HUTTO — Several City Council members say concerns about having enough water for the town have forced them to harden their stance on offering supplies outside of the city limits.
The council is standing firm in denying such requests, rejecting the Kirk Tract Development Agreement at its Jan. 23 meeting.
“We don’t have enough water for ourselves. Let’s be greedy and let’s protect ourselves on water,” said Mayor Mike Snyder, advocating for denying the request.
The council voted 4-2 against approving the agreement, which would have included voluntary annexation of the property as well as providing city water and wastewater utilities.
The initiative calls for creating a single-family subdivision with 272 homes, plus an 11-acre commercial tract along the East Wilco Highway near the Cottonwood Creek and Meadowbrook subdivisions.
The development is in an area outside the city’s certificate of convenience and necessity water-service area and should be receiving water from the Jonah Water Special Utility District. In December, the council established a policy of denying requests for water outside the Hutto CCN, to be able to control its future water supply, officials said In a previous meeting, Ryan Quinn of Quiddity Engineering told council it would cost about $40 million for the developer to get water from Jonah Water due to the land being outside of Jonah Water’s CCN and the utility not having built adequate infrastructure in the area yet.
Quiddity Engineering had not responded to a request for comment as of press time.
“The reason they wanted us to serve them water was it was going to take basically a mountain for Jonah to be able to get them service in the timeline they’re wanting to go ahead and do their project,” City Engineer Matt Rector told the council, adding it was not because of a lack of supply.
Kirk Tract is within the city’s service area for wastewater, so if development occurs on that land Hutto could still be required to provide wastewater utilities, unless the city takes legal action to change its CCN boundaries.
The council was divided on the vote mainly because the Kirk Tract developers have been working with the city since 2022. The original service extension request had expired due to the length of time without progress, officials said.
Councilwoman Amberley Kolar and Mayor Pro Tem Peter Gordon cast the dissenting votes. “It’s hard for me to draw a hard line on some of these that have been around for years,” Kolar said. “We need to address these development agreements that have been in the pipeline that have not been moving for the past four to five years. We need to take these on by a case-by-case basis and then maybe we do make a policy decision to drive that hard line moving forward.”
The vote signals a turning point in Hutto’s outlook on development.
By requiring that developers outside the city’s water and wastewater service areas get council approval before being able to draft development agreements, the city is taking more control over its growth, planners said.
“At the end of the day… every (unit) of water we give outside of our CCN means we took a problem that was not on our board and now we’re using water we don’t have,” Snyder said. “I don’t know why we’d do that.”
