As spring arrives to League City, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on what we have accomplished and our plans for the future. A more detailed accounting will be in the annual State-Of-The-City Address on April 11th.

We are very fortunate; the condition of our city is strong and our future is promising. League City continues to be the crown jewel of the Bay Area. There are more than 60,000 citizens in League City and our challenge is to keep pace with growth, while maintaining the high quality of life that our citizens expect and deserve.

As in years past, public safety continues to be one of my top priorities. My goal is to make League City the safest city of its size in the country. Under my administration, we have added more than 18 positions to our public safety departments. In 2007 alone, we added 10 new police officers, the most in any one budget year in history.

In response to the growth and increase in traffic in our city, we created a new Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Program. This will ensure that trucks on our streets are operated in a safe and legal manner. We also added a Crime Analysis officer to the police department so we can get better, more accurate, and more timely information and intelligence to the police officers in the field. This will help them protect our citizens from crime. I reaffirm my promise to strengthen our public safety departments in this year's budget as well.

In 2005, the year I was sworn in as League City's Mayor, the city collected approximately $5.6M in sales tax. Thanks to our aggressive economic development programs that focus on high-quality commercial growth, our sales tax receipts have increased more than 42%. In 2008 the city is projected to collect more than $8M in sales tax.