- In area MUD elections, handful of voters decide $1 billion in bonds" 'Rent-a-voter' districts chided while supporters point to progress.
A few months ago, a cabinet maker and his wife were recruited to move into a manufactured home parked on a dirt road that was plowed into the woods on the west side of Conroe in Montgomery County.
Daniel and Deborah Spiecher are now the only residents of a newly created municipal utility district, or MUD, carved from 82 acres of land there. They are also the only ones eligible to vote Tuesday on $500 million in proposed bonds to develop that tract.
In fact, they are among just seven voters who will decide the fate this week of $1.07 billion in bonds for roads, water, sewer and recreational facilities in three such districts that were recently formed in this fast-growing county north of Houston. The debt will be repaid with taxes imposed on future residents and businesses. While some believe the MUDs provide a means to bring about high-end development in an orderly way, critics say they are out of control, with developers manipulating the democratic process to essentially take on the roles of cities and borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to make public improvements.
Montgomery County resident Adrian Heath decries the lack of transparency and citizen input into what critics call "rent-a-voter" MUD elections. Heath notes that the billion-dollar MUD proposals make the contentious, countywide election over a $280 million road bond package look like "kid stuff."
Yet an attorney representing one of the developers for the three MUDs refers to these initial seven voters as "urban pioneers."
"They move onto the land and help establish new communities, paving the way for the future homeowners," said Angela Lutz, the attorney for Stoecker Corp., which plans to develop land covered by a separate MUD on Conroe's west side and also north of The Woodlands. She stressed these elections are completely legal, as well as being "typical and ordinary" and the way MUDs have operated for decades.
