Four months into his first term representing District 2, Georgetown City Council Member Doug Noble hosted a town hall August 20 to update residents on water, traffic, data centers, homelessness and upcoming state legislation.
“There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in Georgetown right now, so it’s always good to meet your fellow neighbors and let them know what’s happening, but also get their feedback and hear what questions they have,” Mr. Noble told the Sun.
The district encompasses Wolf Ranch, Rivery, River Chase, River Ridge, Northwest Boulevard and more.
He hopes to host two town halls a year, he said, and now felt like a good time to “get one in the books.” The next town hall, he said, will likely be held in the spring.
“The open communication is helpful because we get a pulse on what people want,” Mr. Noble said. “If you look at social media, you get a clearly different side versus when you talk to somebody where you know these events, you get their actual questions. You can feel what the actual issues are or what they’re concerned about.”
Data centers
A hot topic across the county, Mr. Noble discussed the city’s approach to data centers. He said the city evaluates each project to see what it means for residents, and makes sure projects go into industrial zoned properties
“Any time a case comes before council and we’re looking at rezoning, we look at how close is that [property] to a residential neighborhood,” he said. “Most times, industrial zoning is not next to residential. There’s usually industrial [zoning], a buffer of some sort, and then residential. So most residential houses will never be near a data center.”
Additionally, Mr. Noble said data centers pay the impact fees for their usage of water and reserve the rights to the electricity they need, which offset some of the infrastructure needs associated with the projects.
“They pay for all that they use. It doesn’t go onto residents,” Mr. Noble said. “The other thing we hear about is water. The older data centers did use a lot of water. The newer data centers are what they call closed loop. It’s kind of like your radiator in your car, it just goes in a loop. Most modern data centers use less [water] than 15 houses.”
Having businesses like manufacturing plants or data centers add to the city’s overall commercial base. According to Mr. Noble, a data center developer can invest as much as $750,000 to $1 billion into the local economy through capital investment.
Homelessness
When discussing homelessness in Georgetown, Mr. Noble told attendees solutions will come from public-private partnerships between the city and area nonprofits.
“You’d like to say that this is an easy solution. It’s not,” he said. “Obviously, these are real people. A lot of people have mental illness, but Georgetown is trying to address it as much as we can. We work with a lot of charities, a lot of churches, but it’s going to continue to get bigger as the population of Georgetown increases.”
In 2024, the Georgetown Police Department created the Crisis Intervention Team to handle mental health cases.
“That team also tries to help those individuals return to zones of support outside of Georgetown. So, if they have family in Cedar Park, or if they have family in Temple, we try and get them back to where they can be supported.”
Added water capacity
With the completion of the South Lake Water Treatment Plant this summer, Georgetown’s water treatment capacity was doubled to 44 million gallons of water a day.
Mr. Noble said the city will try to keep water rates down as much as it can while the city works to get water from East Texas to serve residents and businesses. The water will be piped from the Bryan-College Station area to Circleville, where the city will then build a pipeline from Circleville to Georgetown.
“[Water is] going to be a fresh resource, and so it is going to be more expensive,” he said. “The good thing is that the city, before I got here, had done some planning way ahead of time and thought about that. A couple years from now, a lot of cities should be struggling to get water at all if they can get it. And then if they do get it, it’s going to be crazy expensive.”
The city this spring also sold off a large portion of Georgetown’s water service territory – a lot of which made up the former Chisholm Trail Water Territory.
“Estimated full transfer is probably around [2029 at the latest]. Then [water territory buyer National Utility Infrastructure] will be responsible for their water, and we will be responsible for our water,” Mr. Noble said.
Legislative priorities
The next Texas legislative session opens in January. Mr. Noble and City Manager David Morgan encouraged residents to get involved through the city’s Legislative Ambassador newsletter. Through this newsletter, they said, residents can learn about bills that could impact Georgetown and voice their opinions to their representatives.
“We feel like there’s a lot of bills that are happening in Austin that no one’s aware of, and we want to make sure that more people are aware of what’s happening,” Mr. Morgan said during the town hall. “We can communicate it all day long, but it’s much more effective for residents to be engaged with what’s happening in the Capitol and for you to make your voice heard.”
This upcoming session, Mr. Noble said there are some bills that will “try to take control away from cities,” like putting limits on impact fees, which builders pay to offset the impact they have on resources like water and roads.
“They want to keep those either very small or not all,” he said. “One of the ways that Georgetown helps pay for future growth for all the people moving in is through those impact fees.”
Traffic
Upcoming transportation projects and road work in the District 2 area include:
- A roundabout at Memorial Drive and Wolf Ranch Parkway: work starts at the end of summer 2027.
- State Highway 29 from I-35 to Wolf Ranch Parkway: work starts September 2027
- DB Wood Phase 2 from Oak Ridge Road to Williams Drive: work starts October 2027
- Three new traffic signals on SH 29 West
“There’s going to be one [new traffic signal] in front of the new Bluebonnet [Plaza] intersection. Then we got two more going in further out, one at River Terrace Drive and one at Parkside Parkway,” Mr. Noble said.
Updates on road work projects can be found on the city’s ClearGov website.