In August 2023, a developer named Jeff Minarcik stood in front of the Llano County Commissioners Court and asked for twenty inches. His subdivision, a 48-lot development called The Drace, was in its final stages. Lots along the man-made canals sold for anywhere from $300,000 to $1.2 million. Everything was ready except one detail: the county's setback rule required an entire structure, not just its walls, to sit at least five feet from the property line on lots smaller than half an acre. Minarcik's homes, on 40 and 50-foot-wide lots, needed their roof overhangs to intrude twenty inches into that buffer.
The court said no. Commissioner Linda Raschke, who had helped write the regulation, explained why the county was strict about something most builders elsewhere treat as a formality.
"In my seven years working on the subdivision regulations, it was the full structure, for many reasons, not just fire. I worry about stormwater runoff because The Drace is at the lowest point of the county, and it flooded more than anywhere else during the 2018 flood."
That flood is not an abstraction. In October 2018, the Llano River rose about 25 feet in twelve hours, flooded hundreds of homes, and collapsed the RM 2900 bridge. Llano County writes its subdivision rules with that event in institutional memory. A builder who has worked twenty years elsewhere in Texas can still get caught by it, because the rule is not written the way most counties write it.
That is the first lesson for anyone shopping land near Lake LBJ: county government is not decoration. It is the actual rulebook for what you can build, how close, and how fast. And Kingsland, the lakeside community where this all played out, sits on top of two of them.
Half a Mile Changes Everything
Most people who search "Kingsland, TX" picture one town. It is not. Kingsland is unincorporated, which means it has no city government of its own, and its post office, its schools, and most of its long-settled neighborhoods sit in Llano County. But drive to the northeast corner of RR 1431 and FM 2342, the intersection where the Llano and Colorado rivers meet to form Lake LBJ, and you have crossed into Burnet County without a sign telling you so.
That corner is exactly where Kingsland Commons is going up: a 50-acre, mixed-use development that broke ground in May 2026 with plans for 60 single-family homes, 160 apartment units, 60 townhomes, 14 commercial or retail buildings, and four restaurants, all organized around a central park with a splash pad and amphitheater. It is the largest thing to happen to Kingsland's built environment in years, and it is not in Llano County at all. The project needed its preliminary plat approved by the Burnet County Commissioners Court, not Llano's, because the raw acreage sits on the Burnet side of that intersection.
Developer Gregg Miller, who has lived in Kingsland for six years and leads Hill Country Land Development Group, has been careful to frame the project as local rather than imported. But the geography he is building on answers to a different commissioners court than the one that turned down Minarcik's twenty inches. Two buyers standing a few hundred yards apart, both telling friends they bought "in Kingsland," may be dealing with different appraisal districts, different road departments, and different subdivision rulebooks entirely.
What Actually Changes When You Cross It
The most concrete difference is the tax bill. Llano County's Commissioners Court approved its fiscal year 2026-27 property tax rate at $0.25953 per $100 of assessed value, the same nominal rate as the prior year. But because property values rose, that flat rate still produces a real increase in what owners pay. The no-new-revenue rate, the number that would have kept tax bills flat, was $0.25336, about 2.37 percent lower than what the court adopted.
That county rate is only one layer. School districts, cities where applicable, and special utility or emergency-service districts stack on top of it, and county-wide guidance for Llano County puts the total effective rate anywhere from roughly 2.0 to 2.8 percent of assessed value depending on which combination of taxing entities covers a given parcel. Two homes of identical value in different corners of the same county can carry meaningfully different total bills. Cross into Burnet County and you are dealing with an entirely separate appraisal district, separate commissioners court, and a separate rate-setting process, none of which is required to move in step with Llano's.
School zoning follows its own logic and does not track the county line cleanly either. Llano ISD is the county-wide district for Llano County and specifically serves the community of Kingsland, with Packsaddle Elementary located right there. But families on the Burnet County side of that same Kingsland area may zone to Burnet ISD instead. The two districts are simply different systems, and boundary maps can have street-level quirks, so the only reliable way to know which district a specific parcel feeds into is to check with the district directly rather than assume "Kingsland" means one answer.
The Utility Lines Don't Follow the County Line Either
Here is where it gets genuinely counterintuitive. The county line is a hard boundary for taxes, courts, and permitting. But water and wastewater service in the area runs through the Kingsland Water Supply Corporation and the Kingsland Municipal Utility District, both of which serve the broader Kingsland footprint regardless of which county a given parcel sits in. It was a "willingness to serve" letter from the Kingsland MUD, confirming it would handle wastewater for the new development, that cleared Kingsland Commons to start bidding out its infrastructure contracts in the fall of 2025.
So a buyer cannot assume that crossing the county line also means crossing into a different utility provider. It might not. What it does mean is a different tax authority and a different permitting desk, layered on top of a utility system that could be identical on both sides of the invisible boundary. That combination is exactly the kind of detail a median price on a portal listing will never surface.
Here is how that plays out for two hypothetical, otherwise-identical half-acre lots near the RR 1431 and FM 2342 intersection:
| Lot A, Llano County side | Lot B, Burnet County side | |
|---|---|---|
| Taxing authority | Llano County Commissioners Court, Llano CAD | Burnet County Commissioners Court, Burnet CAD |
| County tax rate (FY2026-27) | $0.25953 per $100 valuation | Set independently by Burnet County |
| School zoning | Likely Llano ISD, verify by address | Possibly Burnet ISD, verify by address |
| Subdivision setback authority | Llano County's stricter full-structure rule | Burnet County's own subdivision code |
| Water and wastewater provider | Kingsland Water Supply Corp / Kingsland MUD | Same providers may still apply |
What Kingsland Commons Is Actually Building, and How Fast
Beyond the jurisdictional split, the project itself carries a detail that matters to anyone tempted to buy a lot there as a bet on appreciation rather than a home to build. Miller's development agreement includes a stipulation that lots cannot be purchased solely for investment and left undeveloped. Construction has to begin within a year of purchase. That is unusual. Most raw land and pad-site purchases in the Hill Country carry no such requirement, and it changes the calculus for anyone thinking about parking capital in a lot and waiting.
The timeline is also longer than the marketing suggests at first glance. In May 2026, Miller said most lots should sell within the next year to eighteen months, with full buildout of the 50 acres taking about four years from that point. The first confirmed tenant, a Chicken Express location, broke ground that same month with completion targeted for later in 2026. Everything else, the boutique hotel, the retail spaces, the apartment buildings, is still finding its tenants.
Infrastructure is running on its own separate clock, and not always the same clock as the development itself. TxDOT approved entrance roads and turn lanes specifically for Kingsland Commons to handle the traffic increase it expects to generate. Separately, and elsewhere along the county's stretch of RR 1431, the department's own Rural Transportation Improvement Program for Llano County lists a widening project adding paved shoulder and a turn lane between Industrial Boulevard and Texas Avenue, budgeted at $723,583.50 and currently targeted for 2028, still a year or two out from today. It is a reminder that road capacity in this corridor gets planned on a county-by-county, project-by-project basis, not all at once alongside the rooftops.
Before You Write an Offer
If you are looking at land or a home anywhere near the Kingsland side of Lake LBJ, a few questions are worth asking before you get attached to a specific parcel:
- Which county's appraisal district actually covers this address, and what is that county's current adopted tax rate?
- Which school district is this parcel zoned to, confirmed directly with the district rather than assumed from the mailing address?
- Is the parcel inside an existing subdivision's plat, and if so, whose commissioners court approved it?
- Which utility provider serves water and wastewater here, and has that provider issued a willingness-to-serve letter for any nearby new development that might affect capacity?
- If the parcel sits near a road corridor with known TxDOT project activity, what is the current timeline, and does it affect access during construction?
None of these questions show up on a listing sheet. They show up in county records, commissioners court minutes, and a phone call to the right appraisal district. That is the kind of digging that separates a buyer who understands what they are actually purchasing from one who finds out the hard way after closing.
Kingsland is a good example of something true across the whole Hill Country: the map you see online treats these communities as single dots. The county line, the school boundary, the utility district, and the subdivision plat rarely agree on where that dot actually starts and stops. Getting that right before you make an offer is not paperwork. It is the difference between the deal you thought you were getting and the one you actually signed.
Topper Real Estate works these Llano County and Lake LBJ transactions from both sides of that line every day, and can walk you through exactly which authority governs a specific parcel before you ever put in an offer. Schedule your Hill Country consultation to start with the facts on the ground rather than the assumptions on the map.
