A proposed housing development along US 377 and Park Avenue was denied, 6-1, at the Keller City Council meeting July 7.
The overview
The site plan for The Preserve at Keller Oaks was for 55 single-family homes and two commercial lots on 39.38 acres. Only Mayor Ross McMullin voted against the denial.
The item was tabled at the May 5 meeting, according to previous reporting. The land, which has been owned by a Keller family for nearly a century, had development requests denied in March 2024 and June 2025, according to the presentation at the July 7 meeting.
The planning and zoning commission recommended approval for this latest project during its meeting on April 14 with two conditions: no points of ingress/egress shall have an emergency access gate and 75% of the proposed lots should meet the city's minimum lot width for single-family homes.
What happened
Skoburg Company asked for the rezoning from commercial and planned development, which included reducing single-family residential 36,000-square-foot minimum lots to single-family 15,000-square-foot lots and commercial development.
There were numerous changes from the May request, including reducing the number of lots from 59 to 55 for the residential portion and changing the open space from 5.57 acres to 5.28 acres.
Skoburg president Adam J. Buczek said the average lot size increased by 9%, from 18,177 square feet to 19,788 square feet and the number of lots over 20,000 square feet increased from 16 to 35. He said the average price of a home would range from $1.2 million to $1.5 million.
He said those changes made the development closer to the median lot size of two nearby housing projects: Greenway Park and Harmonson Farms. However, the average lot size of The Preserve at Keller Oaks was lower than the other two subdivisions.
Other tweaks featured removing a road that connected to the Harmonson Farm subdivision and agreeing to a 100% masonry wall on the front elevation and a minimum of 80% masonry on the other elevations instead of tubular steel structures.
By the numbers
Buczek said there were 70 letters of support, 24 of those within the 300-foot buffer of the project and 46 support letters in support from outside of the 300-foot buffer.
By comparison, there were 134 opposition letters. Three of those were within the 300-foot buffer of the proposed development and 131 outside of the development.
Buczek said that 86 of the letters, or 64%, were form letters circulated by a group with similar wording or identical wording.
"I wanted to wait until I heard from people in the community,” council member Karen Brennan said. “I recognize that there's a lot of support in the community that's around this land that's really important. I appreciate the surrounding residents and their favorability; that's important to me. At the end of the day, I have to go with what the majority of the people in this city are telling me [that this] is not what they want.”
In their own words
Mayor Pro Tem Shannon Dubberly, who expressed concerns at the first presentation in May, said he appreciated the changes that were proposed by the developer. However, he said he was still not comfortable with this plan. Others on the dais agreed with Dubberly.
Council member Greg Will expressed his desire for bigger lots to mirror Greenway Park to the north of this proposed project.
“I don't think the residents are opposed to development, but what I think they want is to make sure that the development fits with what Keller is,” council member Charles Randklev said. “We have trees in our logo, right? Wide open spaces, and I think for this project, for me, it doesn't fit that yet. I think it's moving in that direction, but certainly it's not there."
Quote of note
“The most important thing I think we're going to have to do, myself included, is do a really good job defining what hometown feel and what our vision is, especially along the [U.S.] 377 corridor,” McMullin said. “We've got to be really specific about what those factors are. That way, we're making sure that when folks come in and do these applications, they're getting feedback from us.”
