The Magnolia city council hosted the open forum held at city hall just prior to a regular city council meeting.

Many residents asked questions regarding the proposed city limits the city hopes to extend to and what neighborhoods fall into that area.

The city provided maps of the greater Magnolia area to the audience with indicated highlighted areas “to be considered for voluntary annexation.”

Those areas are north on FM 1774 starting from the Magnolia Business Park shopping center and ending just north of FM 1486 and west on FM 1488 starting at Charlie Street and ending around 3 miles past FM 149.

Precinct 2 Operations Manager Charlie Riley, one of the attendees of the meeting, asked the council if a three-year plan had been put into motion yet.

“The planning commission has it now, I don’t know that it’s their top priority,” said council member Todd Kana.

Kana continued saying that the city would benefit from larger city limits in terms of sales tax revenue, which is a major factor in keeping the city running.

City Attorney Leonard Schneider stated that the City “does not have a three-year plan in effect as of now.”

After one resident asked about the possibility of forced annexation, Mayor Jimmy Thornton assured the audience that no one would be forcibly annexed into the city limits.

One woman who lives in the River Park Ranch area, who asked not to be identified, said that she and other residents do not want to be annexed because of water and sewer issues.

“People have put in new wells and septic tanks and we don’t want to be annexed for water and septic. We don’t need extra septic. It needs to be more than that to benefit us,” she said.

As previously reported in the Tribune, there are three ways a Type A city such as Magnolia can annex.

The first would be a three-year plan, which the city has been considering, in which the city would begin serving either water or sewer to the extra-territorial jurisdiction (ETJ) areas just outside the city limits. City staff would then notify the residents of impending annexation, and after three years, if a resident doesn’t want to annex, the city would have to wait another three years before trying again.

Second is individual annexation, which would require a resident to voluntarily petition to be in the city limits of Magnolia. This would then bump the city’s boundary lines to wherever that resident lives, and so on.

The third option is if there are fewer than 100 separate tracks of land or less, a city can annex without a three-year plan, unilaterally, as long as there are residential dwellings on each tract.

City Administrator Ryan Kelley previously stated that Magnolia Crossing is the only neighborhood that falls under the third option requirements for annexation.

Kelley said letters have been mailed out to those in areas considered for voluntary annexation and there has been a mixed response.

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