Another one that doesn’t pass the smell test

I may be in the minority here but, still, I don’t like the idea that the City of Kyle is using taxpayer resources to promote a pair of privately owned athletic teams that so completely irrelevant even the local newspaper doesn’t report on them.

I posed this question directly to the city and here’s the reply I received from city spokesperson Kim Hilsenbeck:

"This is all part of Kyle's effort to be a destination city. We entered into a relationship with the soccer team in July; their home field (Gregg-Clarke Park) is a city facility. These games have the potential to bring in teams and visitors from other cities including those who may need an overnight stay in a hotel.

"While they are in town, they shop at stores, eat at restaurants and get gas.

"The same is essentially true with the Stallions, as they also draw in other teams and guests from out of town.

"Below is one of the quotes from Mayor Pro Tem Damon Fogley in July when the city welcomed the Central Texas Lobos; we held a news conference/event and Mr. Fogley said this:

"‘Becoming a recreation and event destination in Central Texas is one of Kyle’s top priorities to support our city’s economic development,’ Mayor Pro Tem Damon Fogley said at the event Thursday at Gregg-Clarke Park soccer complex, according to a city press release. ‘Because of this, we are very excited to be the hometown of the new Central Texas Lobos’."

If some of that was true — and much of it isn’t — that would be excellent reasons for the Kyle Chamber of Commerce to be using its resources to promote these teams, but there is still no rationale for the city to be doing it.

I posed a somewhat similar question to the cities of El Paso, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Texarkana, Killeen — even the tiny burg of Somerset south of San Antonio — some of the cities that are the homes of the 11 other ABA franchises that are in the same division as Kyle to see if they devoted sections of their city’s web sites to these privately owned operations that charge patrons for admission. The response was a unanimous "no."

Typical was this response I received from Bryce Bencivengo, senior public information specialist for the City of Austin: "I checked around our office and with a few other folks around the City and we are not aware of any public funds or resources spent on (Austin’s semi-pro basketball team) the Austin Bats."

In other words, Kyle is the only one of the 12 cities in the Southwest Division of the American Basketball Association that is using public resources to promote its entry. I didn’t waste my time seeking out responses from cities in other divisions of the ABA because I’m sure the answer would have been the same.

(Updated information added here) And what do those cities know that Kyle doesn't. Perhaps they've seen the studies that show athletic teams have absolutely no impact whatsoever on local economies: Michael Leeds, a sports economist at Temple University, studied Chicago, the home of five major league sports franchises and found that if every single one of them deserted the Windy City the impact on the local economy would be a fraction of 1 percent. And those are major league franchises. You can only imagine the absolute negligible effect semi pro franchises have on the local economy.

Apparently the reason for this lack of contribution is that money spent on going to see a team like the Stallions or the Lobos are simply entertainment dollars that would have been spent elsewhere in Kyle. According to Vic Matheson, a sports economist at Holy Cross University, most people have a limited entertainment budget, so the dollars they are spending when they go to a game is money they would have spent elsewhere, maybe even at a restaurant or small businesses where more money would have stayed in the community. In fact, it turns out that when the Los Angeles Lakers left the Forum, located in the Inglewood section of Los Angeles, and relocated in the downtown Staples Center, sales tax revenues from that part of Inglewood actually increased. (End of updated section.)

I have nothing against Kyle becoming a destination city, but I do have a problem with the city using taxpayer funded resources to promote private companies, especially ones that obviously will have minimal-to-no effect on Kyle becoming that destination city leaders are striving for. Want a more likely candidate to attract visitors? How about the Texas Pie Company? Why isn’t that mentioned in the city’s website and in its weekly newsletter. I would bet the Texas Pie Company attracts far more out-of-towners than the Kyle Stallions. Has anyone been to Evo lately, even on a Saturday morning? Now that is a destination. I guarantee it is responsible for more sales tax revenues for the city than either of the two semi-pro athletic teams. But I don't think the city should be promoting that entertainment center on its web site either. What about the Kyle Conservatory of Performing Arts? Doesn't the city think that might deserve a mention as a possible destination? I remember one City Council meeting in which city staff made a big deal about promoting the Katherine Anne Porter house. But, so far, not a word about it on the city's Web site.

Enter the Kyle Stallions or the Central Texas Lobos in Google News’ search engine and the only hit you’ll get is a mention of the teams making Kyle their home that was telecast last month on KXAN. But has anyone read one single game story about the Stallions in particular in the Hays Free Press? Does the newspaper even print the ABA standings each week? No. And that’s not a criticism of the Hays Free Press. The paper does a far more than just adequate job of covering local sports. In fact, the Hays Free Press even had a photo and coverage of a football game between the Kyle Police and Fire departments. The newspapers of Austin, Laredo, San Antonio, El Paso, Killeen, Texarkana and Houston totally ignore their semi-pro teams as well. Why? The obvious reason has to be there is no interest, they are simply not attractions.

I’d be willing to bet more folks come from out of town to see a Lehman High School home basketball game than come from outside Kyle to see a game played by Kyle Stallions. I would even bet that’s true when Lehman hosts a game against Hays High School because more Buda residents will show up to see that game then will come to that very same gymnasium to see a Kyle Stallions home game.

Way, way back, in the summer of 1962, I was a reporter for the Seguin Gazette. Seguin, at the time, had two semi-pro baseball teams, the Seguin White Sox and the SMI Steelers. I remember the ace pitcher for the White Sox was a young hurler named Ed Kuempel, who, during the regular collegiate season, pitched for Texas Lutheran College in Seguin. I’d be willing to bet that is the same Ed Kuempel who went on to represent the Seguin area in the Texas Legislature from 1982 until his death in 2010. The only out-of-town games these teams played were in San Antonio and I remembered the "luxurious" travel conditions of those road trips: everyone crammed into three or four automobiles owned by the players themselves, an after-game dinner we paid for ourselves at a drive-in burger joint on the way out of town (we never even got out of our cars to eat), no overnight hotel stays. I remember it because of the hilarious fit Kuempel would pretend to throw when the massive order of hamburgers didn’t arrive within 10 minutes of ordering them. Fun, it was. A significant financial investment in the town we visited, it was not.

But that is the way of semi-pro sports. It’s called "semi-pro" because the athletes on these teams are not paid a salary high enough to live on. They must have other jobs. Most, if not all, the players for SMI were employed by the team’s namesake, Structural Metals, a Seguin-based operation which used furnaces to melt scrap metal into reinforcing bars. Today SMI is known as CMC Steel and distinctively colored SMI 18-wheelers with green cabs containing shocking pink lettering no longer prowl the Texas highways.

But I digress. The point is I know from first-hand experience the games played by these teams rarely even drew the family members of the players on the team, let alone people traveling from hundreds, or even dozens of miles away — even from the outskirts of town, for that matter. As far as I can tell, these two Seguin baseball teams no longer even exist.

So, yes, I don’t like the idea that the City of Kyle is using taxpayer resources to promote a pair of privately owned athletic teams. I especially don’t like the idea that Kyle appears to be the only city I can see that uses its municipal web site to promote these teams. I’m not saying the city is doing anything illegal. I’m not even claiming that the city is throwing large chunks of money into this effort; we’re probably only talking about the small amount of time the city’s communications guru takes to place these items in the web page and to toss gratuitous mentions of the teams in the city’s weekly newsletter. It’s just that using any city resources at all to promote a for-profit, privately owned business doesn’t pass the smell test.