Watts, the Mayor of Shenandoah, sees a bright future for the city

SHENANDOAH, Texas – Garry Watts, the recently re-elected Mayor of the City of Shenandoah, exclaimed, “The future is unlimited!”

A Shenandoah resident since 2006, Watts first became involved with the city when he read a newspaper story stating that elections had been canceled due to lack of interest.

“I had to go investigate that,” said Watts. From there, I interviewed with the council and they picked me to fill a vacated seat. I ran for a full council term, was elected, and then I was asked to run for mayor, and was elected for two terms. Then I had my wife’s situation and now I’m back!”

Watts refers to his wife Helen’s diagnosis of breast cancer when he took off a term to be there for her.

“She got through this, and she’s doing well, and we’re doing well, and so we’re moving forward. She is cancer free!”

Moving forward is what he wants for Shenandoah as well.

“In every municipality and/or township, there’s always taxes, mobility, water, and the fourth issue is schools. We have CISD, which is a great school system. We’ve erased our water issues by opting outside of the box, and doing our own thing by drilling a well north of us about 15-20 miles. We don’t have to take surface water and recycle it. We have superior water.”

Watts pointed out that the city will save one million dollars each year for the next twenty-five years because of that initiative.

As for mobility, Shenandoah has expanded all around, creating a more direct path to the Portofino Shopping Center and adding a new lane on Research forest coming from I-45 S. There are also several new developments in the works, such as additions to residential areas, a new park, as well as more hotels and businesses.

Five additional hotels will be built just north of Red Robin and Main Event, and approximately 325 upscale apartments with 14,500 square feet of retail shopping space. The city’s neighborhood has also planned to grow with homes built by David Weekly, Grace Point who decided to add a New Orleans motif to their homes, and Pelican Homes who will have built 98 new homes after construction is completed.

On top of the building developments for future neighbors, Watts also wanted to review the plans for Shenandoah’s park. Residents were given a survey regarding how they wanted the proposed budget to be spent for that area. The new mayor, however, says it needs to be redone due to the plans being over budget.

“It’s a lot of money. I had a concern about the capacity or usage of the tennis courts and basketball court.” Rather than tearing the courts down, he suggested checking the statistics, then repainting the courts and putting down new asphalt, which would save money.

When asked about what he would like to see for the park, Watts went on to talk about green space.

“I’d like to see them level the playing field and get a good head of grass and have open space. So you cannot only play baseball, but soccer and lacrosse; but again it comes down to capacity and what the citizens of Shenandoah want to use that space for. There’s nothing wrong with open space as our neighbors to the south have proven with two hundred miles of walking and biking trails.”

He continued, “We have other areas in Shenandoah that could be green space; at the end of Holly Hill and also where the old water plant used to be off of Enchanted, just waiting there. You can never have enough green space for your tax payers. To have a place where moms can meet, a water fountain, a picnic bench, and maybe a small shelter. I started the sidewalk mobility on my first term. We’re just now finishing up our sidewalk issue from almost eight years ago. Some of that has to deal with complications of where they’d go, getting the right of way, getting the proper easements with our neighbors, and financing, but we finally got it done.”

Watts, a man who stressed several times on the fact that people love mobility and that Shenandoah is a sales tax city stated, “There needs to be more action, not so much planning, not so many meetings. We need to implement and move forward. I mean how long has it been since we knew Anadarko was building a second tower? How long has it been since we knew Exxon Mobile was coming to this area? We knew that, so we need to start implementing rather than chit chat.”

In that spirit, Shenandoah hosted the 2013 NCAA Division National Swimming and Diving Championships, and have negotiated to hold them again in 2015 and 2017. After this fact, Watts considered the stadium that was built behind the Portofino Shopping Center to hold more than high school athletic activities since it loses money every day those seats aren’t filled. In response, the city is speaking to the NCAA and NAIA regarding the potential to hold some of their football games in the stadium, thus bringing in more revenue for the local businesses.

Shenandoah has continued to grow with their plans to build homes, build hotels, build a park, and build even more retail space.

“We put Shenandoah on the map, everybody knows where Shenandoah is now.” Garry Watts gave a firm nod over his city’s plans. “There’s a price for progress. We’ve done a good job. We have the lowest water rates, the lowest property tax in the county, we have great public safety, we’ve worked out our mobility situation, we’ve added value by having these fancy homes coming in, and that revenue will supplement some of the projects we want to do as a city. The future is unlimited. Now some people don’t like growth. We can’t stop growth, all we can do is plan for it.”