Capital Improvements Advisory Committee (ciac) - Regular Meeting

We will call the Wednesday, 05/06/2026 Capital Improvements Advisory Committee meeting to order. Cecilia, would you please call the roll?

Chair Claussen?

Here.

Vice Chair Bone? Alternative Vice Chair Dominguez? Committee member Emerson?

Here.

Committee committee member Huckabay? Committee member Holloway?

Here.

Committee member Wan?

Here.

Ad hoc, Grandpastat? Here.

Okay. Pursuant to Texas government code section 551,007, which allows to speak public to speak for a total of three minutes. On the agenda items, to see, do we have anybody for citizen communication signed up? No. Okay. So moving forward, committee members, have you all taken a look at last minutes for 11/05/2025? Do we have any amendments or revisions? Anything to be pulled? If there's none, I'll consider a motion to approve.

I'll move we approve. Second.

I'll first and the second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Vote carries. Presentations. Consider presentation from the Public Works Department, Transportation Division and recommend approval of the semi annual report to city council with respect to the progress of roadway impact fee, capital improvements plan and identification of any perceived inequities in implementing the plan or imposing the impact fee.

Good evening. This is usually the part of the meeting where Gerald and I start the timers on our watch to watch Michael sneak thirty five minutes into a fifteen minute session. But we're going first this time, so you get transportation first today. What we're going to do is go over the roadway impact fee, what we're doing with it, the impact fee collection revenue to date, and a little bit of the administrative review of this required semi annually by the legislature. Original adoption was in 2019.

The fee went into effect in 2020. We did our five year update in November '3. We're scheduled to do another update by November '8. We're probably going to do that sooner because of some recent legislative changes and because we have quite a few annexations and new roadways that would be eligible potentially eligible for CIP consideration. So with the Briggs tract and several other properties, we want to make sure our CIP is up to date, our five year CIP, and we have potential projects identified.

But in the last five year update, we adopted a fourth phase with a start date of January 2025, and that has a new maximum fee for service area A at $5,700 and a new maximum fee for service area B, C, and D at 3818 Effective date. This shows the effective date of all the phases. And the important thing to remember is that when a permit is recorded when a plat is recorded with Williamson County, that establishes the phase they're locked into for the fee. So when we started, about 80% of the city was already platted. So they're going be in phase one unless the property is replatted.

And as the city has developed over the last five years, some other properties have come in and been platted. So the amount of properties in each phase is diminishing over time because the amount of unplatted property remaining in the city. The new developments like the Briggs Track or anything off of University or any of the property that comes in off of the new Wyoming Springs extensions in the future, that will probably be in phase four. But most of the established city is going be in a lower phase. Our service areas.

Service Area A is generally North Of The 620 And West Of I-thirty 5. Service Area B And D used to be the area East Of I-thirty 5, North Of 79. That's the area we split out with the growth occurring in the Far Northeast portion of the city. Then Service Area C is pretty much locked by our ETJ to the South Of 79, including most of the downtown area. Our collections over the last semiannual period, October through March, remain pretty steady with one exception.

Service Area C, you see a large jump to $1,300,000 That is the first building permits for the district coming in. And they're in phase three of the fees. But those first permits on that first area that was platted in phase three of the fees, a lot of multifamily and commercial in one area. And that represents a large portion of that revenue. Total collections to date are just about $35,000 under $18,000,000 total.

The issue is that we have about $211,000,000 in projects to build, and we've already encumbered 120,000,000 in our current CIP. So most of the revenue is going to debt payments over time. The legislature passed some legislation a couple last year, a session ago, where they started looking at offsets and waivers of fees, little bit more requirements in that category. We've always reported to you new offsets and new agreements where a developer comes in and pays for a portion of a road that's in our CIP. They get roadway impact fee credits to offset their development roadway impact fees.

It could be by consent or by application by the developer. Recently in the legislation, they said we should start documenting government waivers and fees where we don't charge fees to government entities or to the school districts. Well, the school district is exempt from fees by law. So we have never charged them fees. Any fees for the city or Williamson County for building permits for their facilities.

We've always gone through I've always gone through the process of creating a form and documenting what the offset is against one of our CIP projects in that service area. So I've been doing the kind of the offset calculation. We just never documented it and reported it. So when we start going through the formal audit process for the fees in the future, we're going to have to have a documentation of those fees, those waivers. So that's kind of a new twist to why we're administering the program in the future.

So in your appendices of the report, I put together the list of all the building permits that we've done for the school district, for the city, and for the county. And we're going to start adding some values to that for the audit purpose in the future. Our distributions of the fees for our CIP projects. You can see we're starting to do one of our first big distributions, Service Area D. That's the new area created two years ago.

Those projects used to be in Service Area B. And up until this time, the Redbud North project and Old Settlers extension used to be considered part of Service Area B. But this is some of the debt payments for those improvements down in Service Area D. In the areas that we've been doing these projects, I guess the new projects that we're getting close to doing are the completion of, first in Service area A, Wyoming Springs. If you haven't seen the extension, drive down Hairy Man Road, look at the bridge structure, look at all the work being done there on that project.

Don't look at the paint job yet. That was for Gerald, but he wasn't listening. In Service Area B, we are close to kicking off a new project. It's part of the Eagle's Nest project that's shown in Service Area A. It's the portions of Service Area B from the improvements to May Street from Cypress.

That's getting close to kicking off. We're close to getting a bid out for that project. So that'll be a new project starting construction in that. And we're continuing our work on design work for Kenney Fort 5 And 6, and starting to work with TechStop more closely on the potential 79 improvements. Service Area C, we have a lot of construction activity coming to a conclusion on segment three, and construction is just starting on segment six.

That will be quite an improvement to the Red Bud And Gattis Gould Intersection sometime in the future. The Redbud South design continues along, and the Greenlawn widening has started construction for the district and all the improvements required for the district driveways. Service area D, again, is the Old Settlers extension, which is coming to a close, and the Redbud North, which will be completing that intersection at Redbud and Old Settlers very shortly. In reviewing this, we found for the five year update to the CIP and fee calculation, we think we're going to be doing that sooner than five years. Next semiannual report, we'll probably be talking about initiating the full update and starting a timeline with that.

We really don't want to conflict with the water and utility impact fees. They'll be going at the same time. We really don't want to have you doing really long meetings for both of the reviews at the same time. So we're going to coordinate on that front. Again, we had over 150 non residential permits that had a no fee associated with them because we're seeing a lot of remodels and a lot of transition and uses, but they're not changing the IT land use code.

So all these new developments that we see in the city, there's actually no roadway impact fees when they're reusing the existing structure and just doing some building permits and updates. We still anticipate changes to the study, and we'll come back to you with a schedule for those updates in the future. So in conclusion, we had no significant issues identified with the roadway impact fee. We'll continue to make recommendations on the study update. And in November, we will have a minor fee update where we can modify the boundaries of the districts based on annexations.

We just can't change the CIP or add new projects. And that will be the full update coming right after that. I'll be glad to answer any questions you have, and we have a recommendation to send this to counsel.

Thank you very much. Sure. We may have some. We'll go ahead and move to discussions. I'm just kind of going to open up. Anybody have any questions, any concerns, anyone wants to talk about? I'm not going to call roll here. Anybody good? Yes, sir.

I have one, if you don't mind. Sure. Thanks for the report. I noticed there's a lot of construction on Gattiskey Road. Yes. There hasn't been any major accidents along there, to your knowledge, have you?

There's been no major accidents involved with the construction.

Construction at all? Okay. I just want to make sure because

Well, we did have one sidewalk accident because the sidewalk was under repair. But that's a different story.

Because those streets are very narrow. There's a drive down, and I find myself getting very anxious when I drive down there.

Well, we're not doing it all at once. We're doing it in phases.

At phase, right.

And so once phase six is complete that goes to Redbud, we'll go back and do the little transitions from Kenny Fort to the north and I mean, to the east and the west to final out the six lane section.

Okay. Thank you. Sure.

I think that you guys are doing a great job with the roadway impact fee. I think it's a fair and equitable how it's being used and dispersed. And you all keep up the good work. If nobody else has any discussion, I'll entertain a motion to approve the CIC recommendations, approval for this to go to city council.

I have to make a recommendation that we approve the CIAC report.

Second. I have a first and a second. All those in favor, aye.

Aye.

Okay, motion carries.

Thank you.

Thank you. We're going to go to E2 and consider presentation for Public Works Department Utility Division and recommend approval for the semiannual report to city council with respect to the progress of the capital improvements plan and identification of any perceived inequities in implementing the plan or imposing the impact fee.

Good evening.

Howdy evening.

I'm here to report on the water wastewater impact fees that we charge. Similar to Ed's presentation, we're required to report to you guys every six months semi annually the progress of our capital program, our growth projections, and the fees that we're collecting. So here's kind of a summary of the of my presentation. We last updated our impact fees for water wastewater in September 2023. They went into effect 01/01/2024.

Because Round Rock has been growing over the past years, about every three years, we come before you with an update to the fees. By law, we're required every five years to look at the fees to make sure we're charging the right amount that's equitable for new connections. So I'll give you an update today. This is over the last six months from 10/01/2025 through 03/31/2026 is what our numbers will include. Here's just a summary of our water usage. The blue are new permits, so you can see these bars continue to increase. That means we're adding new water meters in our system. We're almost at 39,000 water meters in the system for our water system. The yellow is how surface water. So this is a two year period here.

So you can see the amount of water we're using is not increasing over that time, but the number of connections are. So our continuing to water water conservation, our water reuse program, we continue to expand it. So that's protecting our water supply sources. Here's kind of a summary, by month of how much our average daily demand is. The orange is in 2026, so you can see over the last several months, we've used more water in those months versus the previous four years probably because it's been very dry.

We've had just the last few weeks, we've had some rain, but prior to that, it's been very dry. That week of July 4, we had about six to seven inches. From July 4 to around March, we had about six to seven inches, so it took about seven or eight months to equal the same amount we had that week, which is way behind. We average about 33 inches a year in rain. We were asked last time to include our water contracts that we have here. You see that we have water at three different lakes. The first two are Lake Georgetown and Lake Stillhouse. We have contracts with the Brazos River Authority. This is how much acre how much acre footage. We pay that amount per acre foot.

We pay that every year. So BRA, it's a take or pay. So when we pay that amount on September 1 each year, we've paid for this many acre feet of water out of those lakes. So we wanna use that water first, and I say that because these LCRA contracts are different. We pay 50% of that cost to reserve it, and then we pay the other 50% of that cost to take it. So we want to use up all our BRA water first before we take LCRA water from a cost perspective. You look at these costs here per acre feet, that's quite cheap versus what you see now in the future of Carrizo Wilcox. That's running at $1,500 an acre foot. We're paying 106 to $2.00 6, so a lot cheaper. That helped Round Rockman getting out there.

These contracts are about fifty years long, so you see here's when they expire. We'll work with BRA and El Cinero A to extend those with good faith when they do expire. Here's how much we've used. So last year at BRA, we used 20,000 acre feet, and if you add these two numbers right here, that's around 24,000. So we almost use all of our water because we paid for it in advance. And then here's our treatment abilities. We have three different we have two water treatment plants, and then we have a small plant that treats groundwater of Lake Creek. So we've diversified our sources. So Round Rock's a little bit different than most. We have a lot of different sources of supply, and also we have various treatments.

So Round Rock's in good position as we continue to grow to meet this growth into the future. This shows this is the purple reuse system. We continue to promote that. That's very important to our future. It's water that's been treated at the wastewater treatment plant, and we turn around and reuse it for non drinking purposes. Kalahari, for example, cools their entire facility with their cooling towers with reuse water. They're not using drinking water. So anywhere we can promote that, we'll continue to build that system. And any reuse projects we build, that's part of the water impact fee. It's included in those projects.

Next three slides kind of show the permits that we've the new connections to our system. You will see over the last six months, it's been a little bit down compared to previous years. That could be a number of things. The inventory may have been high, and now people are moving into them because I will I have a chart at the end here that shows population, and we're growing as expected. We're growing roughly 3,000 people a year like we've been doing. That's about nine people a day move to Round Rock. So Round Rock continues to grow even though our new connections you see here 137 new house starts in the last six months. Previous years, we've been averaging, what, 500 to 600 for the total twelve months. This is just for six months. So if you double that, that's only two seventy four.

That will be less than what we anticipated. Multifamily, very similar. Over the last six months, 39 multifamily units. Single family, connection is a house is one connection. Multifamily, we go by unit.

So if you have a 100 unit apartment complex, they count half of a house. So that would be 50 LUEs because apartment uses about half the amount of water that a house uses, and that's how we charge for LUEs, and that's the so one LUEs pays that impact fee based on that. Commercial, we've had 12 commercial permits. These are based on meter size. So depending on the size water meter you have, that equates to a number of LUEs, and you pay your impact fees based on the number of LUEs.

So that's why you'll see 12 permits equals 46 LUEs. So putting all that together, we've collected $2,000,000 over the past six months. I will say if you look at our last study, we anticipated collecting about 8,000,000 for the year, so that's why we're going to update this. We plan to update our impact fees, starting later this year. They'll come back at the end of twenty twenty seven with an update of the fees. We continue to collect less money. That could be a problem being able to pay for some of our projects. But right now, our financial situation is still good. So this is only half a year. So if you just double that, right, if we go at the same pace with new permits, it'd be about $4,000.

We would $4,000,000 we would collect, which will be quite a bit less than what we've anticipated in our impact fee calculation. There's a chart that shows the same thing I just said. Kind of ebbs and flows in 2022 was over 10,000,000. You know, you get a big development, a lot of apartment complex, big commercial property. They can bring a lot of impact fees to the table in that given year.

So there is ebb and flow when properties come in. Here's the population rejection that I mentioned earlier. We're right at 142,000 people in the city of Round Rock, so we continue to grow fairly close to what we anticipated based on the 2020 census. We thought we'd be about 145. We're estimating about 142, so not far off.

We also show the ETJ. I show that because we do provide water to wholesale customers in MUDs outside the city limits. The Round Rock ETJ continues to grow as well. The next five or six slides, I'm not gonna really spend a lot of time just to kinda show you just this bottom number here. These are projects that are impact fee eligible that we completed over the last several years, pretty close to what we the cost that we put into the impact fee calculation.

And here's the actual cost of the project. So we kind of our cost estimate and the actual cost was pretty close, which is good. That means we're impact fees are set according to what we need. When we set the impact fee, it's based on projects that we have over the next ten years with a cost estimate. That's how we get there. These are projects that are in progress. Some quite large projects here. You know, you look at that BCRUA deepwater intake, dollars 77,000,000. That's a five year project. We're about three and a half years into it, almost four.

So that's future water for the city of Round Rock. And then here's some upcoming projects, about 38,000,000 there. So a lot of if you just kinda as a whole, you look at our water wastewater reuse system, we have about $400,000,000 of projects slated for the next five year window. So that's a lot of infrastructure we're building, but we're trying to build not only for today, but we're building for the future so that Round Rock, when there's economic development opportunities, we wanna be positioned. We wanna have utilities in place so that Round Rock is attractive for who's coming to town.

Wastewater, the same way we've completed these projects over the last few years. Here's what's in progress. The big one is the next wastewater treatment plant expansion. You see that right there, the 120,000,000. We plan to go out to bid next year on that one. That'll add 10,000,000 gallons a day of treatment capacity to the regional plant. That'll be really good for Round Rock. We're getting 9,000,000 out of that 10. City of Austin's getting 1,000,000. The regional plant is Austin, Cedar Park, Leander, and Round Rock.

And that's the plant that's over there by Kalahari across the street from Del Diamond that hopefully is hiding back there and you don't know it's back there. We try to hide our wastewater plant. And then here's some upcoming projects. These are all included in the impact fee calculation that we do. And then here's our reuse projects. I mentioned that we continue to promote that. We've got a bill reclamation grant of about $4,000,000 that we can use on projects for the next several years. So we're using some of that money, to really set up our reuse system. It prolongs our water supply the more we do that. Always like to show this chart.

This kind of shows you if our rates, how do we compare to our neighboring cities and neighboring wholesale customers? When we're on the far right, that's a pretty good sign. Right? That means our rates are the lowest around this area. That is if you're, you know, on an average a house 10,000 gallons a month for water, 6,000 gallons a month for wastewater, that's what your rates would be. I will say if you use a lot more water, we have those tiered rates. This chart gets even more pronounced. We will stay at that bottom and the rest of the cities go up. Water is getting more expensive. You hear about it all the time, right, of these neighboring cities are out looking for water.

There's no more water per se underneath us right here. We have to go and get it and bring it in. That's why it's getting more and more expensive. Round Rock, over the last fifteen, twenty years was very aggressive in securing water rights for lakes that are close to us, and we're reaping the benefits of that now, which is really good for our city. So there's really two ways we collect money in the water wastewater utility. It's from, our rates of your usage, and then there's the impact fees. We want to make sure new growth pays for itself. So our impact fees used to be the highest around here. Our rates were low, our impact fees were high, but everybody's catching up to us on the impact fees. So you see us sitting there.

That's the cost if you have a house, one LUE. You'd pay $4,912 for your water connection and then 2,921 for your wastewater connection. That 7,833 is included in the cost of a house. You don't pay that separately. Separately. The builder pays it when it comes in for a building permit, and then they put that in the cost of the house when they sell it. Not out of the ordinary. You look at look at Georgetown for a house. They got it at $18,000. That's that's quite a difference as you put that into the cost on top of that.

In 2020, we had some of the highest impact fees in the state, and they said that's going to affect growth in Round Rock. Well, I think we can agree that it did not impact the growth in Round Rock. Alright. So in summary, I would say connections are slower than we anticipated over the past six months, but population growth continues to go. We have a good financial philosophy. We're a triple a bond rated utility. That means if we have to go out and get debt, we are getting the best rates on the market. The triple a bond rating is the highest we can get. There's only nine utilities out of 991 in the state of Texas that have it. That's a good sign for us.

That means we're managing our assets well for our community, and then the citizens get the benefit of that. They get the low rates, and then we have our impact fees set where they need to be. So new growth is paying for a lot of this infrastructure and not the rate payers that are being living here that are causing a water plant expansion, for example. So our recommendation is we we stay the course. We're gonna start our master plan updates here really quickly, finish those later this year, and then we're gonna start our impact fee update after we get our master plan done.

That kinda shows you the master plan will show us what projects we have that we need to do. We start the impact fee update later this fall, winter, and then sometime around mid to fall of twenty seven, If there's any changes in these fees, we'll bring that before you all to consider. So everything's going well. City's growing well, and the utility's doing well. So I'll be happy to answer any questions regarding our update of our capital program and our impact fees.

Thank you, Mr. Stane. Any discussions on this side of the board? Yes, ma'am.

Hey, good job.

Yes, ma'am.

Just clarifying, are there impact fees on any other utilities besides water and wastewater?

So we have the only impact fees the city's charging, we have a water impact fee that helps pay for new connections to the water system that pay for water projects only, Wastewater impact fee, any wastewater connections to the system, that money pays for wastewater connections only, and then the roadway impact fee that Ed just mentioned. That's the only impact fees that we're charging.

So no impact fees on like electricity or anything?

We're not yeah, we're not an electric we don't provide electricity. That's private entities that do that.

Got it. Okay. Thanks for clarifying. Got it.

Question. Mr. Tallaway, you good? Mr. Twent. Good report, Michael. Thank you. I have a question, though. Why you showed how much water was used from LCRA and how much from BCRA? The way I understood it, we got to pay for the BCRA regardless. And why do you use any LCRA water when you still it looks like you still had capacity, right? Like 4,000 acre feet?

Yes, sir.

Why do you use any LCRA? Is that because of where that comes into the system?

Yeah. There's a couple of things there. So when we are starting to use our water at the beginning of the year, we don't want to just use BRA water only for the first six months of the year because that water is coming in from Georgetown and Stillhouse. But if we use up all our BRA water too soon in the year, then I'm in trouble because it comes in on this side of town, and I don't and the LCRA can't provide meet the demands for the rest of the year. You follow me?

Now, what we could do, so our year starts October BRA starts September 1, so you could use them both, come all the way to about July, August. We could potentially cut off the valve at LCRA water, but I can't do that now because we have connections on the West Side. And we partner with Georgetown and Liberty Hill, and we're feeding them some of our water. And I can only do that on the West Side of town. We do that for a couple of reasons.

It's helping our neighboring cities, but also it helps pay off some of our debt. We've got infrastructure on the ground. We have extra capacity that we don't need now, so we signed some five year contracts with Georgetown and Liberty Hill. During that five year window, we're feeding them water. It helps our finances, and then we get that money, that water back after five years and the infrastructure for us. So the way the system is set up, it's kind of hard to just use BRA only. I'm giving you a long

answer, complicated. I mean, it just seemed like and it looks simple, but I realized there was more to it. But I appreciate that.

We do watch that. And I would say the year before, we used about 22,000 of the 24. So last year, it was only 20. But I talked last month to our water treatment plant superintendent, I said we have to try to get it all the way because we've paid for it.

Yes, sir. Thank you. Mr. Dominguez?

Yeah. Just want to make sure I understand the timeline. So you said that the fall was it the fall of 'twenty seven that you were referring to as far as the recommendations for changes to the impact analysis? Okay. So we've got the update that we'll have later this year. And then we'll have another one roughly this time. Or I guess would it be I'm trying to understand how many updates we'll have before that recommendation. Every six months. So right now,

this is for the first six months through March 31. We'll give another one in November. That'll take us all

the way through About like this time next year?

And we'll have a second one. We'll have another one this time. You'll have one in November. We'll have another one next May.

Yeah. So about this time next year, and then the one after that will be the one you make recommendations Yeah. For.

But the one I do next year, I should have a good feel for what our impact fee is going to be. So we can probably kind of give you a feel there. And then we'll come back sometime after that for the adoption of any changes to the fee. Okay.

I just want to understand the timeline a little better. Yeah.

We're still a ways away before we recommend a change. Okay.

Thank you.

Yes. Mr. Emerson?

Thank you. Mike, great rapport. I just had a quick question. I don't know if you can answer it, but we have, what, five data centers in Round Rock. Has that four or five, if I'm not mistaken. Has that increased or impacted our water at all? Or Yes. Even Natale? Natale? MR.

Sure. So right now, there's two data centers properties, Sabia and Switch, that are in place today. There's three other properties that are zoned or could potentially put data centers on them. But the two that we have today, they both have a closed loop water system, which is very important. I would say several years back, they didn't have those closed loop systems. So they were a heavy water user before that. We require data centers now to go through a planned unit development process. We can control, make them basically put in a closed loop system. So we're not seeing any impact to our water system that's significant because it's a closed loop system and they're just reusing it. It's not bad at all.

Switch was the first one that came to town and we had an agreement with them that we were working on to provide reuse water for them to use in that process. But they switched they got bought out and ownership changed, and then the process changed, and they went to a closed loop system, which is fine. So electricity is a different story, but water, we're not seeing a huge impact on the data centers.

Thank you so much, sir.

Yes, sir. And I'll just add a great report. You guys do a great job managing our water. You know, I remember back in the '70s when we ran out, I was there. So you guys are doing a great job. And if there's no more discussions, I will entertain a motion to approve the CIAC report to report back to counsel.

I will make a motion to approve.

I have a first. Do I have a second? Second. I have a second. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Motion carries.

Excuse me, chair. Who made the second?

Oh, well, I think it was a tie. Say Mr. Holloway. Okay. And with that, we're going to adjourn the CIAC meeting for about five to ten minutes for a restroom break. I will say, although they're in a crowd, if you guys are here for the planning and zoning meeting and you are wishing to speak for or against the amendment that is on the table, please be sure and fill out a yellow card if you need. Be sure and give it to Cecilia. Give it to her so we can make sure and get that on record. And we will adjourn.