Mixed reactions in Clyde as partnership with KemperSports aims for sports complex success

CLYDE, Texas — The City of Clyde has announced that they’ve partnered with KemperSports at the Hanner Sports Complex.

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KemperSports will be providing operational leadership and support to the Hanner Sports Complex to help drive growth for the facility.

“Obviously, we do need some type of oversight over the sports complex,” Clyde resident, Stephen Steele, said. “It’s not been producing what we need it to produce. We’ve invested a lot in it as a community that we didn’t have the option of, we weren’t given a vote on whether to fund this, and frankly, we were told that it wasn’t going to cost us anything and we found out otherwise.”

Steele said that right now the only option to help pay for it is by raising the taxes.

“Most of our citizens out there live either paycheck to paycheck, or seniors that live on a fixed income,” Steele said. “To force people that don’t have any use for a sports complex to pay for a sports complex is just poor judgement.”

Some residents feel that if the partnership is mutually beneficial for both KemperSports and the City of Clyde then it could be a really good thing for the Hanner Sports Complex.

“If they are incentivized and make sure that it generates more than we have to pay and the city comes out on the positive end of it, then I think it’s a great relationship,” Steele said. “And we really need this thing to start paying for itself.”

Many people on Facebook have been talking about this partnership with KemperSports; some are for it, while others are against it.

“The City of Clyde, we’ve got to get things going in the right direction,” Steele said. “We can’t afford to continue to compound out debt. We are not the City of Abilene, we are a small town, and we like it that way.”

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We reached out to the City of Clyde, KemperSports, and the Hanner Sports Complex for more information but have not yet heard back.