Three draft ordinances go to the Planning & Zoning Commission on September 4 — a wildlife-mitigation rulebook, a rewrite of the city’s stormwater “low-impact development” menu, and a fix for the two-acre loophole that Belmont Estates exposed in July. None of them will draw a crowd. Together they change how raw land in Fulshear turns into subdivisions and shopping centers. Here is what’s in the packet, where each piece came from, and what a “Wildlife Impact Analysis” actually asks of a builder.

The Fulshear Planning & Zoning Commission meets on the first Friday of every month at 8:30 in the morning, in Building A of the Municipal Complex on West Cross Creek Bend Lane. According to the minutes, the August meeting was called to order at 8:30, heard no citizen comments, recommended a handful of plats for approval, and adjourned at 8:38.

Eight minutes.

That is not a criticism of the commissioners. It describes how development regulation usually works: consequential decisions are made in draft ordinances that arrive in a PDF packet the Friday before, get a public hearing that nobody attends, and go to City Council with a recommendation attached. By the time a subdivision sign goes up on FM 359, the rules that shaped it were settled months earlier, on a weekday morning, in a room with more staff than residents.

The September 4 packet is one of those mornings. Alongside two specific-use permits (a liquor store at 8526 FM 359 in the Downtown District and a wireless antenna at 27500 Fulshear Bend), the commission will hold a single public hearing on three text amendments to Chapter 28 of the city code, the Coordinated Development Ordinance, or CDO. Regular readers will recognize the CDO from “The Rulebook and the City” as the 2020 document that combined zoning and subdivision rules into a single code. What’s on the table Friday is not a new rulebook. It is three targeted edits, and each one responds to something that happened this spring or summer.

The three ordinances, and where each came from

Ordinance 2026-1550 defines what “two acres” means. This is the Belmont Estates fix. On July 21, City Council voted 6–0, with Council Member Abhi Utturkar abstaining, to approve an amended plat for the 109-acre first section of Belmont Estates along Bois d’Arc Lane. The subdivision sits in the Estate Residential district, where the CDO requires lots of at least two acres. The plat met that number. What it also did was place drainage easements and detention ponds on several of those lots, so that a buyer’s two acres might include a good deal of ground they could never build on, fence off, or mow.

P&Z had unanimously recommended denial. Residents asked council to reject the plat and fix the ordinance instead. But Planning Director Josh Brothers told council the code never said whether two acres meant gross or usable land, and council concluded it had no legal basis to say no. As Commissioner John Dowdall put it at the public comment podium that night, “Obviously there’s a loophole in our estate residential ordinance. It does not say it has to be usable land.”

The staff memo in Friday’s packet says exactly that, in politer language: council asked staff “to look at tightening the regulations related to the dimensional standards of the 2-acre lots,” because the CDO “does not specify whether or not this calculation is gross or net.” The draft answers the question two ways. A conventional Estate Residential lot must now be a “2-acre minimum lot size unencumbered by drainage easements or other stormwater facilities.” A new “planned” option — which, as I read the current code, the ER district does not offer today — allows flexibility in lot configuration in exchange for more common open space and “coordinated placement of drainage and stormwater facilities,” with the condition that at least 50 percent of each lot remain unencumbered. Setbacks, height, and the 150-foot minimum lot width remain unchanged.

It is worth being clear about what this ordinance does not do. It does not reach Belmont’s first section, whose plat is already approved. It is drafted to take effect when published after council adoption, and the adoption line in the packet is already filled in for September 15. It ensures the next Belmont cannot happen the same way.

Ordinance 2026-1552 rewrites the stormwater menu — but only for commercial projects. This is the sequel to an amendment council adopted on April 21 as Ordinance 2026-1526. Section 28-3-2(k) of the CDO, “natural management of stormwater,” requires new commercial, office, multi-family, and other non-residential developments to choose two features from a list of seven: sidewalk storage, a cistern capturing half the roof runoff, a green roof, bioswales or rain gardens across half the landscaping, mature-tree preservation with drainage landscaping, wet-bottom detention with wetland plants, or a greywater system. The April amendment kept the two-of-seven rule but allowed a greywater system to satisfy the requirement on its own.

The September draft reorganizes the list into two categories. Passive practices are the ones that “infiltrate, filter, detain, or evapotranspire” without any mechanical operation: bioswales and rain gardens on at least half the landscaped area, naturalized detention or constructed wetlands, green roofs, vegetative walls, preserving mature trees of 12 inches or more in diameter on at least a quarter of the site, permeable pavement on at least half of the drive aisles, and tree box filters. Active practices capture, store, or reuse water: rainwater harvesting of at least half the roof drainage, integrated greywater reuse, HVAC condensate recovery, and reuse of detention-pond water. Every new commercial project must include at least one of each. Sidewalk storage, which sits on today’s list, is gone, and whether a greywater system by itself still satisfies the rule, as it does under the April amendment, is not clear to me from the draft; that is worth a question on Friday. The city may require maintenance agreements and inspection reports, and violations are misdemeanors with fines of up to $2,000.

That is a real tightening. “Two of seven” could be met with a cistern and some rain gardens; “one passive plus one active” forces a landscape practice and a plumbing practice into the same site plan. But notice the applicability sentence, which the draft leaves untouched: this section governs “commercial, office, multi-family, and other non-residential developments.” Single-family subdivisions — the land use that covers most of Fulshear’s acreage and generates most of its runoff — are not in it. Detention requirements and county criteria govern their drainage, not this LID menu. I’ll come back to why that matters.

Ordinance 2026-1551 adds teeth to the wildlife study the city adopted in May. This one has the longest history, and the agenda buries it under the driest heading. To understand it, you have to go back to March.

What a Wildlife Impact Analysis actually requires

On March 20, Planning Director Brothers brought a draft wildlife-study ordinance to the Parks & Recreation Commission. The staff draft would have triggered a study at 50 acres; the commission agreed to lower that to 15. I flagged it in May as something that “has not yet hit council.” It hit council on May 19, and Ordinance 2026-1524 is now codified as Division IV-4 of the subdivision regulations, Sections 28-4-22 through 28-4-26. (The code calls it a “Wildlife Impact Study,” or WIS; Friday’s agenda and the new draft call it a “Wildlife Impact Analysis.” Same document.)

Here is what the May ordinance requires, because Friday’s draft only makes sense on top of it.

The trigger is a new residential subdivision inside the city limits that creates 20 or more lots, or sits on a gross tract of 20 acres or more — a compromise between the 50 acres staff proposed, and the 15 the parks commission wanted. Lot-line adjustments and minor replats that don’t create new buildable lots or disturb undeveloped habitat are exempt. So is anything in the extraterritorial jurisdiction, which is why the bald eagles near the Waters PUD in June turned out to be outside the ordinance’s reach.

The study is a condition of completeness. The city will not treat a preliminary plat as filed until a WIS has been submitted with it and the Planning Director has determined it meets the ordinance. It is meant to be reviewed at the same time as the plat “so that wildlife considerations can be integrated into layout, open space configuration, and infrastructure design,” and if the layout changes substantially, the study must be updated.

A “Qualified Wildlife Professional”—someone with a degree in wildlife biology, ecology, environmental science, or a related field and relevant habitat-assessment experience— must prepare it and sign and certify it.

And it must contain eight things: a project description with acreage, lot count, and phasing; a map of existing land cover and “Sensitive Habitat,” including riparian corridors, floodplains, wetlands, native grasslands, and wooded areas, based on field reconnaissance; a desktop review of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Annotated County List of Rare Species for Fort Bend County and an assessment of whether the project could affect any listed species or their habitat; an impact assessment covering direct effects like clearing, grading, and drainage modifications, and indirect ones like fragmentation, edge effects, lighting, and human disturbance, including specifically “how proposed stormwater and drainage facilities may affect aquatic and riparian habitats”; the design measures taken to avoid and minimize those impacts, such as clustering homes and preserving stream buffers; recommended mitigation and construction-phase best practices; a recommendation to coordinate with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or TPWD if listed species are implicated; and a signed conclusion.

The ordinance includes two honest caveats. The rare-species review “is for planning purposes only and does not constitute a determination of the presence or absence of listed species.” And the city’s review is administrative — the City Engineer and planning staff check the study for compliance, and the city “may require revisions” to the layout or open space “as conditions of plat approval,” but only where they are “reasonably related to the impacts of the proposed subdivision” and consistent with the city’s authority under Chapter 212 of the Local Government Code. That last clause is doing a lot of work. A Texas city’s power over subdivisions is a platting power, not a general environmental-review power, and the May ordinance carefully stays within it. Clearing or grading before the WIS and plat are approved is unlawful, enforceable by stop-work orders and permit revocation.

The May ordinance did not say what happens when a study finds a problem. It required the diagnosis and left the treatment to a later day.

Friday is the later day. Ordinance 2026-1551 would add a new Division IV-5, Sections 28-4-27 through 28-4-34, titled “mitigation requirements related to a Wildlife Impact Analysis.” The staff memo describes it plainly: when a study shows that a development “adversely impacts critical habitats or wildlife,” these rules set out what the builder must do.

The core is a four-step sequence that anyone who has worked near the federal wetlands program will recognize. First, avoid — design around wetlands, streams, riparian buffers, nesting habitat, identified dens or roosts, critical habitat, and wildlife corridors. Second, where avoidance is impossible, minimize — limit clearing, preserve mature trees, use narrower roads where the code permits, install wildlife-friendly fencing, and restrict construction during breeding and migration seasons. Third, restore temporarily disturbed habitat with native vegetation. Fourth, where impacts remain, compensate.

The compensation table is the part with numbers. Where the study identifies significant impacts, the “approving authority” may require habitat preserved through conservation easements or protected reserves; wildlife corridors and stream buffers; native vegetative buffers of at least 50 feet along intermittent streams, 100 feet along perennial streams, and 150 feet around identified critical habitat; replacement of specimen trees at two-for-one for trunks 12 to 24 inches in diameter and three-for-one above that; and compensatory mitigation at ratios of 1:1 for common habitat, 2:1 for high-quality habitat, 3:1 for riparian habitat, 2:1 or whatever applicable law requires for wetlands, whichever is greater, and 4:1 for critical habitat. Mitigation can be on-site, off-site, through habitat banking, or through conservation easements. The draft includes no fee-in-lieu option.

Then it asks the builder to stay around. A Wildlife Management Plan must cover construction monitoring, long-term maintenance, invasive-species control, and adaptive management. The performance standard is “no net loss of wildlife habitat function whenever practicable,” and restoration must show at least 80 percent survival of native plantings after three years. The developer files annual monitoring reports for at least three years, and if the plantings fail, the city can require supplemental planting, wider buffers, or more compensatory mitigation.

To be fair to the draft, some of this is aspirational language that will get its meaning in practice. The ordinance does not define “critical habitat,” “high-quality habitat,” or “significant impact,” and it doesn’t say who the “approving authority” is — P&Z, council, or staff — or at which stage of platting the mitigation decision is made. Those are exactly the questions a commissioner should ask on Friday, and the answers will determine whether this is a working ordinance or a page of good intentions.

Why the sequencing matters

If you read the three drafts together with the CDO they amend, a pattern emerges, and it’s one I’ve been circling since “How Native Prairie Restoration Is Fighting Fulshear’s Floods” in April and “Where the Rain Goes” last month.

The stormwater menu applies to commercial projects, not subdivisions. The wildlife study applies to subdivisions, not commercial projects. The estate-lot fix applies to one zoning district. Each rule is sensible on its own. But the thing this newsletter keeps coming back to — that preserved prairie and intact creek corridors “do the same hydrological work” as engineered detention, only for free and forever — falls in the gap between them. A 200-acre residential tract in the city limits will now get a biologist’s map of its riparian corridors and native grassland, and a mitigation sequence that starts with avoidance. It will not get an LID requirement. A 17-acre home-improvement store will get a passive-plus-active LID requirement. It will not get a wildlife study.

That isn’t hypocrisy. It’s the natural result of writing three ordinances in response to three separate prompts — a parks commission’s concern about habitat, a council’s frustration with a plat, a staff clean-up of a list that had grown unwieldy. It is also an opening. The wildlife study is required to evaluate “how proposed stormwater and drainage facilities may affect aquatic and riparian habitats.” Read alongside the estate-lot ordinance, which for the first time treats drainage easements and detention ponds as encumbrances rather than free acreage, and the LID draft, which lists naturalized detention and constructed wetlands as preferred practices, the city has three documents pointing in the same direction without quite saying so. The relevant question for Friday is not whether each ordinance is well drafted. It’s whether anyone on the commission asks how they fit.

What Belmont taught, and what these drafts admit

The Belmont Estates vote was uncomfortable to watch because council members plainly disliked the plat and approved it anyway. Mayor Don McCoy opened the discussion by saying the council’s job was “to follow the law, respect the process, and make the decision that we believe is in the best interest of the City of Fulshear,” and that is what they did. Residents who asked council to reject the plat and fix the ordinance instead were asking for something the law doesn’t allow: a plat that meets the code has to be approved, and the fix has to come afterward.

Friday is the afterward. The estate-lot ordinance is the fix the residents asked for. The wildlife-mitigation ordinance is the second half of a rule the city adopted before Belmont was ever on an agenda. And the LID rewrite is a staff clean-up that happens to land on the same morning. None of them undoes July. All of them are the city adjusting the rules of dirt before the next tract comes in, which is the only kind of adjustment a Texas city can make.

If you want to be there

The hearing is Friday, September 4, at 8:30 a.m., Fulshear Municipal Complex, 6611 W. Cross Creek Bend Lane. Citizen comments are limited to three minutes, and the public hearing on the three text amendments is a separate item where anyone can speak. The full packet is posted on the city’s Agendas & Minutes page; the three ordinances run from page 15 to page 35. Whatever the commission recommends goes to City Council; two of the three drafts already carry a September 15 adoption date, and the wildlife-mitigation ordinance’s date line is still blank.

If you can’t make a Friday morning — and most people who work cannot, which is rather the point of this piece — the City Secretary’s office at 281-346-1796 accepts written comments, and the meeting video is posted afterward on FulshearTexas.gov.

The three questions I’d want a commissioner to ask, if I could pick only three: Who is the “approving authority” that decides whether a wildlife study shows “significant” impacts, and when in the platting process is that decision made? Why does the stormwater LID menu still stop at the property line of every single-family subdivision in the city? And, for the estate-lot ordinance, does “unencumbered” also exclude pipeline, utility, and access easements, or only drainage?

It’s an eight-minute meeting most months. It doesn’t have to be this month.

Sources: City of Fulshear, Planning & Zoning Commission agenda and packet for September 4, 2026 (Ordinances 2026-1550, 2026-1551, and 2026-1552 and staff memos; minutes of August 7, 2026); Fulshear Code of Ordinances, Chapter 28, Sections 28-2-5, 28-3-2(k), and 28-4-22 through 28-4-26 (eCode360), including Ordinance 2026-1524 (adopted May 19, 2026) and Ordinance 2026-1526 (adopted April 21, 2026); Covering Katy News, “Fulshear approves controversial Belmont Estates plat after debate over two-acre lot requirement” (July 29, 2026); and prior About Fulshear, Texas coverage: “A Big Week (and Big Decisions) at Fulshear City Hall,” “Planning & Zoning Recap: A New Commission Tackles the Waters PUD,” “The Rulebook and the City,” “How Native Prairie Restoration Is Fighting Fulshear’s Floods,” “Where the Rain Goes,” and “The Corridor Comes Due.”

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

The closer to “Following the $332 Million.” On Tuesday night, the City Council adopted Fulshear’s FY2027 budget and set the tax rate. Here is what was decided, what changed in the room, and which arguments will still be alive in October.

Two weeks ago I told you the number was $0.19310. That was the rate council proposed on August 18, the ceiling for this budget season, and the number I asked you to bring to the September 1 hearing.

The number council adopted Tuesday night is $0.1905 per $100 of valuation.

If that looks like a rounding error, it isn’t. Half a cent on Fulshear’s roughly $5.55 billion tax roll is real money, and how council got there tells you more about this city’s priorities than any single line item in the budget. So before the series closes, let’s walk the last stretch of the trail: what the rate actually is, what it buys, and where the friction was.

What “adoption” means

This is the moment the series has been pointing toward since July. Texas cities run on an October 1 fiscal year, and by law the budget and the tax rate both have to be adopted before then. Everything that came earlier, from the proposed budget in July to the certified appraisal roll to the proposed rate in August, was a draft. Tuesday’s ordinances are the real thing.

Two numbers are worth keeping in your head. The first is the no-new-revenue rate, $0.159522, which would raise the same total tax revenue from the same properties as last year. The second is the adopted rate, $0.1905. The distance between them is, by definition, a tax increase, and Tuesday’s paperwork says so in the plain statutory language the state requires.

The adopted rate breaks into the two halves this series has kept returning to. The interest-and-sinking (I&S) half pays debt. The maintenance-and-operations (M&O) half pays for everything else: police, street crews, the planning department, the lights at City Hall. Which half is going up, and why, is the whole story.

The half you already voted for

The I&S portion of the rate includes, for the first time, payments on the $13.5 million in parks bonds voters approved in May 2025 by roughly two-to-one margins. That is the amphitheater, trails, and parking at Primrose Park, plus the land-acquisition proposition.

There is a small piece of good news here. The debt-service rate came in below what was projected when the bonds went to voters. But the more important point is one I have made before and will make once more: debt service is not a discretionary number. Once the bonds are sold, the payment is owed, and the I&S rate is whatever it takes to make it. Council cannot trim it in a workshop. The only vote that ever controlled that number was the one you cast in May 2025.

If your October bill goes up, a large share of the increase is this half.

The half council actually argued about

The M&O half is where Tuesday’s debate lived, and as it played out, the question was not whether to go above the no-new-revenue rate. Staff had already shown in August that the no-new-revenue rate would leave roughly a $1.7 million hole in the operating budget. The question was how far above it to go.

One camp wanted to hold the total rate under $0.19. The logic was flexibility: 2027 brings step-ups in the city’s debt payments (the Huggins and Wallace payments), and a lower rate now leaves room to absorb those without another jump later. The other camp, which turned out to be the majority, favored $0.195 on the theory that the half-cent buys projects that pull commercial development into the city sooner, and commercial development is what eventually takes pressure off residential taxpayers.

To put the half-cent in context: staff has said a penny on Fulshear’s rate is worth roughly $573,000 to the city and about $40 a year on a $400,000 home. Half of that is roughly $287,000 in city revenue and about $20 a year on that same home. That is what Tuesday’s debate was about. Not a fortune, but not nothing, and from the way the debate ran, the principle mattered at least as much as the dollars.

It is worth being fair to both sides here. The “stay under $0.19” position is the conservative one, and it is not a bad instinct in a year when the growth revenue is softening (more on that in a moment). The “$0.1905” position is the investment one: spend now on the things that could plausibly grow the commercial tax base. Neither side was reaching for a cushion. If you read my last installment, you will remember Council Member Miller’s objection to that very word, and the debate Tuesday was framed around projects, not padding.

The revenue that isn’t coming

Here is the backdrop that made the debate sharper than it would have been two years ago.

Permit and license revenue, the money the city collects when someone builds something, is budgeted to fall 20.65 percent, a shortfall of about $548,670. Revenue from services is down 27 percent. These are the fingerprints of a city whose growth is slowing from a sprint to a jog. New construction added roughly $180 million to the tax roll this year, compared with about $375 million the year before, and Finance Director Angela Alvarado told council in August that Fulshear is “reaching that point of maturation” where new growth will slow significantly.

This is the growth-paradox flywheel I have written about before, running in reverse. For a decade, new rooftops paid for the services they required. As the rooftops stop arriving, that funding stream thins, but the police calls, the lift stations, and the potholes do not. A city in that transition has three levers: raise the rate, grow the commercial base, or do less. Tuesday’s budget pulls the first two.

The bullpen

The most useful thing staff brought to the dais was not a speech. It was a spreadsheet.

Staff built what they called a “bullpen” matrix: a list of unfunded projects that council could toggle on or off in real time, with each toggle recalculating the tax rate needed to pay for it. Think of it as a menu with the prices attached. It is exactly the tool a resident would want council to have, because it converts an abstract argument about “the rate” into concrete decisions about mold, generators, and shade structures.

Six projects came off the bench. Together they total $505,000.

A few of these deserve a sentence each, because they connect to things this series has covered.

The generator and the spare pumps are wastewater resiliency, plain and simple. If you read the $126 million installment, you know that on our flat coastal prairie, sewage does not flow downhill on its own; it is pumped, station by station, and a lift station without power is a spill waiting to happen. Forty thousand dollars for a generator and thirty thousand for pumps on a shelf are among the cheapest insurance a city can buy. The pumps line item is the kind of unglamorous decision that only makes the news when it isn’t made: renting a pump in an emergency costs far more than owning one in advance.

The building repairs are about water intrusion and mold at the Police Department and City Hall. These buildings aren't new, and they aren't old either; a city growing this fast tends to defer maintenance on the buildings it already has while it builds the ones it needs. The $100,000 is a start on that deferred bill.

The Redbird Lane easement has been on the list for years. It is a drainage and safety acquisition, and it is a good reminder from the $23 million drainage installment that a lot of drainage work is not concrete at all. It is the right to put concrete where it needs to go.

And then there is the $200,000 for downtown land, which is where the meeting got interesting.

“Now or never” versus “whose lane is it”

Two debates ran through the project list, and both are about a question this series has circled since the beginning: not what to buy, but which bill it goes on.

The first was about downtown. The Mayor and several members argued for the $200,000 land purchase as a now-or-never opportunity. Downtown Fulshear is a finite number of acres; once a parcel is developed privately, the city’s ability to shape what goes there is largely gone. Buying land is how a city keeps a hand on its own aesthetic and economic future. The counterargument was not that the purchase was a bad idea. It was that the Fulshear Development Corporation, the city’s economic development arm funded by its own slice of sales tax, could potentially make such acquisitions without touching the property tax rate. The purchase was approved. The question of whether the EDC should have carried it did not go away.

The second debate was about utility infrastructure, and Council Member Miller put it most clearly. Projects that serve the water and sewer systems, like the land acquisition for the Primrose Wharf site, should, in his view, be paid for out of the Utility Fund, which is funded by the rates on your water bill, rather than the General Fund, which is funded by your property taxes. He called it keeping the “lanes clear.” The logic is sound: utility customers should pay for utility assets, and every utility project that migrates into the General Fund pushes the tax rate instead of the water rate.

The honest complication is that the lanes are not as clean as the phrase suggests. Money is fungible, and a dollar of General Fund relief is a dollar of Utility Fund pressure, which eventually shows up as a rate adjustment on the same household. The real question is not which fund is purer. It is which bill you would rather see it on, and whether new development (through impact fees) or existing customers (through rates) should carry the utility share. That was the question I asked you to bring to the hearings back in July, and it is still open.

The EDC gets a homework assignment

Council also spent time on the Fulshear Development Corporation’s spending, and specifically on the $25,000 to $50,000 a year that goes to “Entrepreneurship Hub” events.

This was not an attack on the program. It was an accounting question, and a fair one. Members noted that the cost per event, and the cost per hour of programming, is high relative to the number of events actually held, and they asked for something the events have not had: clear key performance indicators and a formal report on the return taxpayers get. The kinds of questions that would answer it are obvious enough: how many businesses started, how many stayed in Fulshear, how many jobs followed.

I would not read too much into the tone. Councils ask this kind of question of every program eventually, and a program that can answer it is usually stronger for having been asked. The natural place for that answer is October, when council takes up a comprehensive strategic plan review meant to line up EDC spending with council’s own goals. That review is where the downtown-land question and the Entrepreneurship Hub question will meet again.

Three directives worth remembering

Beyond the rate and the project list, council gave staff three instructions that will shape next year’s budget more than this one.

First, the strategic plan review in October 2026, described above.

Second, following recent unplanned downtime at a water plant, council prioritized getting the Primrose Wastewater Reclamation Facility to “shovel-ready” status. Readers of the wastewater installment will recognize the stakes. Treatment capacity is the real ceiling on growth in Fulshear, including commercial growth, and a facility that is designed, permitted, and ready to bid can move forward as soon as funding lines up. The plant outage reminded everyone that resiliency isn't only about the future; the existing system has to keep running while the next one is built.

Third, the city will move forward on a $180,000 comprehensive plan update, with a Texas General Land Office grant expected to reimburse the full cost. A comprehensive plan is the long-range document that guides land use, and Fulshear’s is due for an update after a growth spurt this size. Getting it done on the state’s dime is, quietly, one of the better decisions in the budget.

Where the trail ends

When this series began in July, the headline number was $332 million: the five-year capital plan, the largest in the city’s history. I walked you through the $126 million for wastewater, the $23 million for drainage, and the tax rate that pays for the operating side.

Here is what changed between July and Tuesday. The rate moved from an early planning assumption of the current $0.167903, to a proposed $0.19310, to an adopted $0.1905. The growth revenue softened. Six small projects came off the bench because staff gave council a tool to see what each one cost. And the arguments that will define next year, about which fund pays for utility land, about what the EDC should be buying, about whether flexibility or investment is the better posture for a city whose growth is slowing, all surfaced on the record where you can watch them.

That is the point of following the money. Not the number itself, but the decisions the number forces into the open.

The budget is adopted. The fiscal year starts October 1. The next place this trail picks up is the strategic plan review in October, and I will be there. If you were at Tuesday’s hearing, or if you have a view on the “lanes” question, hit reply. I read every one, and a few of you have already changed how I think about this.

And if you know a neighbor who wonders why the October bill looks different, send them this. They already voted on half of it.

Earlier in this series: Following the $332 Million: A Budget Series · The $126 Million You’ll Never See · Where the Rain Goes: The $23 Million Drainage Budget · The Increase You Already Voted For · The Number Is $0.19310 · The Penny Council Didn’t Take

Sources: City of Fulshear, Proposed FY2027 Budget and Tax Rate and budget documents; Covering Katy, Fulshear City Council proposes new tax rate; September 1, 2026 council meeting.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

The city framed Friday’s announcement as a drought response. The plan behind it tells a more specific story — one about pressure in the mains, demand measured against capacity, and a number I haven't been able to find published anywhere. Here is what Stage 1 actually requires, what it can cost you, and the question worth carrying into Tuesday night’s hearing.

On August 27, the Fort Bend County Fire Marshal’s Office put the county’s Keetch-Byram Drought Index at 634. The scale ends at 800. Commissioners Court approved a burn ban for unincorporated areas that afternoon. Six days before that, the City of Katy activated Stage 1 of its own drought contingency plan and asked customers for a voluntary five percent cut during a run of triple-digit afternoons.

So when Fulshear announced Stage 1 on Friday, August 28, it landed in a week that already looked, felt, and smelled like drought. If your sprinklers ran Saturday morning, you were already off the schedule the city had just published.

It is worth saying plainly, then, that Fulshear’s Drought Contingency Plan does not contain a drought trigger.

Not one. Read Section 4.3.1 of the Drought Contingency Plan as carefully as you like. Rainfall does not appear. Neither does temperature, reservoir level, or the U.S. Drought Monitor. Instead, it shows pressure, demand, and the system’s capacity to meet it.

That is not a gotcha. It is the most useful thing the document has to tell us.

What the plan is, and what it says

Fulshear’s current Drought Contingency Plan was written by Freese and Nichols and adopted by City Council on August 20, 2024, as Ordinance 2024-1456. It replaced a 2019 plan that Council Member Jason Knape described at the time as needing “some teeth.” Every retail water supplier in Texas with 3,300 or more connections has to file one of these with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality every five years. Ours runs three stages, and it is a genuinely readable document.

Stage 1 lives in Section 4.3.1. It has a gate and a set of keys.

The gate is pressure. The city may initiate Stage 1 when material portions of the distribution system fall below 50 pounds per square inch. For context, the plan’s own definitions section says a suitable average operating pressure for Fulshear runs between 50 and 70 psi depending on time of day, location, and elevation. Fifty is not a crisis number. It is the floor of normal—the point at which the system is still delivering water but has lost margin. (The genuine emergency number is 20 psi, the threshold at which TCEQ requires a boil-water notice. Fulshear crossed it downtown in August 2023.)

Then, with that gate open, any one of four keys will do:

1. Total daily demand equals or exceeds 60 percent of currently available System Operating Capacity for three consecutive days.

2. Total daily demand equals or exceeds 65 percent of that capacity on any single day.

3. The system cannot deliver water or hold pressure because of failure or damage to major components, contamination, a power outage, grid failure, natural disaster, or extreme weather.

4. The Mayor or a designee judges Stage 1 appropriate “based on weather conditions, distribution and water supply system deficiency, and/or unforeseen circumstances.”

That fourth key is the one worth slowing down for.

The phrase that isn’t a separate box

Read quickly, key four looks like the plan offering two rival explanations — weather on one side, system deficiency on the other — and inviting us to pick. It would be easy to write a post arguing the city picked the flattering one.

It would also be wrong, and I would rather be accurate than punchy. “Distribution and water supply system deficiency” is not a standalone trigger. It sits inside a single discretionary clause, in a list with “weather conditions” and “unforeseen circumstances,” describing the range of judgments the Mayor may make. Nobody checked a box marked deficiency. The plan does not have that box.

And a further wrinkle cuts against tidy narratives in both directions. The preamble to Section 4.3 says the Mayor may order a stage when the pressure threshold and a trigger are met — or at the discretion of the Mayor or his official designee. Read literally, that discretion runs around the pressure gate entirely. The city can declare Stage 1 with no trigger met at all, and the plan only says the reason “should be documented.”

Which brings us to the reframe.

The question is not whether Friday was really about drought or really about the system. Stage 1 has no drought trigger because drought isn't what the plan measures. Every objective gate in Section 4.3.1 measures the system: pressure in the mains, and demand as a fraction of what Fulshear can produce. Drought is the input. It stops the rain, so twenty thousand irrigation controllers come on, so demand climbs toward capacity, so pressure sags in the parts of town at the end of the line. The weather is the cause. The system is the thing being graded.

Framed that way, “proactive drought response” and “system deficiency” stop being rival stories. They are the numerator and the denominator of the same fraction.

Which raises an obvious question: what is the denominator?

The number I couldn’t find

The plan defines System Operating Capacity as the limiting capacity — either the city’s total well capacity or the firm distribution capacity of the system, whichever binds first. As of 2024, it gave both figures. Seven wells, 8,511 gallons per minute combined, or 12.3 million gallons a day. Firm distribution capacity of roughly 29.52 million gallons a day. Storage of 2.35 million gallons on the ground and 0.25 million gallons elevated. With those numbers, wells were the binding constraint, so System Operating Capacity was 12.3 MGD.

Then the definition adds the sentence that matters: this figure “will increase or decrease with changes to Fulshear’s total well capacity, booster pump availability, or the integration of additional water supplies such as NFBWA.” (NFBWA is the North Fort Bend Water Authority.)

So the trigger is a percentage of a moving number. And the number has moved. In its own fiscal 2025 recap, the city listed a completed one-million-gallon elevated storage tank at the new Pecan Knoll Water Plant, plus a new booster pump station and a one-million-gallon ground storage tank downtown. Elevated storage alone is several times higher than the plan’s 2024 figure. Connections have moved too — the plan cites roughly 16,000 customers including Cross Creek Ranch’s MUD 169, while the 2025 Water and Wastewater Master Plan counted 15,254 connections and projects about 25,000 by 2029.

Here is what that means for a resident trying to check the city’s work. To know whether demand hit 60 percent for three days, you need today’s daily demand and today’s System Operating Capacity. I have not found either one published — not in the plan, not on the utilities pages, not in the CIP (Capital Improvement Plan) materials.

Take the 2024 figures at face value for a moment, purely to get a feel for the scale. Divide 12.3 million gallons a day by 16,000 connections, and you get about 769 gallons per connection per day at full capacity. Sixty percent of that is roughly 461 gallons per connection per day, or about 14,000 gallons a month.

Fourteen thousand gallons a month is also, precisely, the residential allocation the same plan authorizes at Stage 1 when a shortage threatens public health and safety.

I would not lean hard on that. It averages across every meter in the system—commercial, irrigation, institutional, plus line loss—not a household figure, and both numbers have shifted since 2024. But it gives you the order of magnitude, and the order of magnitude is uncomfortable. On a hot August day in a city of irrigated lawns, the gap between ordinary demand and the Stage 1 line is not large.

What Stage 1 actually costs you

Most of Stage 1 is a request. The watering schedule is voluntary: twice a week, even-numbered addresses on Monday and Thursday, odd on Tuesday and Friday, with customers asked to avoid outdoor watering between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. Note what the table leaves out. Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday are not assigned to anyone. If your habit is a weekend soak, the schedule has no day for you.

Some of Stage 1 is not a request. Even at the mildest stage, the plan flatly prohibits five uses of water: washing down hard surfaces, washing buildings for anything other than immediate fire protection, dust control, flushing gutters or letting water run in the street, and failing to repair a controllable leak after notice. The Mayor or a designee must observe violations and document them photographically. The first is a warning. The second carries a $100 administrative fee on your next water bill, the third $200, and the fourth and beyond $300 each. Unpaid fees accrue late penalties and can lead to service termination.

And Stage 1 carries an authority most residents don’t know exists. If shortage conditions threaten public health, safety, and welfare, the Mayor may initiate drought surcharges: a 14,000-gallon monthly allocation for single-family homes, with an extra dollar per thousand gallons above it. At Stage 2, the allocation drops to 12,000 gallons at two dollars over; at Stage 3, to 8,000 gallons at four dollars. Those are cumulative. They are not automatic — they are tools on the shelf — but they are on the shelf now.

One more mechanic worth knowing: because Stage 1 includes mandatory restrictions, the plan requires the city to notify TCEQ’s executive director within five business days. That notification is a public record, and it will state a reason.

Where this meets the $332 million

This series has walked through wastewater, drainage, and the tax rate. It has not walked through water. Friday made that omission hard to defend.

Water is roughly $19 million of the $70.25 million capital plan for fiscal 2027 — the second-largest slice after wastewater’s $49 million, and headlined by a new elevated storage tank at the Water Plant, sized in Assistant Public Works Director David Licon’s words “to support future growth within the city’s water distribution system.” Look further out and the April 2025 master plan splits $212.42 million almost exactly down the middle: $106.11 million for water, $106.31 million for wastewater, over ten years.

Storage is the right instinct. Elevated storage carries a system through the morning and evening peaks without pressure sagging—which is to say, it keeps you above the 50 psi gate. But storage does not create water. It buys hours.

The water itself is supposed to come from somewhere else. Fulshear is a participant in the North Fort Bend Water Authority, whose share of the $1.486 billion Surface Water Supply Project runs about $555 million and whose lines are meant to carry treated water some 55 miles from the Northeast Water Purification Plant. The Fort Bend Subsidence District requires a 60 percent cut in groundwater use by 2027. That is a mandate, not a goal — and it means Fulshear cannot drill its way out of a demand problem even if it wanted to.

Here is the tell. The 2024 plan refers to NFBWA supply in the future conditional throughout — the city “will receive surface water in the near future,” and every notification requirement is written as taking effect “once the NFBWA water supply is online.” Two years on, whether that water is flowing to Fulshear taps today is the single most important fact in this entire subject, and I do not have a confirmed answer.

What to ask the city for

It would be useful if the City publishes the following:

1. The city’s total daily water demand, by day, for June 1 through August 31, 2026.

2. The System Operating Capacity figure in effect on the date Stage 1 was initiated, and the calculation behind it.

3. Any pressure monitoring records showing distribution system pressures below 50 psi during August 2026, by location.

4. The documentation the plan calls for when a stage is initiated at the Mayor’s discretion.

5. The TCEQ notification submitted under Section 288.20(b), with its stated reason.

6. Volumes of NFBWA surface water delivered to the city monthly during 2026.

Those six answers settle the question this post opened with. If demand ran at 60 percent of capacity for three days in August, this is a growth-and-capacity story and it belongs squarely in the budget conversation. If it did not, and Stage 1 came from the discretionary clause, that is a defensible call — but residents are entitled to see the documentation the plan itself requires. I will publish whatever comes back, including the parts that make my framing here look overcooked.

Tuesday night

The public hearing on Fulshear’s proposed property tax rate is Tuesday, September 1, at 6 p.m. at the Fulshear Municipal Complex, 6611 W. Cross Creek Bend Lane. Council may adopt the budget and the rate that night or wait until September 15. Sign in before the meeting starts; you get three minutes.

The tax rate doesn't pay for water lines—that is the utility fund, rates, impact fees, and bonds. But the budget ordinance adopted alongside the rate carries the capital plan, and the capital plan is where the elevated storage tank lives. Three minutes is enough to ask one question and sit down.

Mine would be this: what was the city’s peak daily water demand this August, as a percentage of System Operating Capacity — and where can residents look that up next summer without filing a request?

A city that is second-fastest-growing in the country will be having this conversation every August for the foreseeable future. It should not require a records request to know how close we came.

Sources: City of Fulshear 2024 Drought Contingency Plan (Ordinance 2024-1456, adopted August 20, 2024), prepared by Freese and Nichols — Sections 2.0, 4.2, 4.3, 4.3.1–4.3.3, 4.5; City of Fulshear Utilities Resources & Links page; City of Fulshear FY2025 accomplishments recap, October 8, 2025; Community Impact, “Fulshear officials to consider $70.25M in capital improvements for 2026-27,” May 22, 2026; Water and Wastewater Master Plan approved April 15, 2025; North Fort Bend Water Authority project and FAQ pages; Fort Bend County burn ban and Keetch-Byram Drought Index reading, August 27, 2026; City of Katy Stage 1 activation, August 2026; Covering Katy News, “Fulshear City Council proposes new tax rate,” August 21, 2026. Earlier installments of Following the $332 Million are linked above.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Fort Bend County just drew a line around 3,057 acres for a solar factory that may never be built here. Here’s what Monday’s vote actually did, what it didn’t do, and why a decision made twenty miles from Fulshear lands on our tax bills and in our school district.

Three thousand fifty-seven acres is a little under five square miles. Ten point one billion dollars is a number with no useful local comparison — it is more than Tesla has ever committed to a single American manufacturing site on paper.

On Monday morning, Fort Bend County Commissioners Court voted to draw a line around the first number in hopes of attracting the second. The vote was 4–0. Interim County Judge Daniel Wong did not participate.

If you only read the headline, you learned that Fort Bend County took a major step toward landing Tesla’s $10.1 billion solar cell plant. That’s true. It is also considerably less than it sounds, and the reasons why are worth fifteen minutes of your attention — because the same court that handled this smoothly is scheduled to adopt your county tax rate in about two weeks, and it is not at all clear it can.

What the court actually did

Commissioners created Reinvestment Zone 34, covering roughly 3,057 acres near FM 762 and FM 1994, south of the Brazos River near Richmond.

A reinvestment zone is a designation on a map. That’s it. It does not abate a single dollar of anyone’s taxes. Under Chapter 312 of the Texas Tax Code, a county cannot enter into a property tax abatement agreement with a company unless the property sits inside a reinvestment zone the county has formally designated after a public hearing. Monday’s hearing was that step — the prerequisite Tesla’s own state filing said Fort Bend County would need to complete, citing Section 312.201.

The actual abatement — how much of the county’s property tax Tesla would be excused from paying, for how many years, with what job and investment commitments, and with what clawback provisions if the company falls short — is a separate agreement requiring a separate vote.

That vote has not happened.

Worth keeping straight: this is a different animal from the Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones (TIRZs) some of our neighbors live inside, where future tax growth is captured and reinvested in the zone. A Chapter 312 zone is simply the legal container that makes an abatement negotiation possible.

What Tesla has actually filed

The project’s internal name is Project Crystal Sun. Tesla’s application, signed July 22 and posted publicly by the Texas Comptroller on August 6, requests a ten-year limitation on taxable value under the state’s JETI program — the Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act, the 2023 successor to the old Chapter 313 school tax breaks.

The filing puts total investment at about $10.116 billion: roughly $1.5 billion in buildings and land improvements, roughly $8.6 billion in equipment. It projects 9,712 permanent jobs at full operation and commercial production beginning in the first quarter of 2029. The site covers portions of five parcels, and the application makes it clear the plant might occupy only parts of them.

The application also says, in the plainest terms a corporate tax filing permits, that Tesla is evaluating locations in multiple states and that without the tax treatment it is asking for, the Fort Bend site loses to an unnamed competitor elsewhere.

To be fair to everyone involved: that is what these filings always say, and it is sometimes even true.

The jobs number deserves a footnote

Nearly 10,000 permanent jobs is the number in every headline, including this one’s neighbors. Here is the schedule underneath it, from the consultant’s own hiring projections in the filing.

Construction runs 2026 through 2028, peaking at roughly 1,147 workers — contractors, not Tesla employees. Operations begin in 2029 with about 1,942 people. The plant adds roughly that many each year afterward, reaching 9,712 around 2033.

So the honest framing is about 1,900 jobs in 2029 and the full complement four years later, assuming every projection holds and the company builds here at all. A four-year hiring ramp is entirely normal for a plant this size. Attaching the 2033 number to the 2029 opening date is not.

Why this matters in Fulshear

The site is roughly twenty miles from us as the crow flies, on the far side of the Brazos. Easy to file under “somebody else’s news.” I’d argue three threads run straight back here.

The first is Lamar CISD. Tesla’s JETI application is routed through our school district, because the site is inside Lamar CISD’s boundaries. A JETI agreement limits the taxable value of eligible property for the district’s maintenance and operations taxes — 100 percent during construction, then 50 percent once the plant is running, for ten years. It does not limit the district’s interest and sinking taxes, which repay bonds for new campuses. That distinction matters in a district opening schools as fast as this one is. The interaction between a JETI limitation and the state school finance formulas is genuinely complicated, and I’m not going to hand-wave it in a paragraph; it deserves its own post, and it will get one.

The second is the county line item on your tax bill. Whatever abatement the county eventually negotiates is county revenue foregone in the near term against a much larger base later. The consultant’s benefit statement estimates roughly $1.1 billion in property taxes across all taxing jurisdictions over a 38-year study window absent incentives — an estimate prepared by the applicant’s own consultant, which is worth remembering when it gets quoted back to you as a fact.

The third is that the debate over whether this is a good deal is coming, and a Commissioners Court that has spent the summer arguing about whether it can legally meet will conduct it.

The part that got tense

Wong abstained because his engineering firm, Tolunay-Wong Engineers, has worked for Tesla for several years — a relationship he said predates his appointment. He has stated he will not participate in any county vote involving Tesla.

Commissioner Dexter McCoy used that recusal to make a broader point. Wong has been presiding over the court since a visiting judge appointed him on an interim basis in April, after former County Judge KP George’s federal money laundering conviction. The county attorney has argued his authority lapsed in June; Wong disagrees; a district judge has allowed him to stay while the case proceeds toward a November trial. McCoy and Commissioner Grady Prestage boycotted the court for two months over it, and Monday was their first participation since June.

McCoy’s question, per ABC13’s account, was why Wong would step aside to protect the integrity of a Tesla vote but not, in his words, “to protect the integrity of the people’s business.” Wong did not engage on the recusal request. He did note, pointedly, that he was still the judge running the meeting. It did not de-escalate from there.

An unavoidable political layer remains: Wong and McCoy are the Republican and Democratic nominees facing each other for county judge on November 3.

The vote that actually decides this

Here is the arithmetic that will govern the next several months.

With Wong recused from anything Tesla-related, an abatement agreement needs three of the four commissioners present and voting. Two of those four were absent all summer. Monday proved the court can produce four votes when the stakes are high enough. It did not prove the court can do it twice.

Meanwhile, the county’s tax rate for fiscal 2027 is scheduled for adoption September 10, and state law requires four court members to adopt a tax rate. Neither returning commissioner has committed to being in the room. An agenda item concerning the structure of the county attorney’s office — the same county attorney litigating against Wong — is set for this Thursday.

Fort Bend County did not land a factory on Monday. It cleared one procedural gate, out of several that run through the Comptroller’s office, the Governor’s office, the Lamar CISD board, and eventually this same Commissioners Court. What it demonstrated is narrower and, I’d argue, more important: that when a big enough number is on the agenda, four elected officials can set aside a constitutional argument for one morning and vote.

The question for the rest of us is whether that only works when the number has ten digits.

Commissioners Court meets on the second and fourth Thursday of each month at 1 p.m. on the second floor of the 1909 courthouse in Richmond, and agendas are posted in advance on the county’s website. Thursday’s meeting is a reasonable place to start paying attention.

Sources: Fort Bend County Commissioners Court, August 24, 2026; Tesla, Inc. JETI application to Lamar Consolidated ISD, Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts; reporting by the Fort Bend Falcon, Houston Public Media, ABC13, the Fort Bend Independent, and Electrek. Full coverage of Monday’s meeting is at the Fort Bend Falcon — link in the comments.

Fulshear keeps landing on “best places” lists. This is a look at what those lists actually count, what they can’t see, and what an honest scorecard for our city looks like in August 2026.

Every so often, a reader asks me some version of a hard question. The most recent one came down to this: is Fulshear actually a good place to live, or do we just tell each other that it is?

That turns out to be two questions wearing the same coat. The first is technical — how does anyone measure quality of life at all? The second is local — what do those measurements say about us? You should understand the first question before you let anybody answer the second on your behalf.

What the professionals actually measure

There are three broad approaches, and they disagree with each other more often than you’d expect.

The first is the objective dashboard: count things you can count. Income, poverty, crime rates, commute times, school ratings, air quality, life expectancy, housing costs. No opinions, just indicators.

The second is subjective wellbeing: ask people how satisfied they are with their lives and take the answer seriously as data. This sounds soft. It isn’t — self-reported life satisfaction is one of the most reliable predictors researchers have of things like health outcomes and whether people stay put.

The third is the composite index, which rolls a pile of indicators into a single score. The OECD’s Better Life Index uses eleven dimensions — housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety, and work-life balance — and lets you set the weights yourself, which is an unusually honest design. The AARP Livability Index scores every address in the country from 0 to 100 across seven categories using 61 indicators, with the average American community set at 50. County Health Rankings scores health outcomes and the factors that drive them, county by county. U.S. News evaluates communities on 92 measures.

Here is the part worth carrying with you: every index is two judgments stacked on top of each other — which things to count, and how much each one should count — and only the first of those is technical. The weighting is a values choice. An index that weights commute time heavily and school ratings lightly produces a different “best place to live” than one that does the reverse. Neither is wrong. They’re just answering different questions.

Three ways a ranking can mislead you, specifically here

Before the numbers, three cautions that apply to Fulshear more than to most places.

The first is the denominator problem. SafeWise’s 2026 report ranks Fulshear the eighth-safest city in Texas — a real distinction out of 343 cities that qualified. But it calculates our crime rate against a population of 26,048, and it draws on FBI data from 2024. The Census Bureau’s July 2025 estimate for Fulshear is 64,630. When the population in the numerator’s denominator is two years and forty thousand people out of date, the rate it produces is a description of a city that no longer exists.

The second is the boundary problem, which I’ve written about before and which refuses to go away. The Census Bureau says 64,630. Our city manager projects 42,000 to 46,000 inside the city limits. Both figures are produced in good faith, and they cannot describe the same place. Every per-capita measure of Fulshear’s quality of life — parkland per resident, officers per thousand, gallons of wastewater capacity per household — inherits that disagreement.

The third is the averaging problem. A median is a single point in the middle of a distribution. It tells you nothing about the spread, and in a city growing this fast the spread is the story.

The scorecard, category by category

With those caveats standing, here is what the data says.

Material conditions: exceptional, and unusually so. The Census Bureau puts median household income at $187,035 and the poverty rate at 1.6 percent, compared with a national poverty rate near 12 percent. Just under 75 percent of adults over 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. Only 2.8 percent of residents under 65 lack health insurance. Ninety percent of occupied housing units are owner-occupied. There is no honest way to read these numbers as anything but extraordinary.

Housing: expensive, and that is the constraint. Median home value is $572,700. Median monthly owner costs with a mortgage run $3,730; median gross rent is $1,952. Fulshear is affordable to people who can already afford it. That is a real finding about livability, not a footnote to one.

Safety: strong, with a wobble worth watching. SafeWise’s figures show our violent crime rate at 0.7 per thousand in this year’s report, up from 0.2 in each of the two prior reports, with property crime down to 3.6 from 5.6 two years ago. No motor vehicle thefts were reported. Property crime falling while the population climbs is the harder achievement of the two, and it’s the one we got. The violent-crime uptick is off a very small base and should be read carefully, not dramatically.

Schools: good, and getting more uneven. Lamar CISD scored 87 out of 100 on the state’s accountability system for 2025-26 — a B, down one point from last year’s 88. Fulshear High School earned an A, as did Foster, George Ranch, Terry, and Tomas. Elsewhere in the district, three elementary campuses earned Ds. The district average is a B; the experience inside it ranges from an A to a D depending on which side of the district your child’s bus route is on. To be fair to Lamar CISD, holding an 87 while opening new campuses in the fastest-growing corner of the state is no small feat.

Health: county-strong, city-thin. Fort Bend County consistently scores as the healthiest county in the Houston region, with life expectancy estimated around 80 years, above the national figure. But Fulshear itself has no hospital inside the city limits. Full-service hospitals are in Katy, Richmond, and Sugar Land; the nearest emergency care center sits out on FM 1093 near Cinco Rose. For a city of this size, that gap is the single largest hole in our health infrastructure.

Time: our worst number, and nobody ranks it. The Census Bureau puts the mean travel time to work for Fulshear workers at 37.8 minutes, one way. The national average is a little under 27 minutes. That eleven-minute gap, doubled and multiplied across a working year, comes to roughly 300 hours — about twelve and a half days a year that a median Fulshear commuter spends in a car and a median American commuter does not.

No “best places to live” list I have found weights that the way a household living it would.

Parks and open space: the gap we voted to close. When the city campaigned for the $13.5 million parks bond in May 2025, Fulshear had roughly 55 acres of public parkland. Voters approved both propositions by two-thirds margins. Primrose Park is now 25 acres and growing, with Phase 3 and an 11.5-acre Bessie’s Creek Park in the plan. The parkland dedication ordinance requires one acre for every 60 dwelling units, or $350 per unit in cash — which means a developer can buy out of an acre for $21,000 in a market where the city just paid roughly $375,000 an acre on Dixon Road. That arithmetic is why the bond was necessary.

Civic engagement: the weakest category we have. Every serious index counts this. In May, one of our council districts was decided by a winning vote total equal to 1.37 percent of the residents that seat now represents, and several races drew no challenger at all. Whatever else Fulshear’s quality of life is, it is not currently being determined by a broadly participating electorate.

Belonging: real, and genuinely hard to measure. About 11 percent of residents lived somewhere else a year ago. Thirty-one percent are foreign-born, and 38 percent speak a language other than English at home. Eight percent are 65 or older. A community that adds a Fulshear-sized town every few years has to manufacture belonging deliberately, because it isn’t inherited. Whether we’re succeeding is exactly the kind of question dashboards can’t answer, but churches, Rotary clubs, Little League, and the historical association can.

The honest complication

A selection effect underlies most of these numbers, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

A city with a 1.6 percent poverty rate has that rate partly because of the price of admission. Our income, education, insurance, and homeownership figures describe who could move here at least as much as they describe what living here does for people. That doesn’t make the numbers false. It means a high quality-of-life score partly measures the residents and only partly measures the place.

The things that are genuinely attributable to the place — the schools, the police department, the parks, the drainage, the road capacity, the fact that our commute is eleven minutes above the national average — are the ones the city can actually change.

The bottom line

The relevant question is never whether Fulshear ranks well. On most published measures, we do, and we will keep doing so for as long as the people moving here keep arriving with the incomes and degrees that generate those rankings.

The relevant question is whether the things a ranking can’t see are being built as fast as the houses. Whether the commute gets worse before the road capacity arrives. Whether parkland per resident rises or falls while the denominator doubles. Whether a hospital ever comes inside the city limits. Whether the next council seat is decided by 109 votes or by 1,090.

Those are budget questions, every one of them, and the budget is on the table right now. Council is working through the proposed FY2027 budget and a five-year capital plan of roughly $332 million, with hearings running through September and adoption required before the fiscal year starts October 1. I’m walking through that plan installment by installment in Following the $332 Million.

If you want a quality-of-life score for your own street rather than the whole city, the AARP Livability Index will give you one by address, free, and let you set the weights yourself. Try it, then tell me which category you weighted highest. I’d like to know what my neighbors actually value — that’s a number no index publishes.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, Fulshear city, Texas (V2025 population estimates; 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates for income, housing, commute, education, insurance, and household characteristics); U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 city population estimates; Spectrum News, “Census ranks Fulshear, TX as the second-fastest growing U.S. city,” June 2, 2026; SafeWise, “Texas’s Safest Cities of 2026”; Fort Bend Herald, Lamar CISD 2025-26 TEA accountability results, August 2026; Community Impact, Lamar CISD and Katy ISD accountability coverage; County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, Fort Bend County; U.S. News Healthiest Communities; AARP Public Policy Institute, Livability Index methods and sources; OECD Better Life Index; City of Fulshear Parks and Pathways Master Plan and 2025 bond materials; Community Impact, Fulshear Primrose Park land acquisition, May 14, 2026; and my own prior reporting in “The Rulebook and the City,” “The 109-Vote Council,” and Following the $332 Million.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

A reader asked what outdoor recreation exists in and around town. The honest answer has two halves — there is a great deal, and the city owns almost none of it. Here is the full inventory, plus what’s coming and how to weigh in.

Every so often a reader asks me some version of a hard question. This week’s sounded easy: what is there to do outdoors in and around Fulshear?

I started to answer in a paragraph. Then I went and counted.

In 2020, the Census counted 16,856 people in Fulshear. The Bureau’s 2025 estimate puts the city near 64,600. In the summer of 2024, when city staff were building the case for a parks bond, Assistant Public Works Director Tiffany Stodder told council that Fulshear had roughly 55 acres of parkland, and that this put us behind comparable cities.

Both of those numbers are true at the same time, and holding them together explains nearly everything about recreation here.

There is a lot to do outside in Fulshear. Most of it is not the city’s.

What the city actually owns

Four places, and the list is short enough to read in one breath.

Frances Smart Park, at 7926 FM 359 just north of downtown, is 0.87 acres — a triangle of live oaks with a gazebo, picnic tables, grills, and the relocated Switch House. It is the smallest civic park you will ever see punch above its weight, largely because of where it sits.

Irene Stern Park and Community Center, at 6920 Fulshear Katy Road, cover about 2.2 acres. There’s a playground, a pollinator and butterfly garden that earned a nod from the Houston-Galveston Area Council back in 2015, restrooms, picnic areas, and roughly 5,000 square feet of indoor meeting space that remains the only city-owned venue of its kind.

Eagle Landing Park, at 4131 Woods Road in Tamarron West, is the newest of the older set: 26 acres with three full-size and ten youth soccer fields, a playground, a 2,000-square-foot concession and restroom building, a walking trail, and parking. It’s worth understanding how it got there. A municipal utility district built it — at an estimated $4.69 million — and donated it to the city under a developer agreement. Fulshear did not buy it. Fulshear accepted it.

Primrose Park, at 7622 Dixon Road, is the one that finally moved. The site is about 25 acres: fifteen purchased with park dedication fees, ten donated by Sig and Patricia Cornelius, longtime residents who wanted baseball in Fulshear. Phase 1 — a walking trail and a gravel lot — began in 2019. Phase 2 opened June 13, 2026, after a weather delay pushed it from May: four lighted baseball and softball fields, a concession and restroom building, more parking, and the stormwater detention the site required. The expansion ran about $5.5 million. Council has since recognized Fulshear Little League as the official association for programming there.

One practical note that gets lost in the ballfield coverage: the Primrose walking trail is open to anyone, whether or not you have a kid in a uniform.

The part most people actually use

If you live in Fulshear and you walked this morning, you almost certainly walked on something a developer built.

The master plan counts roughly 123 miles of sidewalks and multi-use pathways in and around the city, and states plainly that they are “primarily located within new residential developments.” Cross Creek Ranch alone — 3,200 acres — has more than 28 miles of trails, over 20 parks, a 50-acre polishing pond with a boardwalk and nature overlook, and a disc golf course threading along Flewellen Creek from Arbor Park on Morgans Spur Drive. Fulbrook on Fulshear Creek maintains natural trails in its southeastern section that reach Bessie’s Creek. Fulshear Run, Jordan Ranch, Tamarron, Firethorne, Churchill Farms, and Candela all have their own systems.

Here is the mechanism, because it matters more than the acreage.

Fulshear adopted a park land dedication ordinance in 2013 requiring one acre of park land per 60 dwelling units in new residential development, with a negotiated cash-in-lieu option. That ordinance is how the city got the money for fifteen acres of Primrose and how it received the 11.5 acres at Bessie’s Creek. But it didn't build Adventure Island or the trail network in Cross Creek Ranch. Those came from the developers’ own amenity programs, financed through home prices and maintained through annual HOA dues, and they are scoped, by design, to the people who pay them.

To be fair to the HOAs: this is exactly what residents bought. Nobody was misled. And the master plan is candid that the city’s job is to complement those amenities rather than duplicate them — HOAs don’t build sports complexes, event lawns, or connections between neighborhoods.

But it does produce a strange result. Fulshear looks amenity-rich and park-poor at the same time, and both descriptions are accurate depending on your address. The relevant question was never whether Fulshear has enough trails. It’s whether the trails near you are ones you’re allowed to use.

The 2018 master plan survey asked residents where they actually go for recreation. Katy came first at 71.9 percent. HOA facilities came second at 58.9 percent. Fulshear’s own parks came in at 20.1 percent. That’s eight-year-old data, taken before Eagle Landing and before Primrose had a single ballfield, and I’d expect the numbers have moved. I would not expect them to have flipped.

The best public trail in town runs beside a highway

Texas Heritage Parkway is 6.4 miles of four-lane boulevard from FM 1093 north to I-10 at Pederson Road, built with roundabouts instead of signals through a partnership among private landowners (about half the roughly $55 million cost), Fort Bend County, and the cities of Fulshear and Katy.

It also carries a 10-foot multi-use trail, with lighted pedestrian tunnels running beneath the roundabouts so walkers and cyclists never have to cross traffic.

It is not a nature experience. It is a paved path next to moving cars. It is also continuous, well-lit, genuinely public, and the closest thing Fulshear has to a spine.

Road cycling has been a Fulshear tradition for well over a decade — riders come out from Houston for the quiet country roads west and south of town, and the 2018 focus groups estimated 200 to 500 cyclists in Fulshear on a given Saturday. The same focus groups flagged the obvious problem: FM 359 and FM 1093 have narrow shoulders and growing traffic. That tension hasn’t resolved.

Prairie, creek, and birds

Two of the best outdoor experiences in our area are free, quiet, and almost nobody uses them.

Williams Prairie is an 11-acre remnant just north of town that has never been plowed. It became the Coastal Prairie Conservancy’s first conservation easement in 1997 and was later donated by the Williams family. A mowed trail winds through native grasses and depressional wetlands. It’s open every day, dawn to dusk, with on-street parking off Hepplewhite Drive and no restrooms, so plan accordingly.

The Indiangrass Preserve and Katy Prairie Welcome Center, at 31950 Hebert Road in Waller, opened its renovated Welcome Center on April 10, 2026 — a gateway to a preserve system of more than 19,000 acres. The Ann Hamilton Trail runs 1.5 miles and the South Trail another 1.3. Admission is free. It’s open Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with extended hours the first weekend of every month. Two rules worth knowing before you drive out: foot traffic only, and no pets, because the scent of a domestic animal keeps grassland birds off the habitat.

I wrote about both of these at more length in Bessie’s Creek, and the 2026 Prairie Openings, along with the argument that engineered detention and preserved prairie do the same hydrological work.

Which brings up the gap. Bessie’s Creek Park — 11.5 acres in the floodplain along the creek through Fulshear Lakes, planned for a trail loop, boardwalk, pier, fitness stations, and native plantings — is not built. The master plan priced it at $816,547 in April 2025. The estimate the city is working from this summer is about $1.1 million. It remains the most interesting unbuilt park in Fulshear.

Within an hour’s drive

• Jones Creek Ranch Park, 7714 FM 359 in Richmond. A 112-acre county park straight down 359 from us, with a lake that Texas Parks and Wildlife stocks with catfish, trout, and bass, plus disc golf, two softball fields, basketball and volleyball courts, horseshoe pits, playgrounds, and eight rentable facilities including a lodge and bunkhouses.

• Paul D. Rushing Park, 9114 Katy Hockley Road. 232 acres of Harris County Precinct 4 prairie with about two miles of paved, ADA-accessible trail through shallow lakes, six observation bird blinds, a dog park, and cricket and softball fields. It sits on the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail and earns that designation during fall migration.

• George Bush Park, in the Barker Reservoir. Roughly 7,800 acres, more than eleven miles of paved and dirt trail, equestrian areas, model airplane fields, ponds, a dog park, and a public shooting range.

• Stephen F. Austin State Park, at San Felipe. 663 acres of bottomland hardwood on the Brazos, five-plus miles of easy trail, camping from primitive to full hookup, and a $5 day-use fee for anyone 13 and up. Park improvements are underway through September 2026, so call ahead before you load the car.

• Brazos Bend State Park, near Needville. 4,897 acres, more than 35 miles of trail, over 300 bird species, and the alligators that make it famous. The Houston Museum of Natural Science runs the George Observatory, which opens Saturday evenings with separate advance tickets; park entry is $7 per person 13 and up and is not included. No swimming, for reasons that should be obvious.

On golf: Weston Lakes Country Club, the 1986 Hale Irwin and Carlton Gipson course on FM 1093, is the only course inside Fulshear, and it is private. As of this writing, the nearest regularly public play is in Katy — the Golf Club at Cinco Ranch, with Meadowbrook Farms semi-private — or out at the Stephen F. Austin Golf Club beside the state park. The 2018 focus groups complained about exactly this. Nothing has changed.

And every Saturday morning, year-round, the Fulshear Farmers’ Market runs 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 9035 Bois d’Arc Lane at FM 1093. It’s been going since 2014, carries 90-plus vendors, everything grown or made within 200 miles, and it’s free. It isn’t recreation in the parks department sense. It's reliably where the town stands around outdoors together.

What’s coming, and what it costs

Voters already answered part of this question. On May 3, 2025, Fulshear approved a $13.5 million parks bond in two propositions: $10.75 million for Primrose Park Phase 3, which passed with 66 percent, and $2.75 million for park land acquisition, which passed with 67 percent. In May 2026, council used some of that second bucket to buy 4.14 acres on Dixon Road from Living Word Lutheran Church for $1.5 million, folding it into Primrose.

Phase 3 is scheduled for late 2027 and will turn Primrose from a ballfield complex into a park: an amphitheater, walking trails, a playground, an outdoor education pavilion, a food truck court, and open space. Also on the priority list are the Irene Stern renovation — two tennis courts, two pickleball courts, a basketball court, a pavilion, and a nature playground, at roughly $4 million — and the Frances Smart rebuild with a veterans memorial and event plaza, at roughly $2.1 million. The full pathway master plan, which would connect all of this, carries an opinion of probable cost of around $22.1 million.

And 31 miles west, the 1093 Rails to Trails project continues its slow conversion of the old San Antonio & Aransas Pass corridor into a shared-use trail from Fulshear to Eagle Lake. I covered where that stands two weeks ago.

Residents have been consistent about what they want. The city’s 2024 survey drew 953 responses between August and October. Trails finished first: 43.9 percent put them in their top three desired features, and 50.9 percent called them very important to their family. Tennis courts followed at 30.4 percent and pickleball at 23.9. Asked what type of parkland the city should develop next, respondents chose community parks (48.6 percent) and trails (48.2 percent) ahead of sports fields (42.8 percent) and natural areas (40.0 percent).

One honest caveat about the planning documents themselves. The March 2025 “selective update” to the Parks and Pathways Master Plan still carries inventory tables built on a 2017 population estimate of 10,290 residents and a developed city park supply of 3.07 acres. Its conclusion — that Fulshear needs somewhere between 64 and 108 acres of developed park space to meet national benchmarks — was calculated against a city one-sixth the size of today’s. Whatever the gap is now, that document understates it.

The part where you get a vote

The Parks and Recreation Commission meets the second Friday of every month at 9 a.m. in the council chamber at City Hall, 6611 W Cross Creek Bend Lane. The meetings are open, and they are where park concepts get shaped before they ever reach council.

The larger conversation is happening right now. Facilities and parks account for about $46 million of the $332 million five-year capital plan in the proposed FY2027 budget, and that budget stays a standing council agenda item through September, with hearings before adoption ahead of the October 1 fiscal year.

So here is the reframe I’d offer the reader who asked. Fulshear is not short on places to be outside. Between the HOA trail systems, a parkway with a real path beside it, two prairie preserves, a county park down FM 359, and two state parks inside an hour, this is a better place to spend a Saturday morning than most suburbs its age.

What Fulshear is short on is public ground — the kind that belongs to you because you live here, not because of which subdivision you bought into. Four small city parks and one new ballfield complex, for a city that has roughly quadrupled since the last census count.

That’s a fixable problem, and the city is finally spending money on it. The question is whether the pace matches the growth. That gets decided in a room on Cross Creek Bend Lane, and it happens faster when people show up.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Every subdivision you’ll ever drive past began as a stack of documents on a desk in Planning Services. Meet the department that processes Fulshear’s future — and learn which decisions residents can still influence, and which ones are already spoken for.

Somewhere in the Municipal Complex right now, on a desk in the Planning Services department, sits a stack of paper that is — legally speaking — a neighborhood. It has streets nobody has driven, lots nobody has mowed, and utility easements nobody will ever think about again after this month. In a few years it will have a name ending in Creek, Ranch, or Lakes, and the people who live there will have strong opinions about the next stack of paper.

This is the first stop in our growth-and-development arc, the longest in this series — fittingly, for the fastest-growing story in Texas. I’ve written before, in “A City of Rooftops,” about why Fulshear’s boom is so hard to manage: the fiscal math of residential growth and the tools the legislature has taken off the table. This post is about something more concrete: the department where the boom actually lands, one application at a time.

What they actually do

Planning Services, led by Planning Director Josh Brothers, is really four operations sharing a hallway.

Planning handles the big-picture work: zoning cases, plats, site plans — the paperwork pipeline every development moves through, which we’ll walk in a moment.

Building and permits is “the first point of contact for new construction” in Fulshear — every new home, every commercial building, and every renovation big enough to matter. Chief Building Official Richard Valicek’s team reviews plans against the city’s adopted construction codes, and contractors working in the city must register with the department and carry a million dollars in liability insurance. That registration requirement, incidentally, is a consumer-protection feature hiding in plain sight: a contractor who won’t pull a Fulshear permit because they’re “not registered here” has just told you something useful about them.

Inspections sends people like Senior Building Inspector Mike Pruett into the field to check the work at each construction phase — foundation, framing, electrical, final. This is the part of government that stands between you and the corner-cutting you can’t see behind your own drywall.

And then the surprise: this department also inspects restaurant kitchens. Health services — food establishment permits, mobile food unit rules, temporary event food safety — lives here too, under Senior Environmental Health Specialist Jessika Villarreal. The same department that approves the shopping center later decides whether its taqueria’s walk-in cooler passes muster. When you eat out in Fulshear without incident, this hallway is partly why.

The pipeline: how a field becomes a subdivision

This post explains the mechanism, because misunderstanding it produces most of the frustration I see at public meetings.

Development approval in Texas is a sequence, and the steps are not equally open to influence.

1. Zoning decides what may be built on a piece of land — houses, shops, apartments, nothing. This is a discretionary decision: the Planning & Zoning Commission recommends, the council votes, and public opinion is not only welcome but structurally invited, through notices and hearings.

2. Platting divides land into lots and dedicates streets and easements. Here’s what most residents don’t know: plat approval is largely ministerial. Under state law, if a plat complies with the city’s adopted regulations, the city must approve it — and Texas’s 2019 “shot clock” law gives cities roughly 30 days to act before approval can happen by operation of law. A plat hearing is not a referendum on whether the development should exist. Zoning answered that question, sometimes years earlier.

3. Site plans, permits, and inspections then check the actual construction against the actual rules — technical review, not policy debate.

So the reframe, and it’s the single most useful sentence in this post: by the time a development is visible enough to be angry about, the decision you wanted to influence is usually two steps behind you. The moment of maximum resident leverage is the zoning case — and, further upstream still, the comprehensive plan and development regulations that constrain everything after. Show up angry at a plat hearing, and the system can only shrug; the staff isn’t being dismissive, they’re being lawful. Show up at a rezoning hearing, or when the comprehensive plan is revised, and you’re standing exactly where the levers are.

A department like this one, in other words, spends much of its public-facing life absorbing frustration aimed at decisions it doesn’t own. The zoning belongs to the council. The state owns the shot clock. What Planning Services owns is the rigor of the review — and in a city processing Fulshear’s volume of growth, rigor at this desk is the difference between a boom and a mess.

Where you’ll meet them (sooner than you think)

You don’t need to be a developer to encounter this department. Add a pool, a patio cover, a water heater, an electrical panel — you likely need a permit. Homeowners are sometimes tempted to skip it; beyond the $350 fine for unpermitted work, the real cost usually surfaces at resale, when a buyer’s inspector asks for permits that don’t exist. The department publishes a permit fee calculator online, and you can reach the counter at permits@fulsheartexas.gov or (281) 346-1796. In my experience, the cheapest sentence in home renovation is “let me check if this needs a permit” — asked before.

Code enforcement — the complaint-driven cousin that handles overgrown lots and junk vehicles — also runs through this department, though it’s distinct enough that it gets its own profile later in this arc.

Your move

Two practical suggestions. First, when a rezoning notice shows up near you — the sign on the fence line, the letter if you’re within notification distance — treat it as the main event, not a formality. That hearing decides things. Second, for the civically ambitious: the next post covers the Planning & Zoning Commission, the citizen body that hears those cases first — and its seats are filled by ordinary residents who applied.

The future is arriving at that desk either way. The only question is how many residents are in the room when it’s stamped.

Next time: the seven residents who see Fulshear’s future before you do — the Planning & Zoning Commission, and what its recommendation actually means.

Renovating something? Fighting a rezoning? Reply and tell me about it — reader experiences with the permit counter and the hearing room will shape this arc. And share this one with a neighbor before the next sign goes up on a fence line near you.

Sources: City of Fulshear — Planning Services pages (fulsheartexas.gov); Texas Local Government Code ch. 212 (platting; HB 3167 shot clock, 2019); About Fulshear, “A City of Rooftops.” Details verified July 2026 — confirm current information at fulsheartexas.gov or (281) 346-1796.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

The county’s big semiquincentennial celebration lands November 21 at the Fort Bend Museum, free and open to everyone. Here’s what’s planned, why it matters to Fulshear, and the opening it creates for our own historical organizations.

Every community gets a handful of chances to tell its story to a bigger audience. Most of them arrive unannounced. This one comes with a date on the calendar.

On Saturday, November 21, the Fort Bend County Historical Commission will host “Turning 250: Fort Bend County Celebrates the American Journey” at the Fort Bend Museum in Richmond, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. If that sounds familiar, it should — I flagged this event back in June when the county first announced it. Now, with the date roughly three months out, it’s worth a closer look at what the day will actually hold and, just as important, what it offers the people doing historical work here in Fulshear.

What’s happening on November 21

America turns 250 on July 4, 2026 — the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, if you want the term you’ll see on the commemorative merchandise. Communities across the country are marking the milestone all year, and “Turning 250” is Fort Bend County’s centerpiece event.

The county’s plans call for local museums and cultural organizations, historical re-enactors portraying figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Davy Crockett, musical and dance performances, and hands-on activities — a full day of programming, not a ribbon-cutting. The Historical Commission has also scheduled it alongside Richmond’s annual Pecan Harvest Festival, just down the street, so a single Saturday trip gets you both.

The venue is the Fort Bend Museum at 500 Houston Street in historic Richmond, about twenty minutes from Fulshear — closer than most of the places we drive for entertainment without thinking twice.

Two organizations, one confusingly similar name

A quick mechanism note, because the names trip people up. The Fort Bend County Historical Commission is the volunteer body appointed by the county to preserve and promote Fort Bend’s history — it’s the host of this event. The Fort Bend History Association is a separate private nonprofit, and it operates the Fort Bend Museum itself, along with sites like the Moore Home and the DeWalt Heritage Center. For the History Association, November 21 means a full day of county-wide foot traffic through its front door — the kind of exposure a small museum spends years working toward.

And that’s exactly why the day matters for Fulshear.

The opening for Fulshear

The county’s own description of the event — a showcase of “local museums and cultural organizations” — is an open door, and the Fulshear Historical Association is precisely the kind of organization it was built for.

If you’ve followed the association’s work — digitizing archives, documenting cemeteries, inventorying historic structures, keeping the story of this town from slipping away as tens of thousands of new neighbors arrive — you know it does serious work with a small footprint. What it rarely gets is a venue full of history-minded people from across the county in a single day. A table, a display, a stack of maps, a volunteer who can explain what a freedom colony is: that’s how a local organization turns a county event into new members, new donors, and new people who simply know it exists.

To be fair, I should note what I don’t know: I haven’t seen a confirmed list of participating organizations, and neither the association’s website nor the county’s has published one. Consider this less a report than a nudge — to the organizations, and to readers who belong to them.

The connection isn’t just organizational. It’s historical. Fulshear’s origins run straight through the story this event is built to tell — Churchill Fulshear arrived as one of Stephen F. Austin’s Old 300 colonists, and the freedom colonies established by formerly enslaved people after emancipation are part of this area’s fabric. When the county tells the story of “the American journey” in Fort Bend, Fulshear isn’t a footnote to it. It’s a chapter.

The city has its own America 250 page, too

Closer to home, the City of Fulshear’s Parks and Recreation department has been running its own “Celebrating America 250” programming. This summer that meant a pair of resident contests — a coloring contest for kids in kindergarten through fifth grade and a photo contest for residents 16 and up — with winners announced at the July 7 City Council meeting. The entries are still displayed on the city’s page, and it’s worth a scroll.

Contests aren’t a county-wide festival, but they’re the same instinct at a municipal scale: an invitation for residents to mark the milestone in their own voice. If the city adds more America 250 programming this fall, it will appear on that page.

If you go — or if you want in

The details, in one place: Saturday, November 21, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Fort Bend Museum, 500 Houston Street, Richmond. Free. For questions about the event, contact the Fort Bend County Historical Commission at (281) 342-1256.

And if you’re a member of a Fulshear organization — historical, cultural, or otherwise — that ought to have a presence there, the highest-leverage thing you can do this week is ask. The Historical Commission’s number is above; the Fulshear Historical Association is at info@fulshearhistory.org.

A 250th birthday only comes around once. The county has built the stage. The question for Fulshear is whether we’re in the audience that day — or part of the show.

Sources: Fort Bend County Historical Commission — America 250 Celebration, City of Fulshear — Celebrating America 250, Fulshear Historical Association, Fort Bend History Association

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Piper is not an energetic dog.

Most afternoons, she barely lifts her head when I step out onto the patio in our Fulshear backyard. So when I noticed her frozen—completely locked in on something under the patio furniture—I knew something was off.

She wasn’t barking. She wasn’t wagging. Just staring.

I followed her gaze and took a few careful steps closer, trying to see what had her so focused. At first, I didn’t notice anything—just shadows and the legs of the furniture.

And then it moved.

A slow, unmistakable shift beneath the chair.

Now, I’m Australian. I grew up around snakes, and one thing you learn pretty quickly is this: you treat every snake with caution.

But standing there in my backyard in Fulshear, that experience didn’t give me answers—it just made me more aware of what I didn’t know. Texas snakes aren’t the ones I grew up with.

My mind immediately started racing. Is it dangerous? How close is too close? What am I actually supposed to do here?

If you live around here, there’s a good chance you’ll have a moment like this at some point. And what I’ve realized is: knowing what to do doesn’t come naturally, but it can be simple. And it definitely doesn’t have to start with panic.

1. Pause and create distance

Stop moving toward it

Slowly back up to at least 6–10 feet away

Keep your movements calm and predictable

Most snakes aren’t interested in you—they just don’t want to feel threatened.

2. Get pets and kids out of the area

Call your dog back (this was my first priority with Piper)

Bring pets and children indoors right away

Don’t let curiosity turn into a closer encounter

3. Do not try to handle or kill it

This is where a lot of trouble happens.

Most snake bites occur when people try to interact with or kill the snake

Even a harmless snake can bite if it feels cornered

The safest interaction is no interaction.

4. Watch the snake’s behavior (not just how it looks)

You don’t need to be an expert in identification.

Instead, notice:

Is it moving away? → Great, let it go

Is it coiled or staying put? → Give it space and time

Is it near a hiding spot (bushes, fence line, furniture)? → It’s likely passing through

5. Give it time to leave

Most snakes will move on within minutes to a few hours

Your yard is usually just part of their route—not their destination

6. Call for help if something feels off

It’s completely okay to ask for help.

Consider calling local animal services if:

The snake is inside your home or garage

It hasn’t moved on after a while

You feel unsure or uncomfortable handling the situation

7. Take a breath—seriously

This part matters more than it sounds.

That initial adrenaline spike? Totally normal.
But once you pause, create space, and think through your steps, the situation becomes much more manageable.

One thing that helped me feel calmer afterward was understanding what’s actually out there.

In Texas, there are four venomous snakes you might hear people mention: copperheads, cottonmouths (water moccasins), rattlesnakes, and coral snakes. All of them exist in the broader region, and a couple—like copperheads—are more commonly talked about around areas like Fulshear.

But here’s the part I didn’t fully appreciate at first: most snakes you’ll come across are harmless.

Rat snakes, water snakes, and garter snakes are far more likely visitors in a backyard setting, and they’re not interested in anything other than finding food and moving on.

The tricky part is that if you’re not used to identifying them (and I definitely wasn’t with Texas species), it’s not always obvious what you’re looking at in the moment.

And that’s exactly why the best approach isn’t to rely on quick identification—but to treat every snake encounter with the same calm caution. Give it space, avoid interaction, and let it move on.

Once I stopped feeling like I needed to instantly “figure it out,” the whole situation got a lot less stressful.

After that experience, I found myself thinking less about “how do I avoid snakes entirely?” and more about something a little more realistic: how do I make encounters like that less likely—and a lot less stressful when they do happen?

Because the truth is, living in Fulshear, you’re never completely separate from wildlife. Neighborhoods back up to open land, ponds, and green spaces. Snakes are just part of that ecosystem.

What is in your control, though, is how inviting your space is to them.

I started to notice the little things, like how easy it is for a yard to become a perfect resting spot without you realizing it. Longer grass, overgrown edges, or shaded areas under furniture can create exactly the kind of cover a snake is looking for. Keeping things trimmed back and visible doesn’t eliminate the possibility, but it does make your yard far less appealing as a place to stop and linger.

The same goes for clutter. Piles of wood, unused materials, or tucked-away corners can feel harmless, but they double as shelter for all kinds of wildlife. That moment with Piper happened under patio furniture is a reminder that even ordinary spaces can become hiding spots.

Another thing I hadn’t really thought about before is how indirect the attraction can be. Snakes aren’t showing up because of anything you’re doing—they’re following food. If your yard attracts rodents, it can quietly become part of that food chain. Simple things like securing trash, avoiding pet food left outside, and keeping things tidy can make a difference over time.

It also changed how I think about pest control. Some methods, like glue traps, can seem convenient—but they’re often unnecessarily cruel and can harm more than just the intended target. Taking a more thoughtful approach to managing pests not only feels better, it also supports a healthier, more balanced environment overall.

I also took a closer look at the house itself, especially around the garage and fence lines. Not in an obsessive way, just noticing where there might be small gaps or easy entry points. It doesn’t take much space for something to get through, and sealing obvious openings adds a little extra peace of mind.

But the biggest shift for me wasn’t anything physical, it was mindset.

You can do everything “right” and still see a snake occasionally. And that’s not a sign something is wrong—it’s just part of living in this environment.

What changed for me is that it stopped feeling like a crisis waiting to happen, and more like something I understood how to handle.

For the snake on my back patio, a non-venomous western rate snake, I gently relocated it to grassy area along the Brazos River.

Later that evening, Piper got a little extra meat in her dinner—part reward, part thank you for paying attention when it mattered.

By the next day, she was back to her usual self: stretched out in the backyard, conserving energy, only occasionally springing into action if a squirrel made a questionable decision.

And honestly, that’s how I want to feel about snakes here, too. Not constantly on edge, not overreacting, just aware enough to notice when something’s off, and calm enough to handle it when it is.

Because in a place like Fulshear, these moments are going to happen. But they don’t have to turn into panic. With a little awareness and a simple plan, they can just become part of the rhythm of living here, something you notice, handle, and then get on with your day.

About the Author: Sarah Johnson is a longtime Fulshear resident and currently serves as Mayor Pro Tem and District 1 Council Member for the City of Fulshear. An Australian native, Sarah has called Fulshear home for more than 13 years and became involved in local government through issues affecting her own neighborhood. When she isn't tackling city business, apparently she can also be found negotiating unexpected backyard encounters with Texas wildlife, with a little help from Piper.

Thousands of planned homes, a boutique hotel, a Home Depot, and miles of new pipe are converging on the ground between FM 1093 and I-10. Here’s what’s actually being built out there — and why the money arrived years before the rooftops.

Texas Heritage Parkway is a 6.4-mile, four-lane boulevard running from I-10 down to just south of FM 1093, threaded with roundabouts instead of traffic signals. For most of its short life, it has felt like a road built for a city that didn’t exist yet — a wide, landscaped corridor through land that still reads, in places, as pasture. If you’ve driven it and wondered who exactly it was for, the answer is now arriving, all at once.

Covering Katy News recently published a useful survey of the corridor, and the individual items will sound familiar to regular readers: Heritage Bend, Fulshear Central, Belmont Estates, the Home Depot at FM 1093 and FM 1463. What the piece captures — and what I want to unpack here — is that these are not four separate stories. They are one story, and it’s the same story I told in “The Financialization of Dirt”: capital commits to land years before anyone lives on it, infrastructure follows the capital, and rooftops come last. The corridor is where that sequence is now playing out in public, project by project.

What’s actually being built

Start with the biggest number. Heritage Bend is nearly 3,000 acres in unincorporated Fort Bend County, announced by Hines in January 2025, planned for more than 7,000 homes with eight builders signed on. The first neighborhood—an 188-acre Highland Homes section with 554 homes planned—broke ground on July 9. Infrastructure is expected to wrap by the end of this year, with the first homesites ready and sales anticipated in early 2027. The master plan also includes the corridor’s next road move: Hines will push the parkway farther south through the property, carrying it beyond the Westpark Tollway toward Winner-Foster Road as the community builds out.

Fulshear Central, the mixed-use project under construction on the south side of FM 1093 between Bois d’Arc Lane and Texas Heritage Parkway, is now underway. At roughly 125,000 square feet, it is the corridor’s commercial down payment: shops and offices, the boutique hotel, and a new connector street tying FM 1093 through to McKinnon Road.

Belmont Estates, a large-lot residential development, got an amended plat for its 109-acre first section approved by City Council on July 21 (6-0, with one abstention). The plat anticipates a future road extending east toward the parkway.

And then there’s the Home Depot — a big-box store of roughly 134,000 square feet planned near FM 1093 and FM 1463, representing more than $38 million in land and construction. On August 4, council voted 5-2 to reject the Chapter 380 incentive agreement — a sales-tax rebate that would have returned 25% of the city’s 1% sales tax for up to five years, capped at $2 million and estimated by staff at roughly $500,000. I wrote about that deal at length before the vote; what matters for this piece is what didn’t change with the rejection. The store site’s water, wastewater, and drainage infrastructure had already been built — by the municipal utility district — before council ever weighed in. As Mayor Pro Tem Sarah Johnson put it that night: “We do want Home Depot in Fulshear.”

Homes, shops, a hotel, a big-box anchor.

The corridor is no longer a road in search of a city.

The dirt was financed first

Here is the pattern worth noticing across all four projects, because it’s the same one I described in “The Financialization of Dirt” and in the Heritage Bend series: by the time you see construction equipment, the important decisions are years old.

Heritage Bend is the cleanest example. Eight builders will sell the homes, but the builders are, in a real sense, customers — Hines assembled and entitled the land, and a municipal utility district finances the pipes and pavement, including the $129 million bond authorization I covered in “Heritage Bend’s $129M MUD Bond — and Who Pays for It.” The parkway extension through the property isn’t a public works afterthought; it’s part of what makes 3,000 acres of dirt worth developing. The road creates the land value, the MUD monetizes it, and future homeowners’ tax bills service the debt.

You can see the same machinery at a smaller scale in the Covering Katy piece if you know where to look. Belmont Estates’ amended plat came with utility strings attached — terms formalized last December in an amended utility agreement among the city, Fulshear Municipal Utility District No. 4, and the developer. The city secured a 12-inch water line — bigger than the subdivision alone requires, sized for firefighting flow and the long-term health of the water system — running up from Fulshear Lake Trace to Belmont’s southern entrance at Bois d’Arc, and it must be in the ground no later than Phase II. Engineers also redrew the sewer plan after finding a shorter, more direct path into the city’s system. The Home Depot site, as noted, had its utilities built by a MUD before the incentive debate even started.

None of this is a scandal. It is simply how master-planned Texas gets built, and it has one important implication for how residents should think about the corridor: most of what will happen along Texas Heritage Parkway was decided in capital structures years ago — what the city still controls is the terms on which that growth connects to Fulshear’s systems.

The tollway is the fuse

If the corridor is the powder, the Westpark Tollway extension is the fuse. The first two miles opened on February 28 — well ahead of the contractual completion date of November 3 — and the remaining stretch of the four-mile, nearly $72 million extension to Charger Way is expected to open this month, adding two toll lanes in each direction along FM 1093 and letting through traffic bypass the signals at the major cross streets.

I made the argument in “The August Inflection Point” that the full opening moves neighborhoods along this corridor across the commute-time threshold that changes who shops for a house here, so I won’t repeat it. The short version: the tollway doesn’t just relieve congestion for the people already here. It enlarges the pool of people who will consider moving here — and every project in this piece was underwritten on that assumption. Heritage Bend’s groundbreaking on July 9 and the tollway’s completion in August landing within weeks of each other is not a coincidence. It’s a schedule.

The honest concerns — and the real question

The reasonable reaction to “7,000 more homes” is some version of: can the roads, schools, and pipes handle it? That concern is legitimate, and I’d point anyone asking it to the budget series running in this newsletter now — the city’s proposed five-year capital plan runs roughly $332 million, and its single largest slice, about $126 million, is wastewater, including a South FM 1093 gravity line that serves precisely this part of the map. Sewer capacity, as I argued in that installment, is the real ceiling on growth. The corridor is why.

But there’s a framing trap here, and it’s the same one from the Home Depot debate. The relevant question is never whether Fulshear can stop the corridor from growing. It can’t — Heritage Bend sits in unincorporated Fort Bend County, outside the city’s limits and largely outside its authority, and the tollway is a county project. The relevant question is whether growth happens on terms the city helps write: utility agreements with conditions like Belmont’s water line, plats that reserve road connections to the parkway, capital plans that put the pipes where the people are coming. That’s the leverage Fulshear actually holds, and to be fair to council and staff, the record in this piece — the plat conditions, the utility amendments, the capital plan — shows them using it.

What to watch

Three things will tell you how fast this corridor matures. First, the tollway’s full opening and what happens to FM 1093 traffic counts afterward. Second, Heritage Bend’s cadence: model homes and first sales in early 2027 will mark the moment the corridor’s financing thesis meets actual buyers. Third — and this is the one you can influence — the budget hearings running through September, where the $332 million capital plan that has to keep pace with all of this gets adopted. The budget is a standing item at regular council meetings until then. If you’ve ever wanted to understand where the next Fulshear is coming from, the corridor is the map, and the budget is the price tag.

Go look at both. And if you know a neighbor wondering what all those roundabouts are for, share this with them.

Sources: Covering Katy, “Fulshear’s next growth corridor takes shape around Texas Heritage Parkway”; Covering Katy, “Westpark Tollway Extension Opens First Segment Saturday in Fulshear”; Covering Katy, “Heritage Bend takes shape as first neighborhood construction begins”; and prior About Fulshear, Texas coverage: “The Financialization of Dirt”, “Heritage Bend: Eight Builders, One Developer, One Financial Sponsor”, “Heritage Bend’s $129M MUD Bond — and Who Pays for It”, “The August Inflection Point”, and the “Following the $332 Million” budget series.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Two weeks ago I told you the number on council’s desk would be $0.19310 per $100 of value. On Tuesday, August 18, council made it official, but not before a two-hour discussion that was the most candid look yet at where Fulshear’s money comes from, where it’s going, and why the easy years are ending.

If you’ve followed this series, you know the premise: the budget is the one document where every other decision the city makes becomes real. Tuesday was the night it started becoming real for your tax bill. This is the installment I promised on the tax rate, the M&O-versus-I&S story, and it turns out the vote was only half of it.

First, the new fact that changed the room

Before anyone talked rates, Finance Director Angela Alvarado walked council through Fort Bend County's certified appraisal roll. The city’s total taxable value is now roughly $5.55 billion, up about 6.2 percent from last year. A year ago, the increase was closer to 12 percent.

The more telling figure is new construction. Last year, new property added about $375 million to the tax roll. This year it added about $180 million, less than half. Council Member Udakar did the division out loud: new growth is only about 3.25 percent of the existing base.

“We are kind of reaching that point of maturation,” Alvarado said. City Manager Zach Goodlander added that the slowdown shows up twice, once in property value and again in development revenue, the permits, inspections, and licenses that new construction pays for.

Mayor McCoy asked the question everyone was thinking: does this mean we’ll soon stop being the fastest-growing city in America? “Probably so,” Goodlander said.

That single slide reframes the whole budget. For years, Fulshear has held its tax rate nearly flat while the city grew underneath it, because new rooftops paid for new services. Council Member Pena put it plainly: “We’ve been fortunate the last few years that we’ve been able to grow to kind of sustain our current government.” That cushion, to borrow a word that would get argued about later, is shrinking.

How a tax rate is built (the part that makes the rest make sense)

Fulshear’s rate has two halves, and they behave very differently.

The I&S half, for interest and sinking, is debt service. It covers the MUD reimbursements the city owes under its development agreements, the interlocal agreements with the county for road projects, and starting this year, the payments on the $13.5 million parks bond voters approved in May 2025. The city has to pay its debts, so this half is essentially fixed. It comes off the top.

The M&O half, for maintenance and operations, is everything else: police, streets, parks mowing, staff. Whatever total rate council picks, the debt gets subtracted first, and M&O is what’s left.

Here is the part that surprised me. Since 2020, Fulshear’s M&O rate has been compressing, from roughly 16 cents to about 11 cents today. That isn’t because the city got dramatically leaner. It’s because the debt half kept growing, and council kept choosing to hold the total rate down. M&O absorbed the squeeze.

The state sets two goalposts each year. The no-new-revenue rate is the rate that would raise the same dollars from the same properties as last year, a benchmark for comparison. The voter-approval rate is the ceiling: the no-new-revenue M&O rate plus 3.5 percent, plus the debt rate, plus any “unused increment.” That last term matters. When a city adopts a rate below its ceiling, it can bank the difference and use it within three years. Fulshear adopted $0.167903 last year against a ceiling near 19 cents, so it carried an increment into this year. If it goes above the ceiling, the rate goes to an election.

The four options, and what each one costs you

Alvarado laid out four rates against the current $0.167903. All of them share the same debt half, which rises from about 5.14 cents to about 6.83 cents. Udakar noted that over 90 percent of that 1.7-cent jump is the parks bond arriving on the books for the first time. Because the city sold those bonds at a true interest cost of about 4.3 percent instead of the 4.83 percent assumed on the ballot, the bond’s cost to a $400,000 home comes in at around $64 a year rather than the advertised $74.69.

The differences between the four options are all on the M&O side.

The no-new-revenue rate, $0.159522, would actually be lower than the current rate. It would leave the general fund roughly $1.7 million short of the budget council has been building since spring. Staff’s illustrative list of what that would take included not mowing the new parks, cutting street maintenance, and dropping every new position except police. Nobody on the dais entertained it. “I don’t think anybody up here is gonna vote for the no new revenue thing,” Council Member Miller said.

The “basic” voter-approval rate, about 18.4 cents, takes the 3.5 percent but leaves the banked increment untouched for a future year. It costs a $400,000 home about $65 more a year, and it leaves the budget about $275,000 short, which staff said would come out of the $400,000 in “strategic projects” already in the plan: $150,000 for parks, $100,000 for drainage, $100,000 for building repairs, and $50,000 for landscaping along the Westpark Tollway.

Staff recommended a rate of $0.19310 to support the preliminary budget. It uses about 43 percent of the banked increment, funds everything in the budget, and leaves roughly $235,000 of additional capacity on top of the $342,000 operating surplus. Staff estimates a $400,000 home costs about $100 more per year. The packet’s required taxpayer impact statement puts the median homestead’s increase at $139.81, or 17 percent, but that figure also reflects this year’s rise in appraised value; staff’s number holds the home’s value constant to isolate the rate.

The maximum voter-approval rate, $0.204901, uses the full increment. About $147 more on a $400,000 home, and about $912,000 in additional capacity, with reserves at 29 percent instead of the 25 percent target.

Two rules of thumb from Tuesday worth keeping: every penny on the rate is worth about $573,000 to the city and about $40 a year to a $400,000 home. And the break-even rate, the one that funds the budget as written with zero extra, is about 18.9 cents. The proposed rate sits four-tenths of a cent above that.

Why 25 percent keeps coming up

Miller asked Alvarado to explain, for the audience, why staff keeps anchoring on a 25 percent fund balance. The answer is three months of operating expenses in the bank: if revenue stopped tomorrow, the city could keep the lights on for a quarter. It is a best-practice number, not a law, but it feeds directly into the city’s credit rating, currently AA+. Udakar drew the line to the capital plan this series has been following: drop the reserve, lose the rating, and the city pays more interest on the roughly $332 million in bonds and loans it will need for wastewater, water, and streets over the next five years. Cutting the reserve to save money would cost money.

The argument over one word

The most interesting stretch of the night wasn’t about numbers. It was about vocabulary.

Staff had described the $235,000 above break-even as a “cushion.” Miller objected. “I just don’t like the word cushion. I don’t think that should be the goal,” he said. “There needs to be a strategic plan that lists projects that can justify what we’re doing.” Goodlander conceded the point, “that was our fault,” and offered “strategic priorities” instead. Council Member Bow agreed the messaging should be project-first: let the need drive the number, not the number drive the shopping list.

Meanwhile, the mayor made the case for more, not less. The difference between $0.1931 and the 20-cent ceiling, he said, is one penny, and the difference between a quarter-million dollars and nearly a million in the bank, at a cost of about $48 a year on a $400,000 home. His reasoning had two parts. First, downtown: invest now in the curb cuts, drainage, and infrastructure that attract commercial development, and the sales tax that follows can pay for beautification later. Second, Austin: the next legislative session is expected to target the 3.5 percent cap, possibly dropping it to 1 percent, which would leave next year’s council with far less room.

Udakar offered the honest counterweight. A 1 percent cap isn’t a red line, he said; it’s a yellow one; it would force the city to justify a larger increase to voters in an election rather than to itself at the dais. And the city hasn’t gone to its ceiling in years, so its own history doesn’t show it needing the room.

Pena framed the $100 figure differently: roughly $64 of it is the parks bond voters already approved, so the operations increase council is actually deciding is closer to $36 on that same $400,000 home.

To be fair to every side of this, none of them was arguing for a lean city. Bow said no resident has ever asked her for fewer services. Pena called the current operation “pretty lean” already. The disagreement was about how much room to take and how to explain it, not whether to take any.

What they want the money for

Goodlander put a list on the screen. None of it is a major capital project; he called them “minor wins, getting things done that we can’t otherwise fund.” Shade structures at Eagle Landing Park, which has no trees. Drainage on Walker Lane, which $100,000 could probably finish, or a first phase of the Leah and Penn Lane outfall, which it could only start. Repairs to the water-intrusion problems in the police building. Spare generators, pumps, and well components at water plants, because, as Bow noted from the council’s tours, much of that equipment is the only one the city owns, and the Cross Creek reserve fund that has been paying for emergency repairs ends this year at zero. Land downtown, before it’s gone. And the comprehensive plan update, which just landed a matching General Land Office grant that the city could choose to leverage harder.

Udakar’s priority order: critical infrastructure first, then maintenance of what the city already owns, then beautification, and weigh each by how many people it helps and whether it’s shovel-ready. Council Member Johnson added downtown stormwater and the long-deferred Redbird Lane drainage. Alvarado committed to bringing back a ranked list with costs, timelines, and who benefits, and to separate true recurring expenses from one-time ones.

The vote

Pena moved to propose the maximum voter-approval rate. It died for lack of a second.

Mayor Pro Tem Johnson then moved to propose $0.19310 with a public hearing on September 1. Council Member Russell seconded. On a roll call, it passed 6–1, with Pena voting no.

One procedural point makes that vote less final than it sounds, and it’s the reason the hearing matters. A proposed rate is a ceiling, not a commitment. Council can adopt anything at or below $0.19310 in September. It cannot go higher without restarting the notice process. So the debate between 18.9 and 19.3 cents is still live; only the debate above 19.3 is closed.

Pena, who wanted the maximum, asked whether proposing it would have preserved flexibility to come down later. It would have. Council chose not to keep that door open.

Three things I’d flag before September 1

First, the tradeoff is narrower than the headline. Between the break-even rate and the proposed rate sits about $235,000 and about $16 a year on a $400,000 home. The honest question for the hearing is whether the project list staff brings back is worth that, not whether Fulshear should raise taxes.

Second, the parks bond is the increase you already voted for. It accounts for most of the debt-side jump, it’s coming in cheaper than advertised, and it’s arriving on your bill this year because the city waited to sell bonds until Primrose Park Phase 3 was ready to build. That’s the right sequence, but it means the bill and the park show up in the same year.

Third, watch the word “cushion.” If the September presentation can name the projects, price them, and rank them, the 19.31-cent rate has a case. If it can’t, council has already said, on the record, that it doesn’t want to buy headroom for its own sake.

Want to weigh in?

The public hearing on the proposed tax rate is Tuesday, September 1, at 6 p.m. at City Hall. Council can adopt the budget and the rate that night or wait until September 15; staff noted there are reasons to adopt early, including police positions that can’t be posted until the budget is final. To speak, sign in before the meeting starts; you get three minutes.

If you go, the most useful thing you can do is react to the project list. Tell council which of those minor wins matters on your street, or which one doesn’t. That is exactly the input they asked for Tuesday night, and it's still the highest-leverage fifteen minutes of civic participation available to you.

Next in the series: what actually gets adopted, and what changed in the room between now and then.

Sources: Fulshear City Council regular meeting, August 18, 2026 (video and agenda packet, including the certified 2026 appraisal roll, the taxpayer impact statement, and the tax-rate options on packet page 338); earlier installments in this series, “Following the $332 Million: A Budget Series” and “The Number Is $0.19310: What’s on Council’s Desk Tuesday Night.”

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Fulshear, Texas – The modern-day city of Fulshear, a thriving community in north Fort Bend County, owes its very existence to a foundational land grant issued nearly two centuries ago. On July 16, 1824, Churchill Fulshear Sr., a prominent member of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists, received a substantial land parcel—a "sitio" or "league"—from the Mexican government. This 4,428-acre grant, officially designated as the Churchill Fulshear League, Abstract 29, along the Brazos River, laid the groundwork for a rich and enduring legacy.

While the general size and location of this significant grant are well documented, the complete, original "metes and bounds" (precise boundary descriptions using directions and distances) for the entire 4,428-acre league are not readily available in general historical summaries. This common challenge in historical land research stems from evolving land records and the centuries-long subdivision of large grants.

However, detailed boundary descriptions exist for smaller tracts later carved out of the original Fulshear League. A prime example is the historically significant 1.988-acre "Negro School Tract," conveyed in 1890 by Churchill Fulshear Jr. (Churchill Sr.'s son) to establish a school. Its boundaries were meticulously defined, starting at a "large post oak post" near the Fulshear race track gate and extending with precise measurements in "varas" (an old Spanish unit of measurement). These detailed descriptions offer invaluable insights into 19th-century surveying methods, showing reliance on both natural and artificial markers.

The Churchill Fulshear League, Abstract 29, remains a fundamental legal reference for property records in the region today. Even contemporary legal documents for small subdivisions within the area consistently trace their lineage back to this original grant, underscoring its profound and enduring cadastral importance.

The evolution of the Fulshear land holdings reflects the foresight and strategic decisions of the Fulshear family. After Churchill Fulshear Sr.'s early passing, his son, Churchill Fulshear Jr., took the reins, expanding the family's estate and developing the property into a self-sufficient agricultural hub complete with a cotton gin, flour mill, and even a racetrack known as "Churchill Downs."

A pivotal moment came in 1888 when Churchill Fulshear Jr. made the strategic decision to grant the San Antonio and Aransas Pass (SA&AP) Railway a right-of-way through his land. This choice, in contrast to the nearby community of Pittsville, which declined railroad access and subsequently declined, proved transformative. It directly led to the formal platting of the town of Fulshear in 1890, attracting settlers and fundamentally shaping the region's economic and demographic landscape.

Although direct family stewardship of the land ended around 1937, the Fulshear family's legacy remains deeply ingrained in the area's identity. The journey from a vast Mexican land grant and agricultural plantation to a formally platted town named after its original grantee highlights how foundational land grants are dynamic entities that underpin centuries of development and continue to shape the modern geography of places like Fulshear, Texas.

For those seeking a comprehensive and precise delineation of the original Churchill Fulshear League's full boundaries, direct consultation of primary source documents is essential. The Texas General Land Office (GLO) archives are the definitive repository for land grant patents, original field notes (which contain precise metes-and-bounds descriptions), and historical survey maps. Additionally, the Fort Bend County Clerk's Office provides access to deed records that detail subsequent subdivisions. These resources, many of which are increasingly available through digital platforms like the GLO's online databases and "The Portal to Texas History," offer the most authoritative avenues for unearthing the precise historical boundaries of this significant Texas land grant.

[NOTE: This article was originally published on July 27, 2025.]

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

The short answer is that nobody has proposed one here. The longer answer is about power, water, and who gets to say no — and on all three, Fulshear is in a better position than most Texas towns. For now.

Every so often a reader asks me a question I can’t answer in a sentence. This month it came three different ways — at a Rotary lunch, in a reply to the water restrictions post, and in a text with a screenshot of a Granbury news story attached. All three amounted to the same thing: Are they going to put one of those AI data centers out here?

It’s a fair question, and it’s being asked in a lot of small Texas towns right now for good reason.

So I went looking.

What I found, and what I didn’t

As of this writing, no data center has been proposed inside the City of Fulshear, and none has surfaced publicly in our stretch of northwest Fort Bend County. Nothing on a Planning and Zoning agenda. Nothing on a Council agenda. Nothing in the Texas Comptroller’s registry of certified data centers. Nothing plotted near us on either of the two statewide trackers that journalists are using — the Texas Tribune’s and the Houston Chronicle’s.

Now let me tell you why that answer is weaker than it sounds.

Texas has no state database of data centers. None. The Tribune has said so plainly, and the Comptroller’s list only captures projects that applied for a specific sales-tax exemption — a subset, not a census. Developers routinely assemble land under LLC names and run projects under code names; in Hood County, the eight proposals that landed on the commissioners’ desks arrived with names like “Fort Spunky” and “Project Panther.” A tract can be optioned, surveyed, and quietly rezoned somewhere else in Texas before anyone at the coffee shop hears the word “data center.”

So the honest version is this: nothing is public here, and “nothing is public” is not the same as “nothing is happening.”It’s simply the best answer available, and it’s the one I’d bet on.

Why everyone is suddenly asking

The scale of what’s happening statewide is genuinely hard to hold in your head.

ERCOT — the grid operator — was tracking roughly 474 gigawatts of large-load interconnection requests as of June, spread across more than 1,800 projects. About 90 percent of that is data centers. For comparison, the all-time record for actual electricity demand on the Texas grid is 91,089 megawatts, set on July 22 of this year. The queue is more than five times the largest hour Texas has ever had.

Not all of it is real. Developers file speculative requests in multiple locations and abandon most of them. But the number was large enough that on August 3, Governor Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to conduct a comprehensive verification and audit of every data center moving through the interconnection process, and said projects that don’t comply with state requirements must be denied grid access. ERCOT responded the same day by suspending its “Batch Zero” study process — the pipeline it had built specifically to handle this wave. At the PUC’s August 14 open meeting, ERCOT said the verification would take several months, though less than nine, and that up to roughly 300 projects fall under it.

In plain terms: the front door to the Texas grid is closed to new data centers until the state finishes counting.

Closer to home, land-use consultants cited in Missouri City’s own agenda materials this spring counted roughly 400 data centers in Texas, with about 55 in the Greater Houston region. The Chronicle’s tracker puts the statewide count at 335 operating, with another 225 planned. Houston is not the epicenter — Dallas–Fort Worth is, by a wide margin — but Fort Bend County has been named repeatedly as a place developers are looking, because of land, existing electric infrastructure, and Houston’s fiber network.

What a data center actually needs

Strip away the mystique and one of these facilities needs three things.

Power at transmission scale. Not a big commercial service — a substation. Senate Bill 6, signed in June 2025, created a whole new regulatory category for “large loads” of 75 megawatts or more, with disclosure and curtailment obligations attached. Seventy-five megawatts is roughly what fifteen thousand homes pull. The projects generating headlines are ten and twenty times that.

Water, or a very expensive alternative. Roughly 30 percent of the energy a data center consumes goes to keeping the chips from cooking themselves. The Houston Advanced Research Center estimated in January that a mid-sized facility uses about 300,000 gallons a day; a University of Houston engineering professor put hyperscale campuses at up to five million gallons a day. Closed-loop and air-cooled designs cut that dramatically, and the industry points that out fairly. But they cost more and use more electricity, which is its own tradeoff.

A large, flat, cheap tract with fiber nearby. Hundreds of acres, ideally, and ideally not next to houses.

Now hold each of those up against Fulshear.

On power: CenterPoint Energy is the transmission and distribution utility here, and the system that serves us was built for rooftops, schools, and retail centers. A single 300-megawatt customer doesn’t plug into that; it follows high-voltage transmission, and it brings a substation with it. Right now, the interconnection queue it would need to enter is frozen.

On water: Fulshear is a member of the North Fort Bend Water Authority, an entity that exists for one reason — to move this area off the aquifer and onto surface water under Fort Bend Subsidence District mandates. The District adopted an amended regulatory plan in December 2025 that steps those limits down over the coming decade. I wrote about all this in the spring, in the infrastructure piece. We are a community actively rationing and re-plumbing its own water supply. A new industrial customer asking for 300,000 gallons a day is not a routine service request here. It’s a policy decision.

On land: this is the part people underestimate. Fulshear doesn’t look like Hood County because our big flat tracts already have a higher bidder. Land that pencils out at master-planned-community prices does not pencil out for a warehouse full of servers. Our best protection against a data center, right now, is a housing developer.

It would be dishonest to pretend any of that is permanent. Closed-loop cooling solves the water objection. Developers routinely pay for their own transmission and increasingly build their own on-site gas generation. And rooftop economics change. These are frictions, not walls.

Who would actually decide — and this is where it gets interesting

Here is the part I most want you to understand, because it’s the difference between reading about Granbury and having a say in Fulshear.

Inside the city limits, Fulshear has zoning. Our Coordinated Development Ordinance — Chapter 28 of the city code, adopted in 2020 and amended several times since — divides the city into districts and lists, district by district, exactly which uses are allowed.

Search that ordinance for “data center,” and you will not find it. Not once.

That sounds like a loophole. It is close to the opposite. Section 28-2-20, titled New, unlisted, and prohibited land uses, handles exactly this situation. When someone proposes a use that isn’t on the list, the city administrator must determine whether it is “a subcategory or functionally similar to a specifically identified use,” weighing fifteen criteria — among them trip generation, impervious surface, regulated air or water emissions, noise, lighting, use and storage of hazardous materials, character of buildings and structures, nature and impacts of operation, and hours of operation. The administrator may refer that call to the Planning and Zoning Commission.

And then this sentence, which is the whole ballgame: if the administrator determines the proposed use is not functionally similar to a listed use, the use is prohibited.

So what would a data center be “functionally similar” to? The only district where it plausibly lands is Industrial (IN), and there are three candidates on that list:

1. Warehousing and Storage — permitted by right. A building permit, and that’s the process.

2. Manufacturing, Light — permitted by right. Same.

3. Power Generation, Transmission, and Distribution — requires a specific use permit, which means a public hearing, a Planning and Zoning recommendation, and a City Council vote.

That single classification decision determines whether your neighbors get a microphone or a notification. It is the most consequential land-use question nobody in Fulshear has had to answer yet.

A few other things worth knowing about the IN district: buildings top out at 45 feet, a Type C bufferyard is required where industrial abuts residential, and the specific-use-permit criteria in Section 28-2-17 require that adequate public services — explicitly including water, sewer, and electricity — be available “without the reduction of services to any existing uses.” That last clause is the sharpest tool in the drawer, and it was written for exactly this kind of question, even though nobody was thinking about AI when they wrote it.

I should be straight about one gap: I don’t have a figure for how many acres inside Fulshear are currently zoned IN. It isn’t much, and any tract not already zoned Industrial would need a zoning map amendment first — again, a public hearing and a Council vote. But I’d like the actual number, and I’ve requested it.

Outside the city limits, the picture inverts. Fort Bend County has not adopted zoning ordinances and does not issue certificates of occupancy. The county’s real levers are subdivision platting, drainage, road design, on-site sewage, and utility connections — process, not use. It can make a project engineer its stormwater properly. It cannot tell a landowner that servers don’t belong there.

That is not a Fort Bend failing; it’s Texas law, and it applies to nearly every county in the state. It also explains the single most important statistic in the Tribune’s reporting: of the 248-plus data centers planned in Texas, nearly half are headed for unincorporated areas — up from about 12 percent of existing facilities. Developers have noticed where the hearings aren’t.

Fulshear’s extraterritorial jurisdiction sits in the middle. The city can apply subdivision regulations out there. It cannot zone.

Which brings me to the reframe. The question isn’t really whether Fulshear could stop a data center. Inside the city limits, with a rezoning and possibly a specific use permit in play, the answer is plainly yes. The question is whether the decision would ever reach Fulshear at all — or whether it would land two miles outside the line, on a county plat, where the only public meeting is the one where somebody reads the drainage calculations aloud.

What Missouri City did, and why it’s the model

Same county. Similar growth pressure. No data center anywhere in the city.

In May, Missouri City amended its zoning ordinance anyway. The package defines data centers as a distinct use, routes them through a special use permit requiring public hearings before both the Planning and Zoning Commission and the City Council, and — the piece I find most useful — requires an applicant to disclose projected energy and water usage before a building permit can be issued. The city’s materials also describe a minimum separation from residentially zoned property, a height cap on the principal structure, screening of equipment, and submittals covering noise, generator inventory and emissions, hazardous materials, traffic, grid coordination, and decommissioning.

Development Services Director Jennifer Thomas Gomez told the council the amendment doesn’t prohibit data centers. It sets standards.

That’s the point. Missouri City wrote its rules with zero applications pending, which is the only time you can write them calmly, cheaply, and without a lawyer for a landowner sitting in the third row. Fort Worth is now doing the other version — a moratorium adopted this month under public pressure, with litigation risk baked in and a ninety-day clock. Both cities will end up with an ordinance. One of them will have paid much more for it.

To be fair to the other side: Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition argues that communities perceived as unwelcoming lose more than data centers, and that the industry has generated over $3 billion in state and local tax revenue in Texas in three years. He’s not wrong about the money. The property tax base a facility like this throws off is enormous relative to its footprint, and it doesn’t send children to school or drive on the roads at rush hour.

But the jobs are the honest weak spot, and the state’s own tax code proves it. To claim the sales tax exemption under Section 151.359, a “qualifying data center” must be at least 100,000 square feet, invest $200 million within five years — and create twenty qualifying jobs. The “large” version, at 250,000 square feet and roughly half a billion dollars, requires forty.

Big tax base, tiny payroll, large appetite for two utilities we’re already managing carefully. That’s the actual trade. It may still be worth making. It should be made with the numbers in front of you.

What I’ll be watching

If you want to track this yourself, these are the places a project shows up before it shows up:

• City Planning and Zoning and City Council agendas, for either a zoning text amendment addressing data centers or a rezoning of a large tract to Industrial.

• Fort Bend County Commissioners Court agendas, for a Chapter 381 economic development agreement — the county’s cousin of the Chapter 380 agreement we spent so much time on with Home Depot. A tax deal is often the first public trace of a private project.

• Lamar CISD board agendas, for any school district value-limitation application.

• The Comptroller’s registered data center list, which is updated periodically and is genuinely public.

• Large land assemblies filed under LLC names with no announced use, particularly near existing transmission corridors.

• The ERCOT and PUC dockets, for the outcome of the Abbott audit. That’s a matter of months, not years.

I’ll keep an eye on all of it, and I’ll tell you the moment something appears.

The bottom line

Nobody is building a data center in Fulshear. But Missouri City wasn’t building one either when it sat down in May and wrote the rules — and that is precisely why it could.

Fulshear has something most of the Texas towns in these news stories never had: zoning, a Planning and Zoning Commission, an unlisted-use provision that turns a novel proposal into a public decision rather than a permit clerk’s judgment call, and a Council that answers to people who show up. Those tools are worth exactly as much as we’re willing to use them before we need them.

The Council meets on the third Tuesday of the month, and the Planning and Zoning Commission meets ahead of it. If you want to know what Fulshear thinks about data centers, the useful thing to do is not to wait for a sign to go up on a fence line. It’s to ask the question while the answer is still cheap.

Sources: Office of the Governor, Aug. 3, 2026 directive; ERCOT Market Notice M-A080326-01 and Aug. 14 PUC open meeting; The Texas Tribune (June 2, June 8, Aug. 3, Aug. 14, 2026); Houston Chronicle Texas data center tracker; Houston Public Media / Texas Standard, June 8, 2026; Houston Advanced Research Center, “Thirsty Data,” January 2026; City of Fulshear Coordinated Development Ordinance, Chapter 28; Fort Bend County Engineering; Fort Bend Subsidence District 2025 Regulatory Plan; Texas Tax Code §§ 151.359 and 151.3595; Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts.

If a neighbor has asked you this question, forward them this post. And if you hear something before I do — reply to this email. That’s how half of what I write gets started.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

A reader says our commute is built for electric cars, and that free-night electricity makes the fuel cost “a nothing burger.” He’s mostly right. But the free part is doing less work than the advertising suggests — and one of the most heavily marketed plans in Texas won’t let EV owners in the door.

Every so often a reader hands me a good question dressed up as a casual suggestion.

This one came from Mitch Winkler, who noted that a Fulshear-to-downtown or Medical Center commute looks close to ideal for an electric vehicle. With so many Texas plans offering free nights, he wrote, the energy cost can be a nothing burger — and EVs excel in stop-and-go traffic besides. Maybe a future topic, he said.

So I spent a few days on it. The short version: the fuel savings are real and larger than most people assume. The mechanism that delivers them is not the one on the billboard.

The commute, in round numbers

From Fulshear to downtown Houston is about 34 miles by road, depending on where you start and whether you take the Westpark or I-10. The Medical Center is a bit farther. Call it 68 to 75 miles round trip.

Five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year, that’s roughly 16,000 miles of commuting alone — before groceries, church, or a grandchild’s ballgame in Katy.

At the AAA Texas statewide average of about $3.63 a gallon in mid-August — up roughly 85 cents from a year ago — that commute costs a 28-mpg crossover somewhere around $2,100 a year in gasoline. A thirstier vehicle gets you closer to $2,400. A frugal sedan, maybe $1,850.

An efficient EV covers the same 16,000 miles on roughly 4,800 kilowatt-hours drawn from the wall. At the Houston area’s typical all-in residential rate of about 14 to 15 cents, that’s around $700.

So before we discuss a single word of fine print: the fuel side of this comparison isn’t close. Mitch is right about the direction and roughly right about the size.

He’s also right about the traffic

This is the part that surprises people. Gasoline cars do their best work on the open highway and their worst in stop-and-go. EVs are the reverse. Regenerative braking recovers energy every time you slow down, and lower speeds mean less air to push. The EPA’s own city ratings for electric vehicles typically run 15 to 25 percent better than their highway ratings.

To be fair, that cuts against the Fulshear commuter in one respect. A good deal of our drive isn’t stop-and-go at all — it’s sustained 70-plus running on the Westpark or I-10, which is exactly where an EV gives back its efficiency advantage. The 8 a.m. crawl east of Beltway 8 helps you. The tollway sprint does not.

What “free nights” actually means

Here is where the marketing and the arithmetic part company.

Your electric bill has two halves. One is the energy charge — what your retail provider sells you. The other is the delivery charge — what CenterPoint bills for the poles, wires, and meter, at a rate the Public Utility Commission sets and every provider passes through at cost. Nobody in Fulshear can shop that half. CenterPoint is our wires company because of where our houses sit, full stop.

Delivery currently runs around a nickel per kilowatt-hour plus about $5 a month. The exact figure moves; the PUC resets it each March and September, and the next adjustment lands September 1.

Now apply that to the commute. Most free-nights plans waive only the energy charge during the free window. Delivery keeps ticking. Charge 4,800 kilowatt-hours overnight at a nickel of delivery, and you have paid about $240 for a year of “free” electricity.

That is still a bargain against $2,100 of gasoline. It is not a nothing burger.

Two more things worth knowing before anyone signs a twelve-month contract:

1. The daytime rate pays for the free window. Providers don’t give away power; they price the free hours into a higher rate for every other hour. Independent analysts generally put the break-even between 30 and 40 percent of your monthly usage falling inside the free window. Most Texas households don’t get there, because most usage is daytime air conditioning.

2. “Many plans” is generous. As of mid-August, one Houston plan-shopping site counted just four time-of-use plans from two providers in our market. The category is smaller than the ad spend implies.

The wrinkle that changes the answer

I looked at TXU’s Free Nights & Cool Summer plan — currently the most visible free-nights offer in Texas — and found this in its footnotes: customer exclusions include homes with rooftop solar panels, electric vehicles, or batteries.

Read that twice. The plan, built around shifting load to night hours, will not enroll the households best equipped to do it.

It would be dishonest to stop there, though, because it makes TXU look like it’s hiding from EV owners when in fact it’s routing them somewhere else. The same company sells EV-specific plans. Its Free EV Miles plan credits back 100 percent of both the energy charge and the CenterPoint delivery charge for vehicle charging done at home between 10 p.m. and 1 p.m. — fifteen hours a day, every day. Verification runs through your car’s telematics, which you have to authorize; TXU says the platform covers more than 90 percent of EVs on the road.

Waiving delivery is the unusual part, and it’s the part that makes Mitch’s phrase nearly literal. That $240 I calculated above goes away.

TXU’s own savings claim is “more than $500 a year,” built on an assumed 3,550 kilowatt-hours of annual home charging. A Fulshear commuter running 16,000 miles to downtown would use meaningfully more than that.

So: is the energy cost a nothing burger? On the right plan, close to it. But you get there through a door marked “EV plan,” not the one marked “free nights” — and if you walk through the wrong one you may be told you’re ineligible.

The costs that don’t show up in the fuel comparison

Fuel is where EVs win. The rest of the ledger deserves the same honesty.

The federal tax credit is gone. The $7,500 new-vehicle credit and the $4,000 used-vehicle credit both ended for vehicles acquired after September 30, 2025. There is no federal purchase incentive in 2026. Anyone quoting you an EV price net of $7,500 is working from an outdated script.

So is the charger credit. The 30 percent federal credit for home charging equipment expired for property placed in service after June 30, 2026. A Level 2 installation in a Weston Lakes garage is now entirely out of pocket — and if your panel is full or the run is long, an electrician’s quote can surprise you.

Texas charges EVs $200 a year. New registrations pay $400 up front, covering two years. That reads as a penalty, and I’ve seen it argued that way. But run the numbers: our 16,000-mile commuter burning 583 gallons pays about $224 a year in state and federal fuel taxes at 38.4 cents a gallon. For a heavy commuter, the EV fee is close to a wash. For someone driving 8,000 miles a year, it isn’t — that driver pays roughly double what the gas tax would have collected. The fee is flat; road use isn’t.

Public charging here is thin. Fulshear has a Shell Recharge site on FM 1463 and a handful of stations along FM 359 and at Cross Creek. The nearest Tesla Superchargers are in Katy, at the Buc-ee’s on the Katy Freeway and near the H-E-B off Nelson Way, with a fast-charging site up in Brookshire. That’s adequate for a household that charges at home and workable for an occasional top-off. It is not adequate as a primary fueling strategy.

Which brings me to the condition the whole argument rests on. If you cannot charge where you sleep, none of the above applies to you. Every dollar of savings in this piece assumes a garage, a 240-volt circuit, and a car sitting still from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The relevant question

It isn’t whether electricity is cheaper than gasoline in Fort Bend County. It is, by something like two-to-one or better, and rising pump prices are widening the gap.

The relevant question is whether your household can put the load where the discount is — and whether the plan you sign will let an EV owner participate at all.

On that test, Fulshear scores unusually well. We are a city of single-family homes with garages, long outbound commutes, and driveways that sit occupied overnight. That is close to the ideal profile, and Mitch identified it correctly.

Two pieces of homework if you’re considering this. Pull your actual hourly usage from Smart Meter Texas before you shop; it will tell you in an afternoon whether a time-of-use plan fits your household or fights it. And read the Electricity Facts Label — the one-page disclosure every Texas plan must publish — specifically for two things: whether delivery charges are included in the free window, and whether EV households are excluded. Both answers are in there. Neither is in the commercial.

If you drive an EV out of Fulshear every morning, I’d like to hear your real numbers — what you pay, which plan you’re on, and whether the math has held up. Same if you tried a free-nights plan and it went sideways. Reply to this email; I’ll follow up with what readers report.

And thank you, Mitch. That was a better question than it looked.

Figures in this piece reflect rates and rules in effect in mid-August 2026. Gasoline prices are AAA Texas statewide averages; electricity delivery rates are set by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and reset March 1 and September 1. Plan terms change frequently — verify against the current Electricity Facts Label before enrolling.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

The red trucks are not a city department. They belong to a second government most residents have never heard of — one with a budget nearly the size of Fulshear’s entire general fund, and a funding problem it has now put to voters twice.

In 1963, a house fire in Fulshear turned fatal, and the town — then a few hundred people — responded the way small towns did: neighbors organized a volunteer fire department so it wouldn’t happen again.

A few years later, they recruited a 15-year-old named Herc Meier to help fight a house fire. He was hooked. At 17, the Fulshear Volunteer Fire Department elected him chief — by his own telling, largely because he was the only one left with a driver’s license. He was still leading the department, by then renamed Fulshear Simonton Fire Department, when he retired in November 2024. Fifty years, from a teenager with the only valid license in the room to the head of a six-station operation protecting more than 80,000 people.

I’ve spent this whole series telling you Fulshear’s fire department isn’t a city department. This post finally explains what it is instead — and why the answer matters to your tax bill right now.

The second government

Here is the fact to keep in mind: when you see FSFD’s trucks, you are looking at the operations of Fort Bend County Emergency Services District No. 4 — a full, freestanding unit of government. Not a city department, not a county department. An ESD has its own governing board, its own tax line on your bill, its own budget, and its own elections. It simply doesn’t have a building you’d recognize as a capitol, so it lives in the civic blind spot.

Why would fire service get its own government? Look at the map. FSFD protects roughly 106 square miles of northwestern Fort Bend County — the city of Fulshear, the city of Simonton, the city of Weston Lakes, and the unincorporated land around and between them. No one city could fairly tax for a department that serves four jurisdictions’ worth of territory; the county’s general budget won’t carry it either. So Texas law offers a purpose-built tool: an emergency services district, a special government drawn around the service area itself, taxing everyone the trucks actually protect. The district levies the taxes and sets the budget; the fire department does the work.

The scale surprises people. ESD No. 4’s property tax brought in an estimated $18.2 million in fiscal 2024 — within shouting distance of the City of Fulshear’s entire general fund. In dollars, the fire district is nearly the city’s peer. Measured in attention, it gets perhaps one percent as much. That ratio is exactly backward, and the past two Novembers proved it.

The arithmetic squeeze

The district’s problem is the same one driving every story in this series — growth — but with a constraint the city doesn’t face.

An ESD’s property tax rate is capped at ten cents per $100 of valuation, a hard ceiling set in state law. On top of that, the 2019 property-tax reform (Senate Bill 2) limits how fast any district’s revenue can grow without voter approval. Meanwhile, the service area is adding rooftops at a hypergrowth pace — planning projections cited by the district anticipate nearly 15,000 new housing units, roughly 44,000 more residents, by 2030. The department, now nearly 80 firefighters strong, opened a $6.7 million station in Cross Creek Ranch in late 2024 and has more planned for Jordan Ranch, downtown Fulshear, and Lakes of Bella Terra. District officials have said they’ll need 30 to 40 additional firefighters to staff the expansion.

Capped revenue, uncapped growth. Something has to give.

The district’s proposed answer was a sales tax — up to two percent, collected where there’s room under the state’s sales-tax ceiling, with the appeal that it shifts part of the burden from homeowners to everyone who shops in the district. Voters said no in November 2024. The district asked again in November 2025, and voters said no again — 6,181 to 3,947, not close.

I understand the no votes, and it would be dishonest to pretend they’re irrational: “up to 2%” reads alarmingly on a ballot, the district’s public case was stronger on need than on specifics, and voters weary of every taxing entity’s hand in their pocket exercised the one veto they’re offered. But the reframe this series keeps returning to applies here too. Rejecting the sales tax didn’t reject the costs — the stations, the staffing, the response times still have to come from somewhere. The real question was never whether the fire district gets funded. It’s which instrument does the funding, and whose money it draws: property owners inside the district only, or every shopper passing through. That question is still open, and I’d expect the district to bring some version of it back.

New chief, old DNA

The department Herc Meier handed off is now led by Chief Doug Boeker, who — fittingly — also started as a volunteer firefighter before a career with the Sugar Land Fire Department. The volunteer-roots-to-professional-force arc isn’t just the chief’s biography; it’s the institution’s. A department born from a fatal fire in a town of 400 now runs battalion chiefs and shift captains across six stations, and the transition from all-volunteer to career staffing happened inside a single chief’s tenure. Few institutions anywhere in Fort Bend County embody Fulshear’s transformation as completely.

Where you come in

Accountability for the fire district doesn’t run through city hall, so redirect your civic reflexes: the ESD is governed by a board of commissioners — appointed by the Fort Bend County Commissioners Court, not elected by you — and its meetings, budgets, and tax rates are public just like the city’s. Your two direct levers are the ballot box, when the district asks voters for anything, and the county commissioners who appoint the board. Start smaller, though: pull up your property tax statement and find the ESD 4 line. Most residents have been funding this second government for years without ever once reading its name.

Next time, this series starts its longest and most consequential arc — growth and development — with the department where Fulshear’s future literally arrives as paperwork: Planning Services.

Did you vote on the fire district’s sales tax — either way — and want to say why? Reply to this email; I’d genuinely like to understand both camps better before the district tries again. And share this one with a neighbor who still thinks the city runs the fire trucks.

Sources: Covering Katy — Chief Herc Meier retirement (Nov 2024); Community Impact — ESD No. 4 sales tax elections (Oct 2024, Nov 2025); Community Impact FY2024 district revenue and growth figures; Texas Health & Safety Code ch. 775 (emergency services districts); fsfd.org. Details verified July 2026 — confirm current information at fsfd.org.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Since January, the Rails to Trails project has quietly assembled the two things every trail needs to run: a fundraising vehicle and seed money. Here’s what’s moved, what hasn’t, and why the first visible progress is happening at the far end of the corridor from Fulshear.

Since I wrote about the 1093 Rails to Trails project back in January, several readers have asked me some version of the same question: is anything actually happening out there?

The short answer is yes — just not where you can see it from Fulshear, and not in the form most of us picture when we hear “trail project.” Nobody is pouring concrete. What the project’s Local Government Corporation spent the first part of 2026 doing is quieter and, I’d argue, more important: building the financial machinery that determines whether this trail ever gets built at all.

Where we left off

A quick refresher for newer readers. The 1093 Rails to Trails project aims to convert roughly 31 miles of the abandoned San Antonio & Aransas Pass rail corridor — the line that runs alongside FM 1093 and helped put Fulshear on the map in the first place — into a shared-use hiking and biking trail stretching from Fulshear west through Wallis to Eagle Lake, crossing Fort Bend, Austin, and Colorado counties along the way.

The Fort Bend County Toll Road Authority acquired the corridor easement from METRO back in 2015. In 2022, the participating cities and Austin County formed a Local Government Corporation — a legal structure that lets multiple governments act as one entity for contracting purposes — to run the project. A Vision Plan, developed with help from the National Park Service, followed in June 2024. Since then, the work has been organizational: committees, cleanups, and the slow business of turning a plan into a funded project.

What actually happened in 2025

According to the LGC’s first-quarter 2026 newsletter, last year’s work was mostly muscle. The Texas Conservation Corps helped clear invasive vegetation along the corridor, and cadets from the Texas Challenge Academy pitched in on cleanup projects in Eagle Lake and Wallis. Unglamorous, yes. But an overgrown corridor can’t be surveyed, engineered, or shown to a grant committee, so the brush-clearing is a prerequisite for everything else.

The rails themselves are the first fundraiser

Here’s the piece of news I find most interesting. The LGC is developing a Request for Proposal — the formal document governments use to solicit competitive bids from contractors — to salvage approximately 8.3 miles of steel rail between Eagle Lake and Chesterville, at the western end of the corridor.

Why does that matter? Because old rail is scrap steel, and scrap steel is worth money. The hope is for salvage proceeds to serve as seed funding for trail development. In other words, the first dollars for this trail won’t come from your taxes or a bake sale — they’ll come from selling the railroad to build its replacement.

There’s a certain poetry in that. The rails that built these towns get one last job: paying for what comes next.

To be fair, the newsletter attaches no dollar figure to the salvage, and scrap values move with the steel market. Until bids come back, nobody knows what 8.3 miles of old rail is actually worth. But as a mechanism, it’s the most concrete funding development in the LGC’s four-year history.

A Friends group, finally

The second development: the LGC is finalizing an agreement with FRIENDS of the 1093 Rail Trail, a 501(c)(3) public charity that will serve as the project’s fundraising arm.

If you’ve followed my coverage of other local projects, you know why this structure matters. A government corporation is built for contracts, not donations. A 501(c)(3) can accept tax-deductible gifts, court corporate sponsors, and apply for the many foundation grants that only fund charities. Nearly every successful rail-trail in the country has a Friends group doing exactly this work. The project is also now accepting donations directly through PayPal, with contributions earmarked for trail construction.

So what about the Fulshear end?

Here’s the honest part. All of the visible activity — the cleanups, the salvage RFP — is happening at the western end of the corridor, thirty-some miles away. If you’re waiting to see progress where the old line crosses Fulshear, you’ll be waiting a while.

That’s frustrating, but it’s not a bad sign. It’s the plan working as designed. The Vision Plan always called for building in phases as funding allows, and Fulshear’s segment has its own complication: the planned Westpark Tollway extension. As City Manager Zach Goodlander put it back in 2023, the city has to be strategic and avoid “spending dollars to make pedestrian improvements in an area where it’ll get immediately torn up in the near future for the tollway.” The relevant question for Fulshear was never when do we get bulldozers — it’s whether the project survives long enough, financially and politically, for our segment’s turn to come.

On the political side, one thing I flagged in January is worth watching. The first-quarter newsletter’s masthead lists Austin County, Eagle Lake, Fulshear, and Wallis. Weston Lakes — whose potential withdrawal from the coalition I wrote about last time — does not appear anywhere in it. I want to be careful here: an omission from a newsletter is not an announcement, and I’ve seen no formal statement either way. But it’s a detail I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Want to be part of it?

The LGC is recruiting volunteers for four specific roles: adult chaperones for Texas Challenge Academy cadet workdays, help managing map records, community coordinators to build business partnerships, and liaisons to work with TxDOT, Fort Bend County, and the Brazos River Authority.

The next board meeting is Monday, September 14, at 4:00 p.m. at the Wallis City Complex Community Center, 6810 Guyler Street in Wallis — about a half-hour drive down 1093, or a click away via the Zoom link on the project’s website, 1093railstotrails.weebly.com.

Thirty-one miles of trail will take years and millions of dollars this project doesn’t yet have. But in the past eight months it has acquired a fundraising arm, a seed-money mechanism, and a corridor clear enough to work in. Projects like this one don’t fail in dramatic votes; they fade when nobody shows up. September 14 is a chance to show up.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Sometime this month — barring weather or a last-minute snag — the Westpark Tollway is expected to reach Charger Way, and the daily math of getting in and out of Fulshear changes for good. Here’s what actually opens, what it costs, and what’s still torn up. (An exact opening date hasn’t been announced as of this writing; I’ll tell you how to watch for it.)

In 2000, roughly 716 people called Fulshear home, and the idea of a tollway reaching this far west would have sounded like science fiction. This month, if the schedule holds, it becomes a fact on the ground: the final two miles of the Westpark Tollway extension are expected to open, carrying the toll lanes four miles along FM 1093 to Charger Way — the light at Fulshear High School.

I’ve written before about what this moment means for Fulshear in the long run — the development it will pull west, the second-order effects on housing and retail. This post is narrower and more practical. It’s about Monday morning.

What’s opening, exactly

First, the mechanism. The extension is a Fort Bend County Toll Road Authority project — not TxDOT — built by Harper Brothers Construction under a contract of roughly $72 million. It adds two toll lanes in each direction down the middle of the FM 1093 corridor, with no new right-of-way required. The free FM 1093 lanes you drive today don’t go away; the toll lanes run alongside them.

You may already be driving the first half. On February 28, the county opened the initial two-mile segment — the stretch that lets tollway traffic fly past the FM 359/FM 1463 intersection instead of waiting at the light. That opening came roughly nine months ahead of the contract’s November 3, 2026 completion date, and Commissioner Vincent Morales publicly credited the contractor for expediting it.

The remaining two miles extend the toll lanes from FM 1463 west to Charger Way. County officials have pointed to August 2026 for full completion since the February opening. As of this writing, though, the toll road authority has not announced a specific opening date — “this month” is an expectation, not a promise. The only date with contractual force is still November 3. Given that this project has beaten its schedule at every prior milestone, August is a reasonable bet. It is not a guarantee.

What changes for your commute

If you live in Cross Creek Ranch, Fulbrook, or anywhere on Fulshear’s west side, the practical change is this: you’ll be able to get on the tollway at Charger Way and not touch a traffic signal until you choose to exit — sailing past the FM 359/FM 1463 light and onto the existing tollway toward the Grand Parkway, Westpark’s Harris County section, and eventually the 610 Loop.

For eastbound morning commuters, the wins stack up at the intersections you no longer wait at. The FM 359/FM 1463 signal — long the worst chokepoint on the corridor — is already bypassed for anyone who caught the February opening. The final segment moves your on-ramp two miles closer to home, which matters most between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., when the free lanes back up approaching downtown.

Westbound in the evening, the change may be even more noticeable for the neighborhoods it touches. Traffic that today funnels off the tollway’s end and merges into the FM 1093 free lanes — dragging through every light into Fulshear — will instead stay elevated in the toll lanes to Charger Way. That should thin out the free lanes too, which is the quiet benefit for everyone who never pays a toll: every driver who moves to the toll lanes is a driver no longer in front of you at the light.

Two honest caveats. Charger Way is also the front door of Fulshear High School, and nobody should expect that intersection to feel serene at 7 a.m. on a school day; the tollway removes through-traffic from the corridor but adds a new concentration of drivers entering and exiting at one signal. And drivers coming from Weston Lakes and points west on FM 1093 will still cover surface road to reach Charger Way — the extension shortens the slow part of the trip, it doesn’t eliminate it.

What it will cost you

These are toll lanes, and the tolling on the new section runs through a new plaza near FM 1463 — the toll road authority’s rate notice lists a “Westpark Tollway FM 1463 Plaza,” built as part of this project. Fort Bend’s toll rates adjusted upward 2% on January 1, 2026, under the authority’s standing policy of raising rates each year by the greater of 2% or inflation. You’ll want an EZ TAG; that’s how the Fort Bend system collects.

I’m deliberately not printing a per-trip price here, because the authority publishes rates by plaza and I’d rather send you to the current table than have a stale number circulating with my name on it. The rate schedule is at fbctra.com, and it’s worth a look before your first trip so the monthly statement isn’t a surprise.

Is it worth it? That’s a household-by-household calculation — minutes saved against dollars spent, times two trips a day, times your patience for the FM 1093 lights. The tollway doesn’t make that choice for you. It just gives you one you didn’t have before.

The road that isn’t done yet

It would be dishonest to celebrate the corridor without mentioning the other half of it. The FM 1463 widening — TxDOT’s project this time, not the county’s — is still under construction, as it has been since February 2022. That $108 million job is rebuilding roughly 6.7 miles of FM 1463 from FM 1093 north to Westridge Creek Lane, near I-10: two lanes becoming six north of Spring Green Boulevard, two becoming four with raised medians south of it.

As of TxDOT’s most recent public statements, construction is still tracking for substantial completion in late 2026, with final project acceptance — the last punch-list items, landscaping, and paperwork — running into mid-2027. If your commute involves turning off the new tollway onto FM 1463 northbound toward Katy, in other words, the smooth part of your drive ends where TxDOT’s cones begin, at least for a few more months.

The relevant question for this fall is never “why isn’t everything finished at once?” It’s whether each piece, as it opens, makes the next piece more bearable. A finished tollway takes real pressure off FM 1463’s worst intersection while TxDOT grinds through its final year. That sequencing isn’t elegant. It is progress.

How to catch the opening date

The toll road authority posts project news at fbctra.com, and Commissioner Vincent Morales’s Precinct 1 Facebook page has been the fastest source for opening announcements — that’s where the February early opening broke, two days before the barricades moved. For FM 1463, TxDOT’s project updates and the city’s public works project page at fulsheartexas.gov are the places to check.

When the date drops, I’ll note it here. And once the full four miles have been open for a few weeks, I want to hear the thing no press release can tell me: what your commute actually looks like now. Reply to this email with your before-and-after — the light you no longer sit through, or the one that got worse. That’s the data that matters, and you’re the only ones collecting it.

Sources: Fort Bend County Toll Road Authority (fbctra.com); Community Impact, “2-mile stretch of Westpark Tollway extension to open ahead of schedule” (Feb. 26, 2026); Covering Katy News, “Westpark Tollway Extension Opens First Segment Saturday in Fulshear” (Feb. 26, 2026) and “FM 1463 Expansion in Katy and Fulshear: End Finally in Sight But Still Months Away” (Nov. 19, 2025); My Neighborhood News, “Westpark Tollway Extension Opens Early in Fulshear” (Feb. 2026); FBCTRA, “Annual Toll Rate Adjustment Effective January 1, 2026.”

Daisy is committed to providing top-tier home automation sales, services, and solutions to our local area. We are proud to support the Fulshear community and help share its unique stories. Visit us at https://daisyco.com/katy-tx/ to learn more. Daisy’s phone number is (281) 822-3339.

Want to see your business here? Contact us at sponsors@aboutfulsheartexas.org for sponsorship opportunities.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem, reaching more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly across Substack, Facebook (@About Fulshear Texas), and our community podcast.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Part three of “Following the $332 Million,” a weekly series on Fulshear’s proposed budget. This week: why your city tax bill is two different taxes wearing one number, what happened to last year’s 23.5 percent proposal, and how much of this fall’s increase is really the parks bond — versus the cost of running the city.

Every so often, a reader asks me some version of a hard question. Lately it arrives in my inbox looking like this: Didn’t the council back off the big tax increase last year? So why does everyone keep telling me my bill is going up anyway?

It’s a fair question, and the answer is one of those pieces of civic machinery that almost nobody explains: the city tax rate is not one tax. It is two taxes wearing one number; they are governed by entirely different rules, and this year they are moving for entirely different reasons. Once you can see the seam between them, this fall’s budget hearings become legible in a way they simply aren’t from the headlines.

So let’s find the seam.

First, what happened last summer

A quick recap for anyone who missed the 2025 budget season, because this year’s story only makes sense against it.

Last July, city staff floated a rate of $0.199901 per $100 of value — a 23.5 percent increase over the then-current $0.161856 — to fund what officials described as essential needs, chiefly police pay and street repairs. That number was big enough to cross a legal line called the voter-approval rate, then calculated at $0.189901, which meant adopting it would have required a public vote, and one was penciled in for November 4, 2025.

The vote never happened. At its August 18 meeting, council balked — one member argued the city needed “a comprehensive plan” rather than a one-year fix — the ballot deadline passed, and the city ultimately adopted $0.167903 per $100, a far more modest step. The big ask was shelved, not answered.

Keep that phrase in mind: shelved, not answered. We’ll come back to it.

The two taxes inside the number

Now the mechanism. Every Texas city tax rate is the sum of two components.

The first is maintenance and operations — M&O — which pays for the day-to-day: police salaries, park mowing, staff, fuel, the electric bill at City Hall. The second is interest and sinking — I&S, or debt service — which exists for exactly one purpose: making the payments on money the city has borrowed.

Here’s why the distinction matters more than almost anything else in this series. State law treats the two halves completely differently:

1. The M&O side is capped. Under the state’s truth-in-taxation rules, a city generally can’t collect more than about 3.5 percent additional M&O revenue from existing properties year over year without asking voters’ permission — that’s the voter-approval rate Fulshear brushed against last summer. The related benchmark, the no-new-revenue rate, is the rate that would raise the same dollars as last year from the same properties; when values rise, that rate falls.

2. The I&S side has no such cap — because the voters’ permission was already obtained. When you approve a bond at the ballot box, you are approving the tax that repays it. The election is the cap.

In other words: an M&O increase is council asking for more. An I&S increase is the bill for something voters already said yes to.

Which brings us to the parks bond

In May 2025, Fulshear voters said yes twice: 66 percent for Proposition A, $10.75 million for Phase III of Primrose Park — the amphitheater, trails, and parking — and 67 percent for Proposition B, $2.75 million for park land. The ballot-season materials were explicit about the price: a potential tax impact of up to $0.018672 per $100, roughly $74.69 a year on a $400,000 home.

Now watch the early FY2027 projections. Staff’s planning numbers show the debt-service side of the rate rising from about $0.051 to $0.069 per $100 — an increase of about 1.8 cents. Set that next to the bond’s advertised 1.87 cents and the conclusion is hard to miss: on the early numbers, the increase arriving on this fall’s bill is almost entirely the parks bond — the one part of the tax rate you voted on directly.

Meanwhile, staff projects the operations side will compress slightly, not grow. The proposed budget was built assuming the current $0.167903 rate for planning purposes, and the operating fund underneath it is balanced with a modest surplus — this year’s police improvements (three new officers, salaries moved toward market) were funded inside the existing envelope, not through a rate ask.

To put the whole thing in dollars: at the current rate, the city’s share of the tax bill on a $400,000 home is roughly $670 a year before exemptions — typically a modest slice of a total bill dominated by school and, in much of Fulshear, MUD taxes. The parks bond adds its ~$75 on top of whatever the final adopted rate produces. If that trade — a finished Primrose Park and new parkland for about six dollars a month — strikes you as good or bad, either way it’s a deal you were given the chance to price at the ballot box. Two-thirds of those who showed up took it.

The honest caveats

Three of them, and they matter.

First, everything above rests on staff’s early projections. The certified appraisal roll was due from the appraisal districts at the end of July, and only after the city works through it will the actual proposed rate — and the legally required no-new-revenue and voter-approval comparisons — be published. If the final numbers tell a different story than the projections, I’ll write that post. Watch for the formal notice; it’s the document with the real numbers in it.

Second, “the increase is the parks bond” is true on the rate math, but it isn’t the whole fiscal picture. The $332 million capital plan this series is named for will be financed substantially with debt over the coming years, and future bond issues — for pipes and pumps rather than parks — will put their own pressure on the I&S rate in budgets to come. This year’s debt story is benign. It will not always be.

Third, remember: shelved, not answered. The needs behind last summer’s 23.5 percent proposal — street maintenance, competitive police pay — did not vanish when council declined to ask. Some are being handled incrementally; the comprehensive plan council said it wanted is the thing to keep demanding. A city that repeatedly declines to raise operations revenue while its service demands compound is not exercising discipline so much as deferring a conversation. At some point, that conversation comes back.

The bottom line

When the proposed rate publishes, and someone tells you Fulshear is raising your taxes, the relevant question is never whether the number went up. It’s which half moved, and who approved it. This year, on everything visible so far, the answer is: the debt half, and you did — 66 to 67 percent of you, in an election that told you the price in advance. That’s not a scandal. That’s the system working exactly as designed.

The unresolved question is the other half — whether Fulshear’s operations revenue can keep pace with a city doubling its plumbing — and that one belongs to the August and September hearings. When the notice publishes, find the no-new-revenue rate in it, compare it to what’s proposed, and you’ll know in thirty seconds how much council is actually asking of you this year. Then come to City Hall and say what you think of the answer. Fill out the card. It’s still the highest-leverage 15 minutes in town.

Next time: the hearings themselves — and if September changes the numbers, a closing installment on what actually got adopted, and what it tells us about where Fulshear is headed.

With the limited number of homes on the current U.S. market, you need an agent with the right connections, technology, and strategies to achieve your home-buying or selling vision. Whether you’re feeling overwhelmed and want someone to take the wheel, or you just need a second opinion and you have it covered, you can rest assured that a RE/MAX agent is the right agent for any level of service, in any market condition. Visit Tajana Surlan’s website here to learn more. Surlan’s phone number is (972) 415-3017 (cell) or (713) 636-3015 (office).

Want to see your business here? Contact us at sponsors@aboutfulsheartexas.org for sponsorship opportunities.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Two weeks ago I told you to circle August 18. The packet is out, and it contains the number this budget season has been waiting for: a proposed tax rate. Here’s what council will take up Tuesday at 6 p.m. — and what it would mean for your tax bill.

On August 5, I wrote that August 18 was the date to circle — the meeting where the certified tax roll would arrive and the FY2027 budget would stop being a stack of projections and start being a bill. The agenda packet for Tuesday’s regular council meeting is now posted, all 346 pages of it, and it delivers.

Buried in the taxpayer impact statement on page 3 is the number: the city is proposing a tax rate of $0.19310 per $100 of valuation for the coming fiscal year — up from the current $0.167903.

Let’s walk through what that means, and then look at the rest of a genuinely consequential agenda.

The tax rate: what Tuesday’s vote is (and isn’t)

First, the mechanism, because it matters. Council will not adopt a tax rate Tuesday night. What the agenda asks for is a recorded vote to propose a rate and to set a public hearing — on either September 1 or September 15, at council’s discretion. State law then requires the rate to be adopted within seven days of that hearing, and it can happen the same night. The proposed rate functions as a ceiling: council can come down from it between now and adoption, but pushing it higher would mean restarting the public-notice clock.

So Tuesday is the night the range gets set.

Now the numbers. Fort Bend County has delivered the certified 2026 tax roll, and it puts the city’s net taxable value at roughly $5.55 billion. From that roll, three rates fall out of the state’s truth-in-taxation math:

1. The no-new-revenue rate: $0.159522. This is the rate that would raise the same total dollars from the same properties as last year. When values rise, this rate falls — that’s the point of it.

2. The proposed rate: $0.193100. What staff has built the FY2027 budget on.

3. The voter-approval rate: $0.204901. The threshold above which the city would have to hold an election.

The proposed rate sits comfortably under the voter-approval line, but it is well above no-new-revenue — about 15 percent above the current rate, and about 21 percent above the rate that would hold the levy flat.

What does that mean at your kitchen table? The packet’s taxpayer impact statement does the math for the median homestead, now valued at $492,498 for tax purposes. At the proposed rate, that home’s city tax bill would be an estimated $951.01 next year, versus $811.20 this year — an increase of $139.81, or about 17 percent. At the no-new-revenue rate, the same bill would actually drop by about $25.56.

If you’ve been following my budget series, the rate's composition will look familiar. The $0.19310 splits into $0.124809 for maintenance and operations — the M&O half that pays for police officers, park mowing, and everything else in the operating budget — and $0.068291 for interest and sinking, the I&S half that pays debt. That I&S figure is the one to watch. It’s up from roughly $0.051, and that increase of just under two cents tracks closely with the advertised maximum impact of the $13.5 million parks bond voters approved in May 2025 — $0.018672 per $100, or about $74.69 a year on a $400,000 home. In other words, a meaningful share of Tuesday’s proposed increase appears to be the parks bond arriving on the bill, exactly as advertised. I’ll break the full M&O-versus-I&S story down in the tax-rate installment of the series once the proposal is formally on the table.

One honest caveat, straight from the staff report: these figures could still shift if the county tax office issues an updated calculation worksheet.

The budget discussion continues

The tax rate item travels with the standing FY2027 budget discussion, and the packet includes an updated budget detail workbook worth a skim. The general fund shows about $21.2 million in proposed revenues, with property tax collections budgeted at roughly $6.9 million and sales tax at $6.2 million — the latter reflecting the voter-approved sales tax change shifting a portion of economic development corporation revenue to the general fund. The budget book link and the full workbook are in the packet if you want to follow along line by line.

Wastewater, again — and a bigger plant

Readers of the wastewater installment know my view: sewer capacity is the real ceiling on Fulshear’s growth. Tuesday’s agenda moves that story forward twice.

The headline item is a $1.02 million professional engineering agreement with Enprotec / Hibbs & Todd to design a further expansion of the Cross Creek Ranch Water Reclamation Facility — from the 3.0 million gallons per day currently under construction to 4.0 MGD. Staff’s case is that designing the extra million gallons now, while the contractor is already on site, saves money and time. The expanded plant would carry projected flows to roughly 2044 and support the eventual decommissioning of the aging Downtown facility.

On the consent agenda, meanwhile, is Change Order No. 2 to the current expansion contract with Wharton-Smith: $290,782 in scope refinements — added piping, protective concrete coatings, structural modifications — bringing the total contract to about $24.1 million. Staff reports no impact to the schedule.

The rest of the agenda, briefly

The fourteen-item consent agenda is mostly the machinery of a growing city: six subdivision plats (three sections of Cross Creek West, Founders Hill, Fulshear Lakes Hillside, and a Tamarron commercial replat), a revised $767,646 authorization for the vactor truck purchase approved earlier this month (a paperwork fix — the purchase requires two cooperative contracts, not one), a $600,000 increase to the city’s waterline maintenance contract with Texas Hot Taps, $42,342.30 in diesel for the utility generators, about $33,754 in security cameras, and the June financial reports, which show the general fund tracking close to budget three-quarters of the way through the fiscal year.

In regular business, council will hear an annual update on the Keep Fulshear Beautiful partnership with Forever Fulshear — 400 volunteers and 2,400 reported service hours in year one, with $3,637 spent of the city’s $8,000 commitment — and will fill a vacancy on the thirteen-member Charter Review Commission, the citizen body now reviewing the city’s founding document. There’s also a discussion of council meeting procedures and Robert’s Rules of Order, placed on the agenda by council members Utturkar and Russell.

Behind closed doors, council will consult with attorneys on two matters: legal issues surrounding the Heritage Bend development and its municipal utility districts, and a reclaimed water agreement involving Fort Bend County MUD 169 and MUD 275. Action on either could follow in open session.

The evening opens on a warmer note: a proclamation honoring Mrs. Rozina Randon-Gardner’s 90th birthday, and the presentation of a flag to the city commemorating September 11.

Want to weigh in?

The meeting is Tuesday, August 18, at 6 p.m. in the council chambers at the Fulshear Municipal Complex, 6611 W. Cross Creek Bend Lane. Citizen comments come early in the meeting; you’ll need to register in advance and keep it to three minutes. And remember the calendar this vote sets in motion: a public hearing on the tax rate on September 1 or 15, with adoption required within a week of the hearing and a new fiscal year starting October 1.

If you’ve been waiting for the moment when this budget season’s abstractions become a number on your bill, this is it. The hearing that follows is still, hands down, the highest-leverage fifteen minutes of civic participation available to you. Circle the next date when council picks it.

With the limited number of homes on the current U.S. market, you need an agent with the right connections, technology, and strategies to achieve your home-buying or selling vision. Whether you’re feeling overwhelmed and want someone to take the wheel, or you just need a second opinion and you have it covered, you can rest assured that a RE/MAX agent is the right agent for any level of service, in any market condition. Visit Tajana Surlan’s website here to learn more. Surlan’s phone number is (972) 415-3017 (cell) or (713) 636-3015 (office).

Want to see your business here? Contact us at sponsors@aboutfulsheartexas.org for sponsorship opportunities.

Supporting Our Local History. All proceeds from “About Fulshear, Texas” sponsorships go directly to the Fulshear Historical Association, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of our community.

About Fulshear, Texas, is the area’s authoritative hyper-local media ecosystem. Our Substack newsletter achieves a 60%+ open rate, our Facebook presence (@About Fulshear Texas) generates over 35,000 monthly views, and we have launched a community podcast. We reach more than 8,000 unique individuals monthly, with 53.5% residing directly in Fulshear. The core demographic is affluent homeowners aged 35 to 54—representing peak household earning years, established homeownership, and the population most likely to refinance, purchase investment properties, or refer neighbors and colleagues to a trusted lender.

How this post was made: drafted with AI assistance, then researched, edited, sourced, and fact-checked by me. Errors are mine — reply, and I’ll correct them. For more details, click here.

Every day, tens of thousands of people drive past a name they can’t quite place. Here is the fullest account we can honestly assemble of the man behind it — what the record proves, what it only suggests, and what it will not tell us.

In 2000, Fulshear was home to 716 people. Today the Census Bureau estimates the city at roughly 64,000, and the fastest-growing name in Fort Bend County belongs to a man who has been dead for more than 130 years, who left no descendants in this place, and whose house was knocked down before most of our grandparents were born.

His father is the one usually credited with founding Fulshear. That is a reasonable shorthand — the land grant carries the elder man’s name — but it isn’t quite right. Churchill Fulshear, Sr. lived here for six and a half years and died in a log cabin. It was his youngest son who built the plantation, bred the horses, made the decision that put a railroad on this ground, and lived long enough to see a town platted on his own acreage and given his own name.

This is that son’s story.

The family that arrived in 1824

Churchill Fulshear, Sr. was born in France, worked for a time as a mariner, and was in Craven County, North Carolina, on December 9, 1800, when he married Betsy Summers. The family had moved to Tennessee by 1808. That is the year their third son was born.

Churchill Fulshear, Jr. was born in Tennessee on July 10, 1808. He was roughly sixteen when the family made the journey to Mexican Texas in the summer of 1824, arriving before July of that year — his father, mother, sister Mary, and his older brothers Benjamin and Graves.

On July 16, 1824, the elder Fulshear received a sitio — a league of roughly 4,428 acres, the standard grant for ranching in Austin’s colony — along the Brazos in what is now Fort Bend County. He arrived already a man of some property, and the household that settled onto the grant included his wife, a daughter, three sons, and one servant.

They lived in a log cabin. When Noah Smithwick walked up from the coast in 1827 and turned up at the Fulshear place, he was taken in and given his first Texas meal: dried venison dipped in honey. It is a small detail, but it is one of the very few glimpses we have of the household that raised the younger Churchill.

There is a piece of local irony worth pausing on. In 1829 the elder Fulshear ran for regidor — council member — of the ayuntamiento at San Felipe de Austin, and lost to a man named Jesse H. Cartwright. He ran again in 1830 and won, serving despite being, in the phrasing of the old accounts, aged and lame. He died on January 18, 1831.

Jesse H. Cartwright, the man who beat him, would become his son’s father-in-law.

The Revolution: what we can document

Here the record gets both more dramatic and less certain, and it is worth being careful about the difference.

What the sources establish clearly is that all three Fulshear brothers — Churchill Jr., Benjamin, and Graves — served as scouts for the Texian army during the Texas Revolution. Scouting was not a ceremonial assignment. The Fulshear plantation sat directly on the path of both armies as Santa Anna pursued Sam Houston east across the Brazos.

On the night of April 11, 1836, elements of the Texian army camped on the Fulshear place. Randolph Foster — another Old Three Hundred settler, whose grant lay just south between what are now FM 359 and FM 723 — was a member of Martin’s Company, and it is from William Harris Wharton’s account that we know the company spent that night at Churchill Fulshear’s.

Three days later, on April 14, the brothers were on scout duty when Santa Anna’s army crossed the Brazos near the plantation.

On April 19, two days before San Jacinto, Fulshear was sent out with James Wells and Washington H. Secrest to track the movements of General Martín Perfecto de Cos. At Stafford’s Point the three men ran into Mexican forces and were separated.

That is where the documentary trail, as recorded in the Handbook of Texas, stops.

The San Jacinto question

The 1971 Texas Historical Marker in front of Fulshear City Hall calls him a “veteran of the Texas War for Independence.” The Fulshear Historical Association’s bicentennial exhibit states that he went on to fight at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. Local accounts add that he was present the following day when Santa Anna surrendered. Fulshear High School’s namesake page repeats both claims.

It would be dishonest to pretend this is settled. His name does not appear on every compiled roster of San Jacinto participants, and the Handbook of Texas entry devoted to him — which describes the scouting in detail — does not assert that he fought in the battle itself.

That absence is less damning than it sounds. Definitive rosters of San Jacinto have never been established; the same problem afflicts hundreds of families across Texas, because the army was a loose assembly of volunteer companies and the recordkeeping reflected it. Men appear on some lists and not others. Some who fought never claimed the 640-acre donation certificate that would have documented their service.

What we do know is that his contemporaries counted him among them. He was a member of the Texas Veterans Association in 1874 — an organization of men who had served in the Revolution, admitted by the judgment of other veterans who had been there. That is not a court record, but it is the testimony of the people best positioned to know.

The honest formulation is this: his service as a scout in the days immediately before San Jacinto is documented, and his standing as a veteran of the Revolution was accepted by his peers. Whether he was on the field on the 21st is probable, widely repeated locally, and not conclusively proven.

Building the estate

After the Revolution, Fulshear married Minerva K. Cartwright, daughter of Jesse H. Cartwright.

The sources disagree on when. The Handbook of Texas places the marriage after the Revolution; local accounts put it in 1830. The genealogical record tilts toward the earlier date — Minerva was born around 1810, and their eldest daughter, Mary, was born in 1832. A marriage around 1830 or 1831 fits the family better than one after 1836.

They had five children.

Meanwhile, the land accumulated. By 1840 Fulshear held title to 5,904 acres in Gonzales County, with another 865 acres not yet surveyed — holdings in DeWitt’s colony that the brothers had begun acquiring in the 1830s. He bought and sold actively: on May 10, 1844, he sold 654 acres to John Randon for $4,000.

The consolidation of the home place came through loss. His father died in 1831. His sister died. Both brothers died. By 1850, through inheritance and by purchasing the interests of his father’s, sister’s, and brothers’ heirs, Churchill Fulshear, Jr. was sole owner of a very large plantation. By 1856 his property was valued at somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 — a substantial estate for antebellum Fort Bend County.

He expanded the operation with a cotton gin and a flour mill, making the plantation not just a farm but the commercial center of the surrounding countryside. Cotton, corn, rice, pecans, cattle, horses. Neighbors brought their crops to his gin. That is the specific reason a town eventually formed here and not somewhere else: the infrastructure came first.

Lake Hill

In the 1850s, he built the house.

He called it Lake Hill, because it stood on the highest ground on the property and looked south across a lake — across what is now FM 1093. The Texas Historical Marker describes it as a four-story brick mansion; local accounts describe it as three to four stories with white colonial columns and a basement said to contain a kitchen, a storeroom, and stables for his most valuable racehorses.

The bricks were made on the place, by the people he enslaved.

That sentence belongs in any honest biography of this man, and it belongs stated plainly rather than folded into a euphemism. Fort Bend County in 1860 counted 4,127 enslaved people against 2,016 white residents — one of only six majority-Black counties in Texas. The Fulshear estate was built and operated on that labor: the cotton and corn and rice in the fields, the pecans, the cattle, and the thoroughbreds in the stalls.

Oral tradition, recorded on the Texas Historical Marker at the site, holds that the Fulshear Black Cemetery on FM 1093 began as a burial ground for enslaved people on his plantation. Most of the earliest graves are unmarked. The oldest surviving headstone belongs to Rebecca Scott and dates to 1915. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2010.

The people buried there are as much a part of this story as the man whose name is on the road signs, and they have far less documentation.

The horses

Fulshear’s real enthusiasm — the thing he seems to have pursued beyond what mere business required — was horses.

Sometime around 1850 he opened a racecourse and ran it for roughly two decades. He called it Churchill Downs, after his own given name. The Texas Historical Marker places the track at Pittsville, about two miles north of the town site; the Handbook of Texas describes it as on the family plantation. Both can be true, given how far his holdings extended.

Because the question always comes up: no, this is not the Kentucky track, and the naming ran the other direction in time. Louisville’s Churchill Downs opened in 1875 — named for John and Henry Churchill, who leased the land to their nephew Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr. — and only came to be commonly known by that name in the 1880s. Fulshear’s track carried the name in the 1850s. There is no evidence the two are connected. It is simply the case that a Texan named Churchill built a downs before a Kentucky family named Churchill did.

He bred good horses. The best remembered is Get-A-Way — “Old Get” — who raced on tracks across the United States and in Europe.

And then there is the part of this story that genuinely startles people who hear it for the first time.

A boy named John Huggins was born in Fulshear on February 25, 1848, and learned the trade at Churchill Fulshear’s track. The historical marker calls him Fulshear’s pupil. Huggins went on to train The Bard to win the 1886 Preakness, took the 1889 Belmont Stakes, won the 1000 Guineas at Newmarket with Sibola in 1899, and in 1901 won the Epsom Derby with Volodyovski — the first Epsom Derby ever won by an American trainer. He was British champion trainer that same year. The New York Times called him one of the most successful trainers in America.

He came home. Huggins died at his house in Fulshear on May 8, 1917, and is buried in the Fulshear Cemetery. In 1979, Lamar CISD named an elementary school for him.

A small Texas racing operation on the Brazos produced a man who beat the English at their own classic. That happened here.

The decision that made a town

Fulshear was eighty years old in 1888, and the last important decision of his life was a real estate transaction.

The San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway had been chartered on August 28, 1884, to link San Antonio with Aransas Bay. Between 1887 and 1888 the company pushed 176 miles of track from Kenedy toward Houston — and that line had to cross northern Fort Bend County.

The obvious destination was Pittsville. Settled in the 1840s on the higher prairie north of the river, Pittsville had deliberately moved away from the Brazos bottoms to escape disease, and it had thrived: a store, a post office, farmers and ranchers, roughly 240 residents by the 1860s, a real town in a way the Fulshear plantation was not.

The SA&AP approached the Pittsville landowners for right-of-way. The Pittsville landowners said no.

The railroad then approached Churchill Fulshear, Jr., and he said yes — granting right-of-way across his land in 1888.

This is the hinge. Within two years, the railroad had platted a town on his property, and the federal government had granted it a post office. Families moved down from Pittsville to be near the track. Scotch-Irish, Czech, and German immigrants who had been passing through on their way from Galveston to Cat Spring and Fredericksburg stopped and stayed. A Freedmen’s community grew alongside.

Pittsville declined and vanished. What remains of it today is a stone cistern off FM 359.

The relevant lesson is not that one man was farsighted, and his neighbors were foolish. It is that infrastructure decisions compound. A single grant of right-of-way in 1888 determined which of two communities would exist a century later — and the town that won had a cotton gin, a flour mill, and a landowner willing to trade dirt for connection.

The end of the line

Churchill Fulshear, Jr. died on February 1, 1892, at the age of eighty-three. He is buried in the Fulshear Family Cemetery, in the town he had made possible four years earlier.

He outlived nearly everyone. Minerva died in 1862. Their son Graves died in 1859 at twenty-one. Their daughter Mary, who had married into the Wimberly family, died in 1866 at thirty-four. Churchill Fulshear III died in 1870 at twenty-two. The man who spent forty years consolidating a plantation by buying out the heirs of his father, his sister, and his brothers spent his last two decades burying his own children.

No direct descendants stayed. Local accounts hold that the last Fulshear family member left the area in 1937.

The town, meanwhile, went on without them. The Southern Pacific absorbed the SA&AP in 1892, the year he died. A school district followed in 1893, a Methodist church in 1894. By 1898 there were 250 residents, eleven stores, three saloons, a school, and a hotel.

Lake Hill came down in the early 1930s — the same stretch of years when the population fell to 100, and the Depression emptied the countryside. The oldest physical link to the founding generation was demolished, and the ground it stood on is now an ordinary address on FM 1093.

What we still don’t know

A comprehensive biography should be candid about its holes.

We do not have his voice. No letters, no diary, no recorded speech. Everything above is reconstructed from land records, census valuations, a historical marker written in 1971, a Handbook of Texas entry first published in 1952, genealogical compilations, and family tradition passed through a community that had every reason to burnish it.

We do not know his politics beyond inference, or what he did during the Civil War — he would have been in his fifties — beyond the general observation that Fulshear-area landowners, physicians, and merchants supported and enlisted in the Confederate army.

We know almost nothing about two of his five children.

And we know least of all about the dozens of people whose labor built the house, worked the fields, and tended the horses that made his reputation — whose names, in most cases, survive only in the unmarked ground of a cemetery on FM 1093.

Why he still matters

There is a version of this story that treats Churchill Fulshear, Jr. as a founder in the heroic mode: revolutionary scout, master of a great estate, patron of a world-champion horseman, father of a town. All of that is defensible, and most of it is true.

There is another version that treats him primarily as a slaveholder who built his fortune on stolen labor. That is also true, and it is not a footnote.

The useful thing is that both can be held at once, which is what a mature town does with its own history. Fulshear did not choose its founder. It inherited him — along with his gin, his railroad grant, his racetrack, and the cemeteries where the people he enslaved are buried without headstones.

He has been dead since 1892, and his line ended with him, and yet his decision in 1888 is still shaping where the roads go, where the subdivisions land, and which side of the county line the growth falls on. A man with no descendants left the most durable inheritance in Fort Bend County.

A generation that ignores its history has no past, and no future. This one has both — sitting right there under the traffic on FM 1093.

Principal sources

• Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas Online: “Fulshear, Churchill, Jr.” (published 1952; revised October 30, 2019); “Fulshear, Churchill”; “Fulshear, TX”; “San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway.”

• Texas Historical Commission Atlas: Marker 8998, “Town of Fulshear” (1971); Marker 5507017257, “Fulshear Black Cemetery” (Historic Texas Cemetery, 2010); Marker 5507016356, “Pittsville.”

• Fulshear Historical Association, Shaping Fulshear: Historic Influences on a Western Landscape (bicentennial exhibit, 2024).

• City of Fulshear, “Home to a Proud Past.”

• Find a Grave memorials, Fulshear Family Cemetery (Churchill Fulshear Jr., ID 188776338; Minerva K. Cartwright Fulshear; Mary A. Fulshear Wimberly; Graves Fulshear; Churchill Fulshear III).

• Dianna Nguyen, “Celebrating Churchill Fulshear, Jr.,” Fort Bend Herald, July 10, 2017.

• Terry Crockett, “Churchill Fulshear Jr — His Land, His Family, His Home and His Legacy,” Explore Texas (2020).

• Susan Strickland, “Fulshear in the Path of Texas History,” Fulshear Magazine, July 2017; Daniel McJunkin, “A Tale of Two Cities: Fulshear’s Turning Point,” Explore Fulshear Magazine, 2019.

• Clarence Wharton, Wharton’s History of Fort Bend County (San Antonio: Naylor, 1939).

• “Reminiscences of Mrs. Dilue Harris,” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, vols. 4 and 7 (1900–1904).

• DeWitt Clinton Baker, comp., A Texas Scrap-Book (New York: Barnes, 1875).

• Daily Racing Form, “Veteran Trainer John Huggins Dies,” May 11, 1917.

Known conflicts in the record

1. Marriage date. The Handbook of Texas places the Cartwright marriage after the Revolution; local accounts say 1830. A daughter born in 1832 favors the earlier date.

2. Height of Lake Hill. The 1971 marker says four stories; contemporary local accounts say three to four.

3. Location of the racecourse. The marker places Churchill Downs at Pittsville, two miles north; the Handbook places it on the family plantation.

4. San Jacinto participation. Asserted by the marker, the FHA exhibit, and local tradition; not stated in the Handbook entry; his name is absent from some compiled rosters. His 1874 membership in the Texas Veterans Association is the strongest surviving evidence.

5. Plantation schoolhouse. The City of Fulshear cites evidence of a schoolhouse at a chapel meeting ground on the plantation in 1885; at least one secondary compilation gives 1855. The earlier date should not be used without a primary source.

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