Unc: A big city but limited services

Let’s take a quick tour of a community I’m calling Unc, Texas.

Unc has an estimated 1.9 million residents, a number surpassed by only four U.S. cities.

Among Texas cities, only Houston is more populous. Twelve U.S. states have fewer inhabitants than Unc.

Unc, of course, isn’t a city. It’s made up of the subdivisions, strip malls and master planned communities in the vast and rapidly growing unincorporated areas of Harris County.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett is the closest thing Unc has to a mayor. He welcomes growth but worries about its implications.

Because they lack a conventional city government, residents of Unc get services from a patchwork of agencies — municipal utility districts, volunteer fire departments, contract deputies, and of course the county itself. But the county isn’t really set up to serve the needs of an urban area. It lacks ordinance-making power, for example.

“County government was created with rural counties in mind,” Emmett told me recently.

Some of the nation’s metropolitan areas have jettisoned traditional county government and adopted some sort of consolidated city-county model. Emmett says he has discussed these possibilities with three Houston mayors, and he says the city and county are combining efforts on some big initiatives.

In the long term, he thinks something like the Woodlands Township model might be an option for Harris County’s unincorporated areas. But for now, he’s struggling to figure out how to use the existing structure to deliver services to all those new residents of Unc, Texas.