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BASTROP — City leaders opened 2026 by reflecting on a year of growth, record tourism and expanding operations during Bastrop’s first council meeting of the year Jan. 13.
Updates from City Manager Sylvia Carrillo and Discover Bastrop Director Michaela Joyce highlighted strong visitor numbers, growing event attendance and an increasingly busy year ahead for city staff. Joyce said Discover Bastrop now uses a data program that pings cell phone signals in defined areas to estimate attendance at downtown events.
“For 2025, we had approximately 1.5 million visits through our downtown — 309,000 people individually went through but multiple people visited multiple times,” she said. “That is really exciting to see because that means a lot of our locals are actually revisiting downtown.”
