Doyle Town

Texas City stinks.

It’s a jibe most in this odor-challenged industrial town have long endured from rival football crowds or visitors. It’s as old as “Toxic City,” a reference to the oil refineries and chemical plants that dominate the local landscape.

But to the thick skins in Texas City, sticks and stones.

“We’re lucky to be in a petrochemical community that employs a lot of people and provides a nice standard of living for folks,” says hometown banker and lifelong resident Matt Doyle. People have miles of shorelines and seawalls to enjoy as scenery, he says.

What about the town’s reputation for pollution, economic decay, epic misfortune and the occasional hurricane? Storm watches and chemical plants are part of life, Doyle says, “but are not the only part of our community. We have a number of parks, and we’re one of the best bird-watching areas around. …And, you won’t be able to go into any city this size and see the amount per capita of artwork and sculptures we have in place.”

It takes deep roots to love a place—this place—that much, and Doyle, 44, has them. He knows what happens inside-out in Texas City and has a voice. In a small town with powerful economic interests running through it, Doyle and his family are a strong current set in the confluence of local finance and politics. The 22-year banking veteran grew up as the oldest son of a town politico who was mayor during the last decade. He was the first of four Eagle Scouts among his siblings. Another brother’s got a high post at the bank. A third is the town Justice of the Peace. Matt Doyle himself is a city commission member, a local college board trustee and a Jaycees mentor. He volunteers for the Boy Scouts and the United Way. A paraplegic since 1981, he also speaks out regionally on disability issues.

Doyle seems one who’s looked past the brighter prospects of the big cities in his earlier career years for the terra firma of home. Perhaps. It’s that entrenchment in this Gulf Coast city 30 miles southeast of Houston, observers say, that is now taking this native son places.

Doyle, CEO of Texas First Bank, is gaining attention as an advocate and trusted resource for the industry’s little guys. Two years ago he joined the board of directors of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, and is wrapping up a six-year term as a board member of the Independent Community Bankers of America. He’s also on the boards of the Independent Bankers Association of Texas and The Independent Bank, a Dallas-based correspondent institution for over 1,000 community bankers across the country. “I certainly see him as one of the top rising stars in the industry today, and clearly one that is visible throughout the industry,” says Chris Williston, president and CEO of IBAT in Austin, TX. “It’s family genes, to be honest with you. Anybody who knows his dad and his family knows they are very driven folks.”

Matt’s dad is Chuck Doyle, the one-time president of the Independent Bankers Association of America (what is now the ICBA) and high-profile gadfly to ambitious interstate banking conglomerates. Chuck, who is chairman of the family’s $450 million, three-bank holding company, was a former Fed Reserve board director in Dallas and was the first small-bank executive ever to hold a position on the influential Advisory Council to the Fed.

Together, Matt Doyle and this modest family banking empire (which includes Matt’s younger brother, bank president Chris Doyle) are branching out from an unlikely base. Onlookers say the reason is that the Doyles, and Matt in particular, have set themselves apart by fitting in so well.

In October 1997, a lucky group of Texas City residents hit the jackpot. A pool of 20-odd friends and co-workers nabbed all six numbers in a $55 million drawing, then one of the twice-weekly Texas Lottery’s largest-ever payouts.

Fearful of losing the ticket or reliving It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the group called up Matt and Chris Doyle. Even though it was 2 a.m., the brothers agreed to be the middlemen for some anxious not-quite-yet millionaires. Pat Doyle, Matt’s Justice of the Peace brother and a lawyer, met members of the group outside the Texas First Bank location in downtown Texas City, and on the hood of his pickup drew up an official contract agreement on a paper napkin. After all signed, it was stuffed along with the ticket into the bank’s night deposit box. “They were all lined up there, first thing Monday morning,” Matt Doyle laughs.

Imagine the odds of phoning up Jamie Dimon or Dick Kovacevich in the middle of the night.

Knowing and caring about a community cannot be marketed or replicated by Delaware-based corporations and franchises, says Chuck Doyle, who left behind a management career at Union Carbide’s Texas City plant to move into banking 30 years ago. “We didn’t want to get rich quick, and we could have done that,” says Chuck Doyle, who still lives with wife Mary Ellen in the house they built in 1967. “We tried to balance the social responsibility of the bank with its economic responsibilities. When you do that, then you see a balance and keep your head on straight.”

Founded in 1973 when Chuck and a group of investors bought a small bank in nearby Hitchcock, Texas Independent Bancshares remains one of only two community bank holding companies left in the area, the other being Mainland Bank. The likes of Union Planters swallowed local banks in mergers, or else the locals failed in Texas’ oil and real estate meltdown of the 1980s. Bank of America, Washington Mutual and Bank One have ebbed into town in recent years. There’s still a solid niche for the likes of Texas First and Mainland. “Small businesses depend on community banks, because the Union Planters and the Chases and all those don’t like to have small commercial lending customers,” says Mary Young, retired CEO of Mainland, which has $63 million in assets. “They want the big boys.”

Doyle agrees. “The likelihood of a large bank making a $50,000 inventory loan to a local hardware store is nonexistent,” he says. “The people we serve are just not on the radar screen of larger banks.”

The small-town philosophy has kept the bank on a steady, upward flow in asset size over the past decade, from $193 million to the current level of $450 million. Sixty percent of Texas First Bank’s loan mix is small business and commercial real estate, through a litany of small service companies, light manufacturers and homebuilders. That has allowed expansion into 13 Galveston County branches, and a network of 40 branded cash machines in the region—a high number for a bank of its size.

“We tout that we have 100-percent Galveston County ownership, we’re independent and that’s important to us,” says Chris Doyle. “That’s where our success comes from.”

Texas First’s rise was helped by the what’s been growing affluence of Texas City’s 41,000 residents. Since 1990, median income has risen from $30,000 to $42,000 a year, without any appreciable increase in population since 1980. New housing developments have brought some upscale living to a formerly all-blue collar hamlet and two new shopping malls sprang up in the past six years.

From nearly all town circles, Chuck Doyle is given a good deal of credit for Texas City’s urban revival, according to town librarian and city historian Susie Moncla. Mayor during the ’90s, Chuck Doyle pushed for city improvements, raising $900,000 from area companies to pay for 40-odd bronze sculptures that are now a city signature. “We definitely had an image problem, and I think anybody in Texas City would admit that,” says Moncla.

Make no mistake, Texas City will never be the venue of the accidental tourist. Located east of the Interstate 45 link between Galveston and Houston, it takes a sharp left at La Marque and a trip through the industrial zone to reach Texas City. “Texas City is not a town you drive through,” says Moncla. “Texas City is a town you drive into.”

From reading headlines and history books, Texas City would be the kind of place you steer clear of. Several major chemical leaks have brought the city environmental notoriety over the years. The city’s most infamous chapter remains the nation’s worst industrial calamity.

In April 1947, the French freighter Grandcamp was loaded with tons of ammonium nitrate when a fire broke out in one of its hulls. As a parade of onlookers came to the nearby wharves to catch the blaze, the ship was ripped apart by an explosion that leveled 12 city blocks and killed an estimated 600 people. Plants belonging to Monsanto, Union Carbide, Amoco and others were destroyed, and 3,000 homes in a town of 18,000 people were wiped out.

Texas City’s future was cloudy. After two days, Monsanto said it would rebuild its plant. “Almost every family was affected in some way,” says Moncla. “I think the decision by Monsanto…that kind of gave people hope that it wasn’t the best thing to move away and leave it all.”

Matt Doyle sees a lesson. “What happened was a terrible tragedy, but I think how Texas City rebuilt is something [residents] take great pride in,” he says.

Texas City never lost population after 1947. It doubled in size through the boom ’50s and ’60s. Still, the Monsantos and the Carbides spread a complex legacy, and Chuck as mayor has felt the heat. Residents living near several plants in the city filed lawsuits during the 1990s about health problems and deteriorating market conditions that kept them from selling their homes. A stinging Houston Press article from 1997 quoted depositions in which Chuck said he never received complaints from area residents. “They have a choice to live there if they wish,” he said then.

The plants today aren’t surrounded by depressed neighborhoods, but by hundreds of yards of greenbelts after most homeowners accepted buyouts from the chemical companies. Doyle made the greenbelts a priority, and is credited with spearheading a fight with the Texas Tin Smelter, an abandoned metals plant cleaned up through EPA Superfund money. The Grandcamp tragedy and the town’s economy give Texas City residents an innate hardness and optimism, the elder Doyle says. He believes it, he says, because he sees it in his son.

Matt Doyle was a newlywed and a recent college graduate when a swimming accident left him paralyzed from the chest down in 1981. He had jumped head first off a pier at the Texas City Dike, and broke his neck in shallow water. “It was just one of those mind-changing occurrences for those who knew him and a total life-changing experience for him,” says Chuck Doyle. “It was just devastating to us.”

Chris Doyle is still haunted, he says, by the day his sister Denise picked him up from a church carnival to take him to the hospital. “It isn’t a pleasant memory of mine,” Chris says. “But even then, he was keeping his chin up and his spirits were good.”

Doyle spent only four months in hospitals and in rehabilitation before he put aside doctors’ wishes and returned to work at his father’s bank in Santa Fe, TX. He would continue to dispel doubts in the years to come—he would have children, he would have a successful career (he was named president of the Bank of Santa Fe in 1985) and he found plenty of reasons to be happy.

“People make a bigger deal out of that than I do,” Doyle says. “I appreciate the folks who think that’s something worth paying attention to, but it’s not a big deal to me. I just get to point A to point B a little bit different way.”

Not many find as many point-B’s to get to as Matt Doyle. He keeps offices in both Texas City and Santa Fe to stay closer to his employees and customers. When he’s not at work, he might be dropping his son Sean or daughter Erin off for swimming lessons and soccer matches. When he’s lucky to get a few days off, he heads off to his ranch where he and some buddies are raising longhorn cattle.

That free time is rare. His commitment to city organizations and government is exhaustive, and his volunteer work throughout the state and county is nearly superhuman, say colleagues. Mary Wolfe, deputy commissioner of the Texas Rehabilitation Commission in Austin, says Doyle’s place on the audit committee helped protect the disabled vocational assistance program from the legislative budget axe two years ago.

Doyle’s efforts for the disabled and for his community resulted in a number of accolades over the years.

Among the highest was when the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of 10 Outstanding Young Americans in 1994, joining the ranks of John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton as former recipients.

While he downplays a political future (“I think I’m getting a little long in the tooth,” he jokes), no one seems to question that he has the skills for politics. Moncla says Matt brings top business acumen to the city’s elected commission on issues like privatized garbage collection. As a member of IBAT’s legislative and PAC steering committees, Doyle helped double political contributions through IBAT to candidates during the 2000 election cycle, according to Williston. “He just demonstrated with a little time and effort and really rallying the troops what could be done,” says Williston.

Matt and Chuck Doyle both helped IBAT push Texas toward being the first to “opt-out” of the federal interstate branching law in 1995, requiring out-of-state banks to establish a Texas charter. “They were so involved in meeting with the [legislative] leadership there, that the state of Texas actually voted unanimously in the state house of representatives” to opt-out, says Gayle Earls, president and CEO of The Independent Bankers bank.

Back in the days of Reagan and before the RTC, Chuck Doyle was usually on the sidelines—like Bear Bryant. He was consistently arguing for community bankers when FDIC chairman William Isaac and Comptroller of the Currency C. Todd Conover were championing deregulation. As the leashes were loosed on S&Ls and dents appeared in Depression-era regulations, Doyle aimed the debate toward restraint.

Those cautions, along with the gavel, have passed along. “I just want a level playing field,” says Matt Doyle. “Some of the unfair advantages with credit unions are that they are starting to look more and more like banks everyday. With the big banks, I’m not sure any of us, including the examination board, understand these large, complex banking organizations now. That is a danger to the system and a danger to us as community bankers, as they get into more and more fields of business.”

He’s raising points to Fed governors about the FDIC insurance ceiling debate (independent bankers have long wanted it not only raised, but indexed) and about regulatory enforcement that small bankers feel is skewed in favor of the larger institutions—the “too big to fail” protection.

Matt Doyle and his father community bankers today are going on the defensive—again—due to the growing centralization and lowered barriers to the banking sector for other sorts of financial companies. While they are taking some protective measures into their own hands, such as converting Texas Independent Bancshares into a holding company and expanding into insurance, the Doyles still worry about the place at the table for community and neighborhood bankers.

IBAT’s Williston, for one, thinks there’s little chance of the financial behemoths running roughshod, with Matt Doyle ascending the ranks and maintaining a family legacy. “The Doyles are people who not only talk about community banking and what it means, but they’ve demonstrated it in terms of what they give back to their own communities and their industry,” Williston says. “That’s a formula, I think, that has really served them well.”