The Katy City Council, at its March 27 meeting, formally adopted a new 2040 Comprehensive Plan for managing the city’s growth. But while the vote proved anticlimactic, the effort to reach that moment was some time in the making.

“This started in January 2022,” Gary Mitchell, Kendig Keast Collaborative president, said in an interview before the council meeting. “We were still coming out of the COVID phase, so we had some outreach challenges, but we had a great response to an online survey, with over 500 responses.”

From there, as people continued coming out of the pandemic-induced isolation, Mitchell and his Kendig Keast colleagues held a series of town hall meetings. They gathered feedback from citizens and city leaders. Kendig Keast is a community planning firm hired by the city to update and revise the plan.

“The previous plan was around 2000-01,” Mitchell said. “There was still a lot of growth for Katy in the pipeline in terms of open land and population. Really, that wave is kind of winding down now. We know what’s in the pipeline.”

The housing growth, within the city, focuses on Katy Court, recently approved by the council, and Cane Island. But when looking at the future, Mitchell said, the focus turns to taking care of what the community now has. Infrastructure and transportation are big concerns, he said.

“Pass-through traffic is a concern,” Mitchell said, adding that pass-through traffic is a concern for communities throughout the area.

“The things I’ve always talked about, and the council members say themselves, is, look at this incredible small-town feel, downtown, right off the interstate that connects to all amenities of Houston,” Mitchell said. “It’s just that small-town atmosphere, is what’s so important here.”

Mitchell said he has been involved in community planning work for about 20 years. When it came to revising Katy’s plan, he said the challenge was to get turnout at the town hall meetings due to the pandemic. But that was not just in Katy, but in other places as well. Even with those issues, he said, the community response has been strong.

Revising the plan began with a renewed focus on the city’s parks and recreation facilities. Looking at those facilities got people thinking about water usage and transportation.

“There are a lot of commonalities,” Mitchell said, adding that Katy voters in 2021 approved a $4.2 million bond comprising hike and bike trail system improvements and acquisition of the parks department administration building.

“We really started on the parks plan first and got that adopted last fall,” Mitchell said. “It set the stage for thinking about the city.”

Mitchell said he sees more opportunities than challenges when thinking about Katy’s future.

“It’s just the resources that Katy has been able to put into beautification, the downtown square, just how it projects itself,” Mitchell said.

The plan passed unanimously.

“I am very happy with the comprehensive plan,” Ward A Council Member Janet Corte said after the meeting. “It was a lot of work and will be a useful guide for future strategic planning.”

To see the plan in full, visit the website online.encodeplus.com/regs/katy-tx/.