Buda Mayor Bobby Lane, with Chief Bo Kidd beside him, swears in the first Buda Police Department. The new officers will work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. (Photo by Jen Biundo)
by JENNIFER BIUNDO
Buda patrol
The nine inaugural members of the Buda Police Department took their oaths of office in October, taking over law enforcement services from the county. In 2007, the city contracted with the Hays County Sheriff’s Office for a dedicated force known as the Buda Patrol, but moved last year to terminate the county contract and build a home-grown police force. Bo Kidd, who led the Buda Patrol, is serving as the city’s first police chief. The new station is housed on Houston Street, just southeast of City Hall. The department’s annual costs are budgeted at about $700,000, slightly less than the city was paying for a contract force.
U.S. Foods saga
A September groundbreaking ceremony marked the end of a long and contentious road in U.S. Foodservice’s two-year fight to build its $50 million regional distribution center east of Buda in the Sunfield development. Members of the group BudaFirst sued the city of Buda last year, arguing that councilmembers violated the citizens’ rights when they refused to honor a petition calling for a referendum election opposing the development. After lower courts threw out the lawsuit, the state Supreme Court denied the suit without hearing the case, giving U.S. Foodservice a green light to move forward.
Buda Fire Dept. Fired Up
2010 saw the culmination of several long-term goals for the Buda Fire Department. In October, Fire Chief Clay Huckaby brought EMS services in-house, taking over ambulance services from the contracted San Marcos/Hays County EMS. And over the summer, after five years of preparation, Buda’s Public Protection Classification (PPC), a ranking which measures how well a fire department can protect property, improved from a 7 to a 3, resulting in savings of up to 30 percent on property insurance. The department also opened the city’s third fire station, located on the east side in the Sunfield development.
Outsourced
One of Buda’s oldest and largest industrial employers, Danfoss Chatleff LLC, announced this summer that it would shutter the 62,000-square-foot Goforth Road plant and outsource 120 jobs to Mexico. The company builds cooling and heating components. In 2007, the Denmark-based company Danfoss bought Chatleff Controls from Austin couple Ray and Carolyn Henderson, who built the Buda plant about 25 years ago. The family maintains ownership of the land and plant.
Woelfel murder
Buda’s first murder in recent memory culminated in a manhunt and SWAT standoff in the Ozarks. Mark David Simmons, 51, is expected to plead insanity in the April murder of his business partner Steven Woelfel. Simmons allegedly shot Woelfel, 55, a week before setting the slain man’s Buda home on fire, and rigging the kitchen stove to explode just as firefighters arrived on the scene. No first responders were injured.
Simmons’ mother, who described her son as an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic, said Simmons stole her Hyundai Sonata before the alleged murder. The vehicle was linked to armed robberies in Branson, Mo., where police arrested Simmons in June after an eight-hour standoff. He was extradited to Hays County, where he remains in jail.
Simmons also faces unrelated charges for being in possession of a firearm while on probation for a previous weapons charge in College Station. He told police he was stockpiling weapons for the upcoming racial war.
Parks are Buda-Ful
2010 was a good year for parks in Buda. Though you couldn’t tell it from the steady stream of visitors slipping around the closed gate, the long-delayed Stagecoach Park officially opened in March, two years behind schedule, following contractor issues and a lawsuit. The rustic 52-acre nature park features hiking trails, a fishing pond, a windmill attached to a splashing water cistern, pavilion, playscape and wildflower areas. The park is named for the historic stagecoach stop on the property.
However, Buda’s next park in the works will feature less nature and more concrete. In September, local teenagers organized and urged the council to build a skateboard park. Two months later, Buda secured $140,000 in county park bond funds for the proposed 10,000-square-foot skate park on south FM 967 (South Loop 4).The county also allocated $310,000 for improvements to the Bradfield Park trail, including one mile of trails and one mile of sidewalks to link Goforth Road and Bradfield residents to Stagecoach Park and Main Street.
The county also finalized a $9.9 million conservation easement on the Dahlstrom Ranch just west of Buda. The deal will preserve in perpetuity 2,254 environmentally sensitive acres on the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, including about 200 acres that will be open to the public.
Good times in Buda
Buda’s festival and entertainment scene got a boost from the city’s recently-hired tourism director, Alisha Burrow. A crowd of thousands turned out to the historically laid-back Boo-dah Halloween Festival, while other events also saw high turnout. The year also saw a resurrection of the Buda Farmers Market, with local farmers and vendors gathering several times a month to sell fresh produce, jams, baked goods and more.
To help keep the tourists coming, the city commissioned a $25,000 branding campaign from Dallas-based advertising firm Ariamedia, to research and design a branding campaign for the city, including elements like logos, taglines and a marketing communications plan.
Roadwork
This year saw a flurry of roadwork throughout the county, and Buda was no exception. Work is underway on a new bridge at the southern terminus of Buda’s truck bypass. Officials hope the new bridge will help alleviate traffic headaches caused when interstate access roads were converted from two-way to one-way this spring.
With no overpasses between FM 2001 in Buda and Dry Hole Road in Kyle, motorists and heavy commercial trucks heading north on Interstate 35 must now detour south about four miles. The new overpass will provide fast access to the northbound interstate.
The city originally had planned to build a connector road linking Goforth Road to northbound IH-35 prior to the one-way conversion of the access roads, but later decided the cost was too prohibitive.
