“The worst is over” in Fort Bend County and “it wasn’t that bad,” County Judge Bob Hebert said today in his State of the County address.

The Central Fort Bend County Alliance lunch event was held at Safari Texas near Sugar Land.

Noting that Fort Bend County was recently named by Forbes magazine as one of the Top 10 Best Places to do business, Hebert pointed to such signs of economic strength as the closing on 900 new homes in Cinco Ranch in 2009.

He said that property value assessments — the county’s primary source of revenue — while no longer galloping upward as it had been in recent years, is nevertheless holding at 2 percent to 3 percent while most other counties in the state and nation have been losing valuation.

As a result of that, plus careful budgeting and the fact that the recession allowed the county to get better deals on contracts, the county’s tax rate also has held at 49.5 cents for the last two years and it is not going up in 2010, Hebert said.

He said all county departments except law enforcement were asked to trim their non-payroll budgets by 50 percent.

Additional savings came in the county’s aggressive new facilities construction program, which has used one master building design with interior variations for each of the county’s new buildings, from precinct headquarters to a tax office and other facilities.

And more new buildings are under way in 2010, including a new EMS facility near the county fairgrounds, which broke ground this week, and a library to begin construction later this year at the University of Houston-Sugar Land campus.

Construction also continues on the county’s new justice center building, which Hebert said will feature a tunnel for moving inmates between the jail and the courts without exposure to the public.

He also talked about a long list of road building and improvement projects the county has on its plate, including widening and improving FM 1093 in a segment including the intersection with the Grand Parkway and completion of feeder roads and overpasses on the Grand Parkway between Interstate 10 and U.S. 59.

“We’ve got a lot of roads and a lot of buildings being built,” Hebert said. “But with economies of scale, careful budgeting and the recession, we have been able to avoid” levying a 2 cent tax increase that was previously authorized by voters for some of these projects.

The county also recently saw the unveiling of major new flood maps produced by the Federal Emergency Management Administration. This $1.4 million modernization project provided critical new data on the rivers and watersheds in Fort Bend County and resulted in significant elevation of the some of the county’s 100-year flood plains, Hebert said.

As a result, the county’s levy management districts and other entities responsible for flood control have been responding to the new information with levy improvements and elevation of flood plains.

The county also received $2.8 million in federal stimulus funds intended for energy conservation projects.