There’s been, for example, talks for years about a dispatch center. Can we consolidate? Can we have a dispatch center as part of this facility? The school district needs a lot of space. That’s not a secret. They’ve talked about needing to move and relocate certain things. How could we be, if not in the same building, part of a complex together where we’re sharing IT, for example. Which would be huge for both of us. As an aside, years ago when I was in a certain city we partnered with a county that was just three buildings down on, not only technology, but on geothermal, with the same pipe work underground. There’s definitely cost savings to be had with consolidation.
I look at it from the residents’ point-of-view. Take the recent floods, for example. It seems to me it would be much better for the citizens if they knew there was one location they could go to get help, whether it was from the city, state, county or federal government.
I totally agree with you. That would be ideal. A perfectly designed and bought-into uptown in Plum Creek I could envision — if not one facility — you know you’re going to the government center and this building is that and another building is that. The conversations haven’t taken place to that level, but I’m kind of holding back just a little bit until, with the Plum Creek group, we have the right partner for the development.
During the council’s first budget workshop last summer, you told me by the end of the year the city would have its own cable TV station. What happened and where is the money designated for that purpose by the cable television franchise agreement?
The money’s still there. None of it has been spent, except on the upgrades that we needed to make to our council chambers that, when I last spoke to you on this subject, I didn’t know we needed to make. We’ve lived through several major glitches in our council chambers — the sound system, the projection system, etc. We’ve worked on upgrading that. We have spoken with representatives from Time Warner Cable on what it’s going to take to get into their system. So we already know that answer. But there were some technology upgrades we needed to make first. So were are in the process of making those with the council chambers.
Personnel wise, we needed to have somebody that could oversee development of not only the channel — putting it together, hardware-wise — but putting together the programming. One thing our Time Warner Cable rep told us was they wanted to see a certain amount of original programming. So what you see a lot on these channels, cities will go out and find filler space. And while that’s all good — I enjoy the NASA channel just as much as anyone, or the Armed Forces channel — it doesn’t do much to benefit your local viewership with local information which is what these channels were predicated on. So we need to have internally the resources to start generating original content to the point where we knew, once we launched the channel, we could sustain the channel and that was tasked to Kim (Hilsenbeck, the communications director) as part of our public information upgrade.
The way the statute works today is all the funds — 100 percent of the revenues generated from the PEG fee (Editors note: Public Education and Government access programming is supported by a PEG fee which is assessed to each cable subscriber) has to go to hardware, equipment. So you can’t spend it on personnel anymore. We can buy the editing software, the computers, the cameras, the filming rooms, the green screens — all that stuff — but we can’t pay Kim for her time. And we can’t bring on someone on a part-time basis. I come from a background where I went to a community that had all these PEG funds and I was asked to start a channel from scratch. So I did it on an absolute shoestring. I went and bought a little cheap camera and a tripod and it was terrible. I literally controlled our cable channel from my desk at city hall. I had a TV put in my office just so I could make sure I wasn’t screwing up. Sometimes, just for fun, I would pop my stuff on there. But to generate original content there I went to the schools and said "Can your student groups help/" I asked the athletics if they could give me footage of their sporting events. I set up the tripod for parades and there’s nothing more boring than watching two hours of parade, unedited. But I put it on there. And, of course, we streamed the council meetings. It was totally not well done, but there was still viewership there. We were able to make it better over time but we were still plagued by original content, quality content. So that’s something, before we get the channel up and running we need to make sure that the plan is in place.
I would love to see us get that up and running this fiscal year. The money’s been appropriated this fiscal year. We’ve had the conversations about getting the hardware acquired this fiscal year. It’s going to boil down to the content.
(The third and final segment of our conversation — dealing with change in Kyle and long-term visions for the city — will appear on this blog Monday.)
No comments:
Post a Comment