Fort Bend County Commissioner, Precinct 3

On Jan. 1, W. A. "Andy" Meyers will be sworn in for his fifth four-year term as the Fort Bend County commissioner for Precinct 3. It is the second consecutive time he has run unopposed for the position.

Meyers' precinct covers most of the northern end of the county with a leg that winds down to Sugar Land, where he and his wife Janet have lived for 34 years. Born in Louisiana, Meyers grew up in Corpus Christi. His family returned to Louisiana while he was a teenager, and he went on to earn his bachelor's and master's degrees from Louisiana State University. His career, however, brought him back to Texas. He worked for Continental Oil, Texas Instruments and Occidental Petroleum before going into real estate development and consulting.

"I got into politics through my wife, who was quite involved in the Republican arena in the late '70s," Meyers said.

As a teacher, Janet Meyers was concerned about educational issues and encouraged her husband to rally behind those causes. At first he supported and campaigned for other candidates who shared his beliefs. Later, friends urged him to run. He did and was elected to his first term in 1996 and has held the office ever since.

Meyers has been named to many committees and served as chairman of the Houston-Galveston Area Council where he proposed and chaired its legislative committee; worked to reduce local taxes; and advocated for more federal and state taxes to come back to the region. He was also the founding director and vice chairman of H-GAC's Energy Purchasing Corporation, which purchases electricity at volume-discount prices for local governments, saving area taxpayers millions of dollars annually.

What is the top issue facing the county during your next term?

Our biggest issue is trying to deal with the growth—primarily mobility and growth in general. In Precinct 3, 95 percent of the population lives in unincorporated parts of the county. There's no city that provides local governmental services, like law enforcement and other governmental types of services that you call a city for—recreation, roads and drainage, and things of this nature. There's no city that you can call. There's no city staff that takes care of all those issues. The only local government they've got is basically me. The unincorporated area of Precinct 3 has about 150,000 people. That's larger than Sugar Land, Missouri City and Katy combined. There are a lot of people who expect reasonable city-like services. Unfortunately, counties are not structured to provide those levels of services. Counties were never set up to do that. Fort Bend County has been fortunate to have these master planned communities that have come in and developed kind of like a semi-city to some extent. About 60 percent of the county is in an unincorporated area, and most of it is in my precinct. Probably 60 percent of the growth is happening in my precinct in the Katy area.

How do you see the Grand Parkway project impacting this part of the county?

Two things which stimulated part of the growth out here and accommodated part of the growth is the Grand Parkway, which is a north-south thoroughfare, and the Westpark Tollroad, which is an east-west thoroughfare. Of course the Grand Parkway was Segment D, which ran from I-10 to Hwy. 59 and was built 20 years ago now. For a long time, there wasn't a lot of activity out here until in '97 when Harris County announced they were going to build the Westpark Tollroad. Once we announced we were going to connect our Westpark Tollroad to theirs, the developers knew that they were going to have another outlet. We suddenly saw this flurry of plats coming in, and developers were identifying this area as an area they could move into. TxDOT is currently building Segment E, and I believe that will be a major impetus for development north of I-10.

As rapidly as the county is growing, should there be more of an effort to preserve open spaces?

We did have a green space provision within our platting process. The only way that we can control development is through our platting process. There is no building code that we enforce like a city does. Through the platting process, if they're going to plat for residential purposes we can require that they have enough utilities, they have enough drainage and that they have enough roads to adequately service the area that they're platting. In addition, we have a provision in which they have to have a certain percent of their land in what we call a green area. I've tried to encourage the developers out here to provide more parks, and so far they haven't.

So, I've tried to build a park with some of their assistance financially.

What motivated you to seek the office of county commissioner?

My motivation, really, was as a real estate developer. I had the experience of dealing with the government from the standpoint of trying to develop property that I owned, and I also got to pay a lot of property taxes. I thought government could do better at both. I also was concerned about the level of services. I wanted a community such as Fort Bend to be attractive because it's a safe community, a quiet community. It has attractive neighborhoods, and people like to live here. It's a quality of life issue.