On this episode of the Post Podcast, Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams stops by to recap the February 2022 Imagine Ellis County Town Hall meeting.
Transcript
James Bell
The Imagine Ellis County town hall meeting this week solicited feedback from area residents about what they'd like to see in the future in Ellis County, Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams stopped by to talk a little bit about that. And more on this episode of the Post Podcast.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
We had our Imagine Ellis County town hall meeting last Monday night at the Hilton Garden Inn, we had about 83 people that attended, which was great. A lot of good feedback from the community, the intent of these town hall meetings is to get down to kind of the grassroots level, we have interviewed the business community, we had all of the business community and organizations come in and kind of give their plans for the next 510 20 years as best they could. And we heard what their challenges are. Now we're trying to get the community involved in here, what other ideas they have in terms of challenges, but also ideas and what they would like to see our community look like in the future.
James Bell
Yeah, and I know the for my understanding, they're going to compile what kind of came out of that meeting. And we'll see that soon, what the idea is, you know, like a list of the ideas that came out, but anything big that you think that came out of that that was kind of unexpected, or something that hadn't been already discussed or talked about.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
You know, that we've kind of got the big three that come up in all conversations that being housing, childcare, and schools. But then other ideas come up with, you know, what, what people would like to see for entertainment, you know, more entertainment for youth, parks, those type of things, quality of life type of things. And so we are compiling those lists, we are scheduling town halls in Victoria Nellis over the next I think 30 to 45 days, because we want to get input from those communities as well. And so you get a you know, there were lots and lots of ideas and comments, and, and that kind of thing. And, and what we're doing is, is putting together these amount of even know what they're called, these charts where it everything that was mentioned, is on the chart, but some are bigger than others if they were mentioned more than once, and there's a name, there's a term for it, but it escapes me.
James Bell
But you know, I'm saying yeah, I don't know, either.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
It's an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper with all kinds of words on it. But the ones that came up time and time again, are big, and the ones that didn't come up much are small. And we're going to circulate those and, and Nina summer, we're going to be doing a community survey that the docking Institute is going to do for us, that will go out to we're trying to get a minimum of 500 respondents that we'll talk about will ask a series of questions and about the community and things they'd like to see. And, and so all this is information gathering, to then we can start laying some plans in place as to what we need to do to make some of this stuff a reality and make our community a more attractive place to live. And it already is a great place to live. But we obviously have some shortcomings. We want to identify those and take advantage of some opportunities.
James Bell
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we've talked about the big ones you mentioned, like housing specifically. You know, that's, that's the base of it. And I think there's so much talk and activity going on there that to me, the there's conversations that you know, about, like, for example, the parks, you know, the the some of the parks in Hays are getting a little dated, and we could use a refresh on them. But those get lost because of the massive housing problem in childcare and etc, etc.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
The big issues always take top billing, you know, that that goes without saying, and then that's understandable. I mean, if we don't resolve those, all the others really don't matter that much. So we've got to focus our attention on those big issues, but we can't forget about the other things. They're important too. And they're those, a lot of those little things are important to the quality of life that we have in our community and, and affect our ability to from an economic development standpoint, they affect our ability to recruit businesses as well as people to our community.
James Bell
Yeah. You know, I think about the diversity of retail was one of the things that was talked about, I think, pretty heavily there. And, yeah, if you're a retailer, maybe one to come to haste, but you know that there's no houses for your workforce, no way to recruit a workforce because we have such low unemployment historically, this is going to you're going to be looking at maybe moving on down the road to the next time.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
And we're obviously we're not alone with some of these challenges we face other communities having as well, but that's exactly right. I mean, if you had an employer, a company that was wanting to come to Hays right now and they wanted 300 people, they would have a real challenge in finding 300 people, the only place they could really find them is in the existing workforce, from the existing businesses that are employing those people. And that's a problem because obviously, Those people need those employees, those businesses depend on those people. And so, you know, it just presents some unique challenges that we have to figure out answers to and, and housing is absolutely one of them. We can't recruit people to our community if we don't have housing.
James Bell
And there's lots of efforts going on to vote or underway to kind of address that already.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
There are, you know, we've got a lot of things going on. Unfortunately, we've I've said this before, you know, housing issues are not quickly resolved, it takes time to build homes to build apartments, and, but be that as it may, we've got to get started and get that stuff going. Or, because six months from now, it's going to take the same amount of time to build something as it takes now, and you know, we've got to get with the program.
James Bell
You know, another thing at this meeting that was discussed pretty heavily and and I thought it was interesting, the the kind of the self awareness in the community. And that was to put it in a nice way, the sometimes the tendency of the city of Hays or residents in the city of Hayes to cling on to, you know, again, I'm trying to think of a nice way to say it, but you know, the way the town has been historically, you know, they live the history of it, that the community, the pride, it's there, and that's great. But it also, I think, sometimes hampers our ability to do change. And this is something that you've talked a little bit about as well we enter the changes, it's necessary, right?
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
Well, change is inevitable, and it absolutely is necessary, we have it, you know, we live in a hyper-change world, things don't stay the same for very long. And admittedly rural areas tend to accept change a little bit slower in most cases than maybe an urban area might, and our community maybe even more than others, because we are stubborn, and we are we do like the quality of life that we have. And we may view some different types of changes threatening that. But, you know, we, we really need to convert to that embracing change and promoting change. And, and that's a hard transition to go through, you know, it's not easily done by any of us, we all like our comfort zones, and we don't want to get out of those. But as a community, in the world we live in today, we really have to think beyond that and look at things a little differently than we have in the past.
James Bell
Yeah, and you're going to talk a little bit about this, and an article that's probably coming up on Hays posts in the next few days. But the growth piece, because you know, we've talked a little bit about this in the past as well, you know, the surrounding area where we're real economic pull factor comes from is shrinking. Haze is growing, but it's not growing fast enough to keep up with that. So if we want to even maintain the quality of life, we have here, the economic dollar flowing in, we have to grow a little bit.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
We do you know, I, as I say in the article, we have to grow to stay the same. And while it while it's and that goes back to that concept of we like Hayes just the way it is, and I get that, you know, it's a great community and faith why we're all here, exactly. But again, our pull factor from the surrounding area, that area is shrinking in population. So there's fewer customers to come to Hays to go to movies to buy cars to go to school here, to go to the, you know, the grocery store, all that is shrinking. And we've got to make that up. Because I in my opinion, a lot of that is irreversible. You know, if you look at the demographics and the shifts going on, and in small rural communities, the youth are not staying farms are getting larger and more mechanized. There's just less to keep those people there. And yes, we do get some of those people moving to our community, but some of them leave permanently. And so we've got to have some growth within Ellis County, in order to maintain the quality of life that we have, and it needs to be at better than point one 7% per year or 400. And some people over 10 years, you know, I don't think 1% per year growth should be out of the question at all, but we sure haven't experienced it for a long, long time.
James Bell
Yeah. And so I mean, population-wise, I think some of the numbers that were thrown around at that meeting, you know, talking by 2030 30, 35, there are some people that thought it might be even higher up into 40, 45. Do you think that's realistic? Or do you think the tendency is going to be that we just end up kind of losing some of the population across the region?
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
Well, I don't think those are realistic. You know, when you talk about 30 would be a huge stretch 40 or 45. I maybe I don't have sufficient division, but I just don't see how you do it. You know, to grow to 30 would be what three or 4% growth per year. Just to give you an example of what that would take at 1% growth. Recent housing study indicated that we would need about 50 To 60 houses per year, and 30 to 40 new apartments per year to simulate that kind of growth, we've been building 20 to 25 houses, and virtually no apartments or very few. So we would really have to ramp things up even to get to 1%. And that's okay, I think we need to, but to get to 30,000 would take, you know, 150 200 new homes a year. And at least currently, we're not in a position to be able to do that. But in terms of land, in terms of contractors, in terms of all the infrastructure that goes with it, you know, that would be an exceptional effort to try and get that done.
James Bell
Well, hopefully, there's some contractors out there listening if they can, oh, man, sounds like a goldmine can be made in haste as build analysis.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
Well, of course, as I say, all the time, it's easy for me to say we want this growth in these houses, but those are the guys who have to do it and have to sign the banknotes and that kind of thing to make it happen and basically take the risk. And so it's a different situation for them. And we are ramping up, we're doing better, you know, we have increased the number of homes that are being built, and we've got the 10 underway in the Tall Grass addition and another 12 are going to be underway in the next 30 days. But we that that's not enough, we need more than that. And so those are the challenges.
James Bell
You know, I think times like these, and obviously, we're coming out of the pandemic, and things are going to be impacted by that for who knows the foreseeable future. And I think that's caused some of the headaches that we're looking at today. But, you know, at this point, I think it's probably fair to say that we're also looking back while we're looking ahead, we're looking at what is went, what has caused the situation that we're in. And I wonder if you have any insight on that, especially around the housing piece, you know, how we've gotten into this situation was Sandy mentioned earlier on the show here, I think it was a number that came from you the the number of houses available is it's under 10. At this point.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
And this, this hasn't happened overnight. You know, as you note, this has been a cumulative deal we have not built enough over the last 10 years. In the housing report, we're going to be putting out we have a chart that shows the number of permits for new construction and for multifamily units in Hays over the last 10 years or 12 years actually goes back to 2010. And it's been a steady decline in the numbers. Why that is, you know, Haze is where oil is a huge part of our economy. And there was a little blip in the mid-2015 2016 area where the price really went down. And so our economy dipped a little bit. And also, the contractors, we have built homes, primarily one at a time. They don't go in and put in, you know, four or 510 15 at a time, like they do in a lot of other places. And we kind of got into that mode. And it worked for them. They were successful at it. So it's hard to change what's working for you. And it just got us into a situation where we didn't build enough new inventory. And that's part of what is the problem that we run into now. You know, supply and demand has not been the demand has been greater than supply over the last 10 years. We kind of met it, but we haven't met it at all in the last couple of years. We've had some growth as I allude to in that in that article that, you know, we've had some growth when you go from over 100 homes for sale to nine, you go from a fair amount of vacancies and apartments to virtually none. And then you add all at the same time you've gone down in enrollment at Fort Hays State, clearly, we've had an influx of people, and we just haven't kept up with sufficient housing to meet that need. And so we're, we're kept playing catch up.
James Bell
You know, I wonder anything else at that meeting that you want to talk about? Or that was kind of something of note, you think?
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
You know, I think just the overall enthusiasm and energy from the meeting was I think very positive. You know, obviously, schools were brought up and then there's a lot of positive energy around this the school bond who knows what will happen but it absolutely is something that we need we need improvements on our schools and but I just felt like the energy and the attitudes were very positive and very optimistic. And I thought that was really good particularly, you know, given the world we kind of life in right now where things aren't always so positive.
James Bell
Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned there they're going to do these in Ellison Victoria but you see another one here in Hays coming up in the near future.
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams
No, I don't know if we're gonna do anything in Hays in the near future we may look at doing another if depending on what comes out of the ones in Ellison Victoria, we could potentially could do another one this summer. You know, we're hoping for this survey sometime in mid-July. Late summer so that'll give us some additional information but we're always open for input. We've got our Facebook page where we're going to have a website sometime here in the next couple of weeks, I believe a website up and displaying our videos that we have for the community you know, the testimonials that we put together, we're going to start this campaign on getting that word out on the eastern slope of Colorado because we believe a lot of people are looking to get out of that mess. And let's hope I know I would be well you know, I talked to some people who went to a wedding out there last week and they just you know, us Flatlanders are not used to that kind of traffic and, and that kind of hustle bustle but people are looking to relocate from those areas. remote workers are more prevalent now than they've ever been. So we've got some opportunities. We just need to make sure we put all the pieces in place to be able to attract them.