During its regular meeting on Monday, Oct. 11, Katy City Council approved a plan to annex multiple pieces of property into city limits or the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction and approved an agreement with Kendig Keast Collaborative, a planning consulting firm, to help the city develop its Comprehensive and Parks, Trails and Recreation Master plans in unanimous votes.

“What we do on the comprehensive planning side is look at where you are today – numbers plus community input, leadership input, what’s on the agenda today – then look ahead at the next 10, 20 years,” said Kendig Keast Collaborative President Gary Mitchell.

The process to develop the Comprehensive Plan and Parks, Trails and Recreation Master Plan will be all-inclusive, Mitchell said. The company will take a systematic approach that incorporates current projects, community priorities and past versions of the city’s Comprehensive Plan to create an updated one which provides both consistency and progress while working to preserve the city’s character. The parks plan will involve much the same process and will include an inventory of the city’s current parks assets, public and private recreation facilities nearby and opportunities to coordinate with neighboring entities such as subdivisions and counties.

The Parks, Trails and Recreation Plan process is expected to take about seven months to draft the plan with adoption of the plan being anticipated in about 10 months. For the Comprehensive Plan, the process will be 15 months to a drafted plan with adoption anticipated about three months later.

Information to develop the plans will include small group listening sessions, workplace visits, workshops and town hall meetings. Once initial data and input is collected from the community, the initial notes will be reviewed with local leaders to confirm consensus on both plans before they are adopted.

The last time the city developed a strategic plan was in 2001, according to Councilmember Janet Corte of Ward A.

Council also voted to annex a new portion of the Cane Island subdivision which includes about 79 acres of land in Waller County into city limits. According to city documents, the acreage was within Katy’s extraterritorial jurisdiction and is south of Morton Road and has Franz Road as its southern border. It is located on the west side of Cane Island.

The second annexation is conditional, allowing about 145 acres to be brought into the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction. The land in question is in both Waller and Fort Bend counties and begins at Highway 90 and goes south of I-10 with Woods Road as its western boundary. The property is near the Amazon facility to the west of Katy and is expected to be used for industrial purposes. Councilmembers unanimously approved the annexation with the condition that Houston agrees to release the property from its jurisdiction.

“I just want to say that this process started about four years ago when we gave some of our land that Amazon’s on to the city of Katy,” said Dez Woods, whose family owns the land. “We put some of our rice farm in then, and we very much would like to put some more in the city, and all I wanted to say is all of the things that we need to do, we’re going to give them anything that needs to be done to complete this process we’re working on. We’ve got our ducks in a row.”

Council also:

• Approved the use of about $203,000 to support the Southland Basketball Conference at the Leonard E. Merrell Center in the first quarter of 2022.
• Approved a contract to review software for the city for gaps in functionality.
• Postponed consideration of a contract with Linebarger, Goggan, Blair & Sampson, LLP for fines and fee collection services for the Katy Municipal Court at the request of city staff.
• Approved an agreement with Fifth Assett, Inc. to provide a repository for debt contracts, leases and amortization tables.
• Approved an update to the city’s investment policy.