Stafford, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Stafford began, why it has no property tax, and the school district found nowhere else in Texas
More about this in Stafford
Stafford sits mostly in Fort Bend County, with a small slice of the city reaching into Harris County, bordered by Houston to the north, Sugar Land to the west, and Missouri City to the south and east. It's a small city by area — just 7 square miles — that runs itself in ways few other Texas cities do. This page is a plain guide to that place, written for anyone who wants to understand the town before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Stafford, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the city came from
Stafford's story starts in 1830, when William Stafford established a plantation on this stretch of prairie, complete with a cane mill and a horse-powered cotton gin. The plantation didn't last undisturbed. On April 15, 1836, during the Texas Revolution, forces under Antonio López de Santa Anna stopped there and burned it to the ground. Stafford rebuilt and lived on the land until his death in 1840, and a settlement grew up around the site under the name Stafford's Point. It became a real townsite in August 1853, when the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway began stopping there — a railroad connection, same as it was for so many small Texas towns.
A slow-growing town for a long time
Stafford's population stayed small for generations. It had just 50 residents in 1884, grew to 300 by 1896, then actually fell back to 100 by 1914. By 1946 it had climbed to 400, and the city formally incorporated a decade later, in 1956. The slow early history is part of why Stafford's character today still feels distinct from the newer master-planned subdivisions surrounding it in Fort Bend County.
The city with no property tax
Stafford is known around the region for something unusual: it has not levied a municipal property tax since 1995, making it the only Houston-area city, and the most populous city in Texas, to fund itself without one. Instead, the city runs on sales and franchise taxes collected from the businesses inside its borders, a model that took real commercial growth to sustain.
The Texas Instruments years
A big part of that commercial growth came from Texas Instruments, which opened a wafer-fabrication plant in Stafford in 1967. The plant made silicon wafers used in cell phones, televisions and solar devices, and by 2009 it employed roughly 1,500 people, making it the city's largest employer. TI closed the Stafford plant in 2012 as the industry shifted toward larger, more efficient wafers the older facility couldn't produce, laying off 500 workers and relocating another 500 to newer plants, with operations moving to the Telfair area of Sugar Land.
A school district that exists nowhere else in Texas
Stafford is home to the only municipal school district in the entire state of Texas. The Stafford Municipal School District formed in 1977, after Stafford broke away from the Fort Bend Independent School District — a split that triggered years of federal litigation before the district's constitutionality was settled in 1981. Today the whole city is zoned to this one district, controlled directly by the city rather than by a separate elected school board, which is unlike anywhere else in Texas.
A long-serving mayor and a growing city
Leonard Scarcella served as Stafford's mayor from 1969 until his death in June 2020 at age 79, and by 2018 he was recognized as the longest-serving mayor in the United States. Stafford's population reached 17,666 at the 2020 census. The city has continued to build community traditions in more recent years too, including an annual Juneteenth Celebration first launched in 2022.
That is Stafford: a plantation burned during the Texas Revolution that grew, slowly and then commercially, into a small city that taxes businesses instead of homes and runs the only municipal school district in Texas.