By Eleni Himaras
reporter@ltview.com
As the filing deadline for state legislation looms on Friday, both the City of Lakeway and the Lakeway MUD are in holding patterns waiting for State Senator Kirk Watson to decide whether he will file the legislation that would allow the city to annex the district.Watson is still weighing out each side of the issue, giving it due diligence and deciding what the exact wording of the bill would need to be, before he files. In the mean time, the Lakeway MUD has filed several open records requests with the city to find out more details on their thinking process over the past two months.
“We found out about [the legislation] only when the city’s agenda came out for the February 17 meeting. We did this open records request to find out what was going on,” MUD General Manager Richard Eason said.
“We just now discovered that they’ve been working on this since early January,” Eason said.
City Manager Steve Jones acknowledged that the process began in early January but that the timeline began when it did simply to align with the legislative session.
“This is as good a time as any to take a look at what we think is a natural process,” Jones said.
Other points of confusion include the boundaries of the LMUD. Eason, along with the mayor of Point Venture do not believe the MUD’s boundary crosses Lake Travis.
“The city actually maintains that there are seven areas of dispute,” Eason said. “The only areas that we are sure about that are an issue are two spots within the hills of Lakeway.”
The map showing those seven areas displayed by the city at their last council meeting came directly from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Steve Jones said.
“I have no reason to not believe [the mayor of Point Venture] but we’re working with the records that we got from the state,” he said.
While Eason maintains the district is functioning extremely well and that what is not broken does not need fixing, Jones reiterated the main argument of the city – that they want the ability conduct an annexation feasibility study and follow through with the results if they lean towards annexation.
The Lakeway MUD also recently commissioned Baselice and Associates to conduct a customer service telephone survey.
“We are doing it to assess our customers’ understanding of the district so the board of directors and staff can use it to improve our service,” Finance and Administration Manager Margaret Cathey said.