A view of downtown Tyler from the Plaza Tower building in 2018. (File/Tyler Morning Telegraph)

Smith County and the city of Tyler are seeking to start initiatives to have the two governments work together on issues within city limits.

The goals are twofold: bring people together to discuss downtown Tyler revitalization and begin ongoing discussions on how to improve services that the county and city both provide.

The Smith County Commissioners Court and the Tyler City Council will have a joint meeting at 3:30 p.m. Thursday at the Smith County Courthouse Annex Building, where members will discuss entering into agreements that involve county-city cooperation.

Smith County Judge Nathaniel Moran and Tyler Mayor Martin Heines announced the initiatives Thursday in a meeting with the Tyler Morning Telegraph editorial board. Public notices of the meeting are forthcoming, they said.

A proposed task force would meet quarterly to discuss ways that the county and city can work together to save money, Moran said. That would mean looking critically at places where both governments are providing services to the same people.

The county and city would each appoint three people to the task force. The appointees are likely to be a mix of elected officials and high-level government staffers in finance and purchasing, Moran and Heines said.

“As Tyler has continued to grow, we need to interact with our county government, and we need to look at models from all over this country that counties and cities have formulated to actually (have) the best, cost-effective approach for their citizens,” Heines said.

“What can the county and the city government do to share costs, to purchase items together, and be a larger purchasing agent to get lower costs for the taxpayers?” he added. “What are the different departments that we can actually interact with?”

Moran said he talks to Heines regularly about what’s going on in the county and the city. Moran said the discussions have been informal so far, and now they want to have intentional calendar discussions about county and city business.

“Those types of discussions have helped, I think, the relationship between the county and the city tremendously in the last couple of years, but we want to kind of formalize the coalescing of those two governmental institutions,” Moran said.

Smith County had a population of about 227,000 in 2017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That year, Tyler’s population was just under 105,000, or a little less than half of the county population, according to the Census Bureau.

A separate coalition would look at ways to encourage economic development in downtown Tyler. That coalition will include leaders in business and higher education, and leaders in cities such as Whitehouse, Bullard and Lindale, among others.

“We’re going to likely hire a company called Retail Coach that will help in economic analysis and development from the retail side,” Moran said. The Mississippi-based company specializes in helping communities recruit retailers, according to its website.

Moran said the county has an interest in developing downtown Tyler because economic activity in the city’s core affects the rest of the county. Additionally, he said the county is the largest single owner of downtown property.

The Smith County courthouse on North Broadway Avenue and the Smith County Jail on East Elm Street are two major county government buildings located downtown. The Smith County Sheriff’s Office is on North Spring Avenue, and the county owns a strip of office buildings on East Ferguson Street.

The city also owns offices throughout the downtown area, including City Hall on North Bonner Avenue, Tyler Water Utilities on West Locust Street, the Tyler Rose Garden on West Front Street, Innovation Pipeline on East Oakwood Street and a parking garage on College Avenue, among others.

Private property owners have also been buying and selling downtown property lately. The Genecov Group announced the sale of the Plaza Tower on North College Avenue in August, and the engineering firm Estes, McClure & Associates Inc. is renovating a building at the corner of South Broadway Avenue and Front Street.

Fitzpatrick Architects has a long-term vision to revitalize the downtown area in response to the city’s trend of growing south, and the city has applied for a $5 million federal grant to change the streetscape of North Broadway Avenue between Front Street and Erwin Street as part of that vision.

“The city has done a great job in the last couple of decades of putting lots of money into downtown Tyler,” Moran said. “The parking garage is the most recent example of the money they’re willing to spend to make sure that there is this investment in downtown Tyler. We applaud that effort.

“The county likewise has done a really good job,” he said. “We’ve spent (by) my estimate, $20 million over the past 13 years in redeveloping and revitalizing certain properties downtown and transforming them into uses by the government.

“So we’ve had separate investments, and that’s been great, but I don’t think there’s ever been a consistent, joint effort to move forward and continue that development,” Moran said.

He said Tyler 21, a former version of the city’s comprehensive plan, “is a great example of that, but we have to continue that, and it has to be an ongoing coalition of folks.”

Thursday’s meeting at 200 E. Ferguson St. is open to the public. A reception will follow at the R.B. Hubbard Center, “The Hub,” at 304 E. Ferguson St. 

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