Texas A&M University
EN-10: Community Partnerships

About: Liberty County is located in southeast Texas between Harris County and Hardin and Jefferson Counties. It is part of the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land metropolitan statistical area, also known as Greater Houston. The County is also a member of the Houston-Galveston Area Council.

Liberty County is 1,158 square miles and is primarily a rural county. There are thirteen communities in Liberty County, eleven cities, and two census-designated places. Liberty City is the county seat. In 2020, there were 91,628 residents living in 33,182 housing units. A majority live on unincorporated county land.

Liberty County has experienced a high level of growth over the past decade. Population growth is greater in Liberty County than in the Houston-Galveston area and the state of Texas. Housing has also grown rapidly to keep pace with the population. Most residents live in the western half of the county and a majority live on unincorporated land. The Hispanic population is projected to increase by 309.5% from 2010 to 2050.

Project: Liberty County is updating its Strategic Plan, a comprehensive roadmap that guides development decisions for the coming decades. Teaming up once again with TxTC, Liberty County asks residents' input to formulate a plan for the future. The 2016 plan has served as the county's official policy guide, addressing crucial factors such as growth, economic development, and environmental considerations. Now, as conditions in Liberty County and the region continue to evolve, the time has come to revise and update the plan to reflect the changing landscape and address new challenges head-on.

A strategic plan is a vital document that outlines the long-term vision for a community's growth and development. It encompasses essential elements such as development considerations, transportation, community facilities, economic development, environment, and housing. By reassessing goals and priorities, Liberty County aims to create a forward-thinking plan that ensures a resilient, thriving, and inclusive community for generations to come. The Liberty County Strategic Plan outlines capital improvement projects, regulations, county investments, and aids in securing grants for proposed projects.

Since September 2022, Liberty County has been collaborating with a community steering committee and Texas A&M students, faculty, and staff to drive the planning process forward. The project team conducted stakeholder interviews, online engagement, and focus group workshops. These engagements aimed to gain insights into the distinctive challenges and opportunities faced by Liberty County. Building upon community feedback and best practices, the team formulated potential solutions addressing critical needs such as growth management, affordable housing, transportation safety and efficiency, economic development opportunities, community facilities siting and funding, healthcare and food access, and hazard management.

Project website: https://texastargetcommunities.mysocialpinpoint.com/liberty-county

About: Located in the Piney Woods of far northeast Texas, Jefferson claims more National Register of Historic Places properties than any other city in the state despite its relatively small size, with around 2,500 residents in a compact 4.4 square miles. Although almost 150 years have passed since its “Golden Age” as a major river port, Jefferson has retained much of its architectural heritage, attracting tourists year-round to historic homes and bed and breakfasts, along with natural attractions such as bayous and lakes.

Jefferson’s population is almost exclusively composed of individuals whose primary ethnicity is either White alone or Black/African American alone, with non-Hispanic White residents making up an estimated 45.8% of the city’s population, and Black or African American residents representing 43.4%.

Project: Graduate planning students designed and facilitated the first engagement process in Jefferson, Texas, with TxTC and the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University. The City of Jefferson and the Jefferson Economic Development Corporation collaborated to understand community priorities and inform the development of the comprehensive plan.

The Jefferson Economic Development Corporation and the Jefferson City Council contacted Texas Target Communities (TxTC) program at Texas A&M University to help the community plan for the future. While the City had worked with a consulting firm in 2019 to conduct a planning and capacity study, residents did not add their needs and priorities. Small, rural communities like Jefferson (pop.1830) often lack the capacity and resources to develop plans or conduct robust community engagement. The new partnership with TAMU presented an opportunity to connect with residents, review and validate the findings of the previous planning study, and foster a collaborative envisioning of the future.

In the fall of 2022, second-year graduate students in the Master of Urban Planning program in the Communication in Planning course undertook the engagement process. Students developed a multifaceted approach embracing traditional public meetings, interactive pop-up engagements, and cutting-edge virtual technology. To enable broader participation, students used Social Pinpoint, an innovative tool with interactive mapping exercises and virtual discussions, providing a convenient and accessible avenue for participation. Additionally, planning students conducted multiple small-group stakeholder meetings to ensure community leaders and champions engaged and provided diverse perspectives in the community.

By utilizing an inclusive and equitable engagement process, the City of Jefferson is now equipped with a good understanding of the community's needs, priorities, and concerns. The resulting document is the first step for this small town to harness local knowledge and amplify the voices of residents, businesses, and stakeholders.

More about TxTC: https://collaborations.tamu.edu/txtc/index.html

SETx: Equitable solutions for communities caught between floods and air pollution

Funded by the Department of Energy, this Urban Integrated Field Laboratory (IFL) is in Southeast Texas (SETx). The long-term goals for the SETx-UIFL are to provide quantitative understanding of projected climate change impacts in a way that is generalizable to other regions, and to improve the practice of resilience science and community resilience through new and generalizable theories of change validated in SETx-UIFL. To achieve these goals, the SETx-UIFL coordinates numerous disciplines, scholars, and community stakeholders toward the short-term goals of 1) integrating new data, methods, and models about the interactions among natural, human-built, and social systems; 2) increasing our understanding of interdependencies, mutual benefits, and trade-offs of different wellbeing outcomes for humans and the environment; 3) co-producing knowledge with stakeholders; and 4) centering concepts of social equity in urbanized regions across spatial and temporal scales.

The Texas Target Communities Program (TxTC) is a high-impact service-learning and community engagement program. Since 1993, TxTC has assisted more than 60 underserved communities across Texas, invested 12,000 hours of student and faculty expertise per community, and connected communities to resources for assessing and leveraging community assets. TxTC is interdisciplinary to provide the tailored support communities need to solve complex problems. TxTC’s mission is to provide training, tools, and assistance necessary to facilitate the transformation of communities from high-risk/low-opportunity to equitable, resilient, and adaptive by mitigating threats to the economy, environment, and culture.
The Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) produces transformative research that offers solutions for more sustainable and vibrant communities, translates the research to action through engagement, and creates high-impact learning experiences for students. IfSC works with communities in the Houston area to engage them in understanding and finding solutions for their urban problems. IfSC works closely with the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Service (t.e.j.a.s.) to investigate the issues related to pollution and environmental justice along Houston's Ship Channel. Researchers (faculty and students) work closely with t.e.j.a.s to take water, soil, air, and particle samples to understand the heavy metals and petroleum chemicals in "fenceline" communities. T.e.j.a.s. guides the research, and IfSC translates findings for community members so they can make the most informed decisions about their own health. These communities were also flooded during Hurricane Harvey and our relationship has led to quick research response to understand the level of exposure from the flood waters. This relationship has led Texas A&M to apply and win a $10 million Superfund Research Center to further investigate the public health consequences of communities with chronic exposure from petroleum refineries.