🏛️ $50 Million to Houston, and Annexation Comes Off the Table

🎨 A Woodlands Frame Shop Says Goodbye After 45 Years

💼 NAES Is Taking 28,000 Square Feet at Hughes Landing

🎓 A Woodlands Grad Is Back at His Old School, This Time on Staff

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The Woodlands Township Board of Directors met in special session Wednesday and voted unanimously to approve a Third Amendment to the Regional Participation Agreement with the City of Houston. All seven directors were present, and all seven voted in favor. It still needs approval from Houston City Council.

The original agreement dates to 2007. It created the Regional Participation Fund, paid for out of a portion of the sales tax revenue generated in The Woodlands and spent on qualifying regional projects. In exchange, it gave the Township long term protection from annexation by Houston and became part of the framework for how this community would be governed.

The amendment ends that fund structure. The Township would send Houston $27.4 million over the next three years, of which $7.9 million is sales tax already obligated for 2027 through 2029 under the original deal, with the remaining $19.5 million coming from cash reserves. It would also release the restrictions on roughly $22.6 million that has built up in the fund over the past twenty years, making it available for Houston to use. The Township describes the combination as $50 million in near term financial benefit to the City of Houston.

What The Woodlands gets back starts in 2030. From that point the sales tax revenue previously required to go into the fund stays here for Township priorities instead, an amount current projections put at roughly $4.5 million a year. The possibility of Houston annexing the Township would be eliminated, though The Woodlands stays inside Houston's extraterritorial jurisdiction. The amendment does not change the community's ability to consider incorporation later, which remains a decision for voters.

Board Chairman Brad Bailey said the unanimous vote would put millions more dollars back in the hands of the people of The Woodlands, and credited Mayor Whitmire, Houston City Council and city staff for the work behind the agreement. Houston's council was scheduled to take the item up Wednesday and has postponed it to next week.

Why it matters: for almost twenty years a share of what people spent here left the community by agreement, and this vote sets a date when that stops.

Source/Credits: The Woodlands Township · Woodlands Online

Woodland Art & Frame is closing after 45 years. The announcement came as a letter from owner Cindy Plummer, written to the community rather than about it, thanking the people who kept a small family owned picture framing business going for four and a half decades.

The letter is mostly a list of what came through the door. First family portraits. Children's artwork. Wedding photos. Diplomas. Military honors. Plummer writes about serving generations of the same families, and about being a small part of their stories.

That is the part worth sitting with. A framer does not sell you a thing so much as agree with you that something is worth keeping.

Why it matters: 45 years is most of the time there has been a Woodlands to frame anything for, and this shop was here for nearly all of it.

Source/Credits: Woodlands Online

NAES Corp has signed a 28,000 square foot office lease expansion at Hughes Landing. The company, which operates power plants, is currently a subtenant at 1735 Hughes Landing and will be establishing a long term presence at 1725 Hughes Landing.

Lucian Bukowski of Stream Realty Partners and Kip Durrell of CBRE represented NAES in the negotiations. Jillian Fredericks, Joel Douthit and John Spafford, all with CBRE, represented the landlord, Howard Hughes Holdings.

Why it matters: a subtenant becoming a long term tenant is a vote of confidence that shows up on a lease instead of in a press release.

Source/Credits: REBusinessOnline

Dylan McDowell was on the sideline Wednesday for the Highlanders' Freshman White football game against Cypress Ranch. He used to play here. McDowell is a Woodlands High graduate and a former Highlanders baseball outfielder who finished at Texas A&M in 2023.

He is back on staff now as assistant varsity baseball coach, freshman football coach, and a world geography and social studies teacher at the Ninth Grade Campus.

Why it matters: plenty of kids leave here for college, and the ones who come back to do the job their own coaches did are a quieter kind of local news.

Source/Credits: The Woodlands Student Center

🤝 Insperity employees built the stuffed animals themselves: Rather than write a check, they bought two stuffed animal making machines so every toy was created, stuffed and dressed by hand before hundreds of them went to patients at Texas Children's Hospital The Woodlands. Read more in Hello Woodlands

💼 The Habitat ReStore on SH 242 now sells on eBay: The Conroe resale shop at 9407 SH 242 is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 to 5, takes donations until 4:30, and every purchase funds Habitat for Humanity of Montgomery County. Read more in Hello Woodlands

🎓 The Red Cross says a disaster plan can cost nothing at all: With National Preparedness Month starting Tuesday, the Texas Gulf Coast Region suggests picking two family meeting spots, keeping contact cards on paper in case the internet is down, and building a kit one sale item at a time. Read more in Woodlands Online

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The Jones State Forest sits on FM 1488 in Montgomery County and is one of only two state forests in Texas with a significant population of the red-cockaded woodpecker, a federally listed endangered species about the size of a cardinal. Some trails close seasonally so the birds can nest.

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You have read thousands of pages without stumbling once, and then somebody asks you to read one sentence out loud and you forget how words work.

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