When the giant sugar cube drops from the clock tower at midnight New Year’s Eve in Sugar Land Town Square, city leaders will be hoping that this brand-new tradition will usher in a prosperous 2010.

A number of major capital projects are on Sugar Land’s agenda for 2010.

The city will be putting together financing and operations groups for the development of two major entertainment venues — a minor league baseball stadium and an indoor concert facility — which were authorized by voters a year ago but have been moving more slowly than expected due to economic conditions, said Mayor James Thompson.

Another focus will be on the redevelopment of the now-idle Imperial Sugar processing site, which Thompson calls “a major icon in the city.” That project also has languished but will be on the front burner in 2010.

At the end of 2009 the city signed off on a more than $80 million project to build a water treatment plant and related infrastructure that will enable the city to convert from groundwater to surface water as mandated by the state.

The new facility ultimately will have the capacity to treat 22 million gallons of water a day.

Legislation passed by the Texas Legislature in 2009 paves the way for Sugar Land to acquire a portion of the state’s Central Prison Unit known as Smithville for expansion of the Sugar Land Regional Airport.

This redevelopment is expected to create more than 2,000 new jobs and $1 million in additional annual revenue to the city.

Mobility projects will continue in 2010 with the improvement of Dulles Avenue from U.S. 90A to Texas 6 under an accelerated contract and the redesign of University Boulevard corridor with the addition of new roads and bridges to accommodate development of Newland Properties.

Also planned are continued improvements to parks and additional hike-and-bike trails throughout the city.

“We have a lot on our plate,” said Thompson, who pledges to continue working closely with neighboring cities and other partners in Fort Bend County.

“What each of us does affects the whole county and region,” he said.

Intermodal Center

Something that could have a big impact on the county and region is what Rosenberg Mayor Joe Gurecky calls “the sleeping giant”— the Kansas City Southern Railroad’s Intermodal Center — which is like an inland port and being developed along U.S. 59 in Rosenberg’s extraterritorial jurisdiction.

Although the site is in its early stages of development, KSC has been running trains here regularly and Nissan is already unloading automobiles from trains to trucks for distribution, said Gurecky.

He adds that another company is in the final stages of negotiations to build a 750,000-square-foot distribution center here in 2010.

“It will be a huge center and it will definitely have an impact locally — some say negative, some say positive,” Gurecky said.

Local residents are concerned about heavy truck traffic, he said, not to mention “50 trains rumbling through Rosenberg every day. These are some of the issues we will face.”

But the facility is projected to create anywhere from 750 to more than 2,000 jobs.

Gurecky points out that Rosenberg used to be known as the Hub of the Gulf Coast “and we’re getting back to that.”

Another major initiative in Rosenberg in 2010 will be a transit study launched by the recently-created Rosenberg Development Corp.

In November, the RDC awarded a contract to Traffic Engineers Inc. to conduct the study, which will look for ways to improve transportation and mobility in Fort Bend County, including pedestrian and bike mobility.

The county is funding 80 percent of the study. The survey and public meetings are slated to get under way in February.

Next year “will be an exciting year,” said Gurecky. “We’re planning for the future.”

From the viewpoint of Fort Bend County Judge Bob Hebert, “right now, signs are good for increased activity” in the county in 2010.

Hebert, like Gurecky, is keeping a close watch on the KSC Intermodal Center.

“We’ll have to see how quickly tenant development occurs.” He said he is anticipating construction at the site in 2010, but that “could slide into 2011.”

“We’ve had a lot of projects coming to Fort Bend County that were put on hold because of the recession,” he said. Some have been announced and others are still confidential.

“At least two of these had anticipated starting construction in 2010 but are currently on hold because they have national and international markets. But they are committed to land in Fort Bend County,” he said.

Mobility a priority

Mobility is always high on the list of projects for the county.

While major rebuilds of state and federal highways such as Texas 6, U.S. 90A and U.S. 59 have been mostly completed, with the result that “traffic moves fairly well in Fort Bend County right now,” the county continues to struggle to get funds to improve county roads that connect these major highways.

One of these projects, the improvement of FM 1464 from the Westpark Tollway to the Grand Parkway, will be completed in 2010, but the county’s chances are slim of winning federal funding to improve a clogged Crabb River Road south of U.S. 59 to FM 762, where a large school is being built.

“It’s a terrible bottleneck and it’s going to get worse,” Hebert said.

Overlaying the plans and prospects for Fort Bend County in 2010 is the fact that it is a census year, which means an updated head count of residents as well as new data on all kinds of topics.

The county’s population is estimated to be more than 550,000 now — reflecting a growth rate of 25,000 to 30,000 per year.

In the next 20 years the county’s population will double, said Jeff Wiley, president of the Fort Bend Economic Development Council.

“That means we need to double job growth,” Wiley said. And he believes the county is poised for that to happen.

“We have a regional and a national reputation as a good place to do business and to live,” he said.

Wiley points to the tremendous growth in major and ancillary medical facilities along U.S. 59 in Sugar Land over the last few years.

“The health-care market leads job growth in Fort Bend County, and the school systems are next,” he said, adding that the EDC is “actively talking with business partners about expanding UH-Sugar Land to focus on health care.”

Biotechnology is also a growing industry in the county, Wiley said, and the EDC sees “an opportunity for these businesses to form a coalition of high-tech companies to attract more like them to Fort Bend County.”

He said the EDC is working with CenterPoint Energy on IT services such as redundant power to enable these kinds of companies to set up here.

He is also excited about the Intermodal Center, which he says will “jump-start job creation and growth” and create “transformational opportunities” locally and regionally.

Wiley points out that besides the KSC development, on the other side of U.S. 59 a major business park is being developed by GBI Properties, focusing on Asian companies that would come to the county to set up markets here, taking advantage of the Foreign Trade Zone designation for both facilities that is expected to become final in early 2010.