KCC/KECD Briefing

Thanks to Daniel Kott, who videotaped John Crutchfield's quarterly briefing on the activities of the Killeen Chamber of Commerce and the Killeen Economic Development Corporation.  The local newspaper largely ignored the presentation.  You won't want to watch it twice, but once probably won't hurt to much.

There has been a lot of criticism of KCC/KEDC, some of it to the point and some off the mark.  I don't think there's much doubt that these are well-run organizations that tell the city what they are going to do, and then (for the most part) do it.  I do think that the city is very bad at evaluating the return we get from funding KCC/KEDC to do those things.

In Mr. Crutchfield's presentation, he did not once mention a dollar amount, either what he had spent or what the city gained from those expenditures.  Certainly he presented a lot of details about effort, and benefits like "we learned a lot of beneficial things."  He described generating a "series of talking points."

In any one quarter, there is no shame in not generating tangible results, even if you spent $1.25 million of the city's general fund not doing so.  Economic development doesn't necessarily show results quarter-to-quarter.  Even if there is no result year-to-year, it might be OK; these aren't the best of times.  But if over 2 or 3 or 5 years we can't see a rate of return from the millions of dollars we've put into these organizations, we have to suspect we're doing it wrong.

KEDC and Glenn Morrison need to  put metrics in place to measure what tax payers are getting from the KCC and KEDC projects they are funding.  The metrics need to be concrete, along the lines of

    -- Here's what the city gave them.
    -- Here's the additional revenue the city got from that investment.
    -- Here's the additional costs the city incurred because of that investment (in terms of new infrastructure or incentives, for example).
    -- Here are the intangible benefits and the dollar value the city places on them.