If You Live Outside the City Limits, Your Public Buildings Are on Friendship Drive and Melton Street

If your mail says Magnolia and your road belongs to the county, the city is not your government for most everyday purposes. Your commissioner is. Montgomery County Precinct 2 runs a set of buildings and services out here that a surprising number of residents have never used, mostly because nobody ever told them the addresses.

Start with the recycling center, because it is the one people ask about most. It sits at 31354 Friendship Drive in Magnolia, and the number is 832-934-2193. It is open Wednesday through Saturday, 7 in the morning to 5 in the evening, closed on county holidays. One condition attached to that, in the county's own words: items must be sorted and clean before you arrive, or you can sort them at the facility. Turning up with one bag of mixed everything is how you end up doing the sorting yourself in the parking lot.

Then there is heavy trash, which runs on a schedule you can actually remember. The county's rule is that the annual Heavy Trash Clean Up is always the weekend before Magnolia ISD spring break. This past March it ran March 7 and 8, on Friendship Drive. Worth writing on the calendar now, because it comes around once a year and people miss it every year.

Three community buildings are available out here, all of them booked through the same office at 281-252-3852 or joanne.moore@mctx.org:

• The West Montgomery County Community Development Center, 31355 Friendship Drive, which also houses The Friendship Center and its social gatherings for seniors through the year.
• The Magnolia Community Building, 422 Melton, with meeting space and a kitchen.
• The Decker Prairie Community Building, 32434 Decker Prairie, same idea, further west.

Rental rates change, and we are not going to print a number we cannot stand behind, so call the office. What matters is that these rooms exist. If you are running a scout troop, a homeowners meeting, a quinceañera planning session or a family reunion, you do not have to find a restaurant with a back room.

The Malcolm Purvis Library sits at 510 Melton St., reachable at (936) 522-2792, part of the county library system. Precinct 2's own office is at 19110 Unity Park Drive, at 281-259-6492, and the precinct also keeps a horse arena and a youth sports complex.

One thing worth noticing about that list. The community building is at 422 Melton. The library is at 510 Melton. On Tuesday we wrote that Magnolia nearly got named Melton and that the discarded name survived on a street sign. It turns out the county quietly put a good share of this area's public life on that same street.

None of this is a substitute for city services, and it is not meant to be. A county precinct does roads, drainage, buildings and programs. It does not do municipal water or a fogging truck. But residents outside the line are not unrepresented and not unserved, and the difference between knowing these addresses and not knowing them is a real one.