Baytown, Texas

mendous amount. The Houston area produces six to eight percent of the nation’s GDP, and it’s second in the world in GDP per capita. When you have that kind of thing happening in Bay- town, the citizens need to reap some benefits from all of that, too.” All of that growth prompted city officials to create a community-based strategic plan to find out what the citizens of Baytown wanted to accomplish with the additional tax reve- nue generated by the corporate expansions. So, it put together a program called “Imagine Baytown” and got input from over 4,000 of the city’s 77,000 residents who came out to community meetings or took online surveys. The results informed a five-year strategic plan that guided a lot of the city’s revitalization and infrastructure upgrade efforts. One such effort was the San Jacinto Boulevard Project, whose aim was to create a parallel road to the west of Garth Road, Baytown’s major commercial corridor, which had become extremely congested. “Phase One has been completed and inaugurated, and it turned out beautifully,” Davis reports. “It is complete with a traffic circle at the intersection of Hunt Road and San Jacinto Blvd. So, there is, now, connectivity of a new, four-lane boulevard all the way from I-10 to just south of Santavy Blvd. At the traffic circle, we also inaugurated a huge statue of Sam Houston on horseback pointing toward the San Jacinto Monument, BAYTOWN, TEXAS