By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
With early voting already happing in Ellis County prior to the Nov. 2 election that will see new USD 489 Board of Education and Hays City Commission members elected, Grow Hays Executive Director Doug Williams said infrastructure should be a consideration for the candidates and the voters.
He said school infrastructure was a topic at a recent election forum, making its way into the discussion by the potential Hays leaders.
"The city commission candidates talked a lot about school bonds and educational facilities," Williams said. "Usually, that would not be on their radar, and I think that shows the importance of what is going on and the need in our community that we have to improve our educational facilities."
While he said facilities might be lacking, the educators themselves have shown the high quality of the USD 489 system. Still, aging systems are a detriment to the education of the students and the community.
"We have a lot to be thankful for and be proud of in our educational system," Williams said. "But unfortunately, they do it with one hand kind of tied behind their back when it comes to facility quality. And we have neglected this for about as long as we can. And it became apparent, both in the forum for the city commission candidates as well as the USD 489 candidates, that those schools have to be a high priority in our community if we expect to have any hope for growth and to put our best foot forward and to do a good job of educating our kids."
He said having quality educational facilities is a quality of life issue that directly impacts recruitment to Ellis County.
"Whether it's a doctor or a nurse considering going to work for Hays Medical Center, or a company that's looking to relocate here, one of the main things a retail company will look at in a community is housing and your education system, because they're going to move people here. They want to attract people to work for their businesses," Williams said. "And if those two things aren't in place, they're not going to choose to locate here."
He likens school facilities to other infrastructure that requires maintenance and upgrades to stay viable.
"If you've got a road that comes into your town, and it's the only way into your town, you've got to maintain that road, and there comes a point in time, if you have some growth, you've got to make it wider," Williams said. "And, you know, if you don't, people aren't going to come to your town.
"I view education facilities, basically as critical infrastructure kind of like that road. We have to maintain them. We have to expand them at certain times if we expect to grow and prosper and be an attractive community."
The lack of a significant bond issue since the bond used to build Hays High School in 1978 puts Hays behind most school districts in the region.
"If you go around to communities all across the state, you will see virtually all of them with more modernized facilities than we have in USD 489," Williams said. "And we're long overdue, and we just have to make these investments on occasion.
"The first bite of the apple is a tough one to take because that's where we experience the cost. Once you have a bond in place, and you're paying for it over time, you can add to that bond later without changing the monthly financial outgo."
But making that first move is the hardest he said.
"We've got to take this first step," Williams said. "Yeah, that's the tough one. But the reality is, it really isn't a choice anymore.
"I know it's going to be a vote. I know people are going to have a choice. But I continue to say you're going to pay it one way or the other. You're going to pay it through the taxes that will need to be generated to pay those payments on a bond, or you're going to pay it because of lost opportunity and growth and shrinking tax base where your taxes go up anyway, because you have not grown your tax base, and you've got fewer and fewer taxable assets to spread that over."
While he said he believes all of the candidates for both the board of education and the Hays City Commission have expressed support for some sort of bond issue for the district, knowing how large a bond issue would be supported by the community is yet to be seen as the bond committee continues developing its plan.
"The challenge is what type of bond, how big, what's it going to include — and that's where you start running into the trouble," Williams said. "I've had people tell me if this bond includes a new building, I'm not going to vote for it because I want to remodel the old ones. Or, if it includes the closing of a particular school, I'm not going to vote for it."
But he said that thinking is not helpful to the effort.
"We need to get over that. ... There's a group in place that's trying to develop the best possible way forward. We need to support their decision," Williams said. "They're not going about this lightly, they're not making crazy recommendations, they're looking at what's best for our community, they're taking their time, and they're putting their expertise into it.
"We need to be supportive of that, even though it may not have either everything we had or maybe a little bit different than something that we think it should have, we need to understand that it's for the benefit of the overall and that's why we need to support what this group comes up with."
While the bond will likely be a point of contention moving forward for elected officials and community members, Williams said the need for housing is almost universally agreed upon and directly affects the growth potential of Ellis County.
"I talked to a Realtor yesterday, and there's 31 homes in the market in Hays, and then very, very few in Ellis or Victoria. There's just no inventory to choose from," he said. "And that's our Achilles' heel as well as the educational facilities."
While efforts are underway to bring more housing to the county, commissioners will have the ability to directly impact the ability to continue in those efforts and address the housing shortfall.
"I think they have the power to do that, in a couple of ways," Williams said. "One is they fund organizations like ours (Grow Hays), which we go out, and we try and make these things happen. So that's critical. And then the other is that they offer some incentives for developers to build these projects."
Historically, he said Hays city leaders had taken a conservative approach to incentives, but recent efforts have been put in place to address the problem and have been supported by the school board and Ellis County as affected taxing entities.
"And I think this commission now recognizes that, while they don't want to just openly give away the farm, so to speak, they understand that that's the way the game is played," Williams said. "That's what you have to do to be competitive. And so I don't think any of them feel like, 'No, I don't want to do that' or 'That's a bad idea.' Or 'We should only do this in dire circumstances.' I think they're proactive in what they want to do, in terms of the use of incentives. They want to be responsible, but I believe that their mindset is where it needs to be in offering this to prospective developers and helping the community get some of these projects going, which it takes these incentives to do."