Sugar Land Mayor Joe Zimmerman is a familiar face in city government.

Before being elected June 11, he served on the Sugar Land City Council since 2012 as well as the Planning and Zoning Commission beginning in 2000. His mayoral term will be two years.

Zimmerman has held positions on multiple city committees and community bodies, including serving as the chairman of the Sugar Land Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee, acting as a member of the Fort Bend County Toll Road Authority, and serving on the boards of directors for both the Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce and the Fort Bend Literacy Council.

He has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Houston and a master’s degree in business administration from Houston Baptist University.

Zimmerman is the director of development with Houston-based Cobb Fendley & Associates Inc., a consulting civil engineering firm.

What is the most pressing issue the city of Sugar Land faces?

The first thing now as the new mayor coming in is to pull the community back together. We went through a fairly contentious election process. Now it’s a matter of pulling together all the different communities so that we can now get over the hump and get moving in the right direction. We’re getting ready to come into the budget process for the city of Sugar Land, and that’s always an important time of the year because that’s when we take a look at the revenues, we take a look at the expenses and we basically look at what we said we were going to do last year at our fall retreat.

What are your top priorities for the fiscal year 2017 budget?

We believe, based on our preliminary tax roll, appraisals are up this year. There’s a lot of property under dispute, both commercial and residential, but we took the step of increasing the homestead exemption from 8 percent to 10 percent. We’re always conscious about the impact on the taxpayer, on our residents, and we’re very sensitive to that. That was a top priority before we even went into this current cycle. We’ll make adjustments as necessary to provide whatever tax relief we can to our taxpayers.

In light of the recent floods, does the city have any flood mitigation efforts in the works?

The county, the Brazos River Authority [and] many of the levee improvement districts have undertaken measures to evaluate damage, if any, to levees that are adjacent to the Brazos River and—if there [is damage]—what steps can be taken to mitigate, improve and fix it. [With] the Brazos River, we’re going back through, and we’re remapping the level of water within the city. We’ve got to recalibrate our vials, reanalyze that flood data, and we’ll look at the entire city. That process will proceed the next few months.

You named public safety as one of  your top priorities during your campaign. How do you plan to address that issue as mayor?

Around 2013 and ’14, we worked with our police chief in our police department [to install] plate recognition cameras. We’re now ready to take that up during this budget process of rolling that out into the rest of Sugar Land. There are [also] pods that we now put in the pavement that allow us to monitor congestion at any given intersection real time so that if intersections are stacking up too much traffic, the pods are sending signals to our traffic control center. So those are two real examples of using technology to help relieve congestion [and] help solve crime that we have.

What do you believe are some of the most important projects in the proposed Capital Improvement Projects budget?

We’ve made now over the last five years significant investments in drainage in both Sugar Creek and in Covington Woods. We’re continuing to do Sugar Creek. We’re going to take up Lexington Boulevard, and we’ll continue the work we’ve done in Covington Woods. There are two big road projects that we’re going to do. One’s a reconstruction of Williams Trace [Boulevard] from Austin Parkway to Hwy. 6, and the other that we’re taking up is the extension of University Boulevard north from Nalco to Stadium Drive.