The Texas House and Senate quickly established special committees to focus on relief efforts and determine what preparations the state must make to be better prepared for future natural disasters.
Now, these panels of state lawmakers are meeting for the first time. Legislators on the Select Committees on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding convened Wednesday to hear testimony from emergency management officials, weather forecasters, the Texas Water Development Board and other experts.
First to testify was Nim Kidd, Chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), who spoke and answered questions for nearly three hours. Overall, he had two top recommendations for state lawmakers to address.
“Communications is one of them,” said Kidd. “That’s messaging from the media, that’s messaging to the citizen and that’s messaging back and forth with our local first responders that are coming from all over the state.”
He added the state has a “long way to go” towards improving communications. Currently, Kidd said, the state lacks consistency — nearly each local government does things their own way.
“We have 52 to 54 independently, usually locally owned, radio systems across the state,” said Kidd. “There’s no state standard for governance and how they operate.”
The second recommendation on Kidd’s list: “We’ve got to do a better job at our warning and notification systems for all hazards, not just floods.”
That’s one thing state Sen. Paul Bettencourt is working on this special session. The Houston Republican is carrying a bill focused on how to get a statewide flood early warning system in place. He told The Texas Newsroom that he’s spoken with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and believes they’re on the same page as Gov. Greg Abbott — especially when it comes to taking the burden off funding such a system off local entities.
“Let’s just get money, get a solution, get it to them,” Bettencourt said in a Tuesday interview.
Bettencourt, who added he doesn’t yet know all the solutions available, said he believes simply adding sirens along the state’s rivers won’t be enough.
“You got to look at gauges. You have to look at cell communications,” Bettencourt said. “If you’re down in a river valley, you may not be able to get the alerts.”
Too bad you weren’t all on the same page about this during the regular session, Paul. Maybe talk to Ken King about the bill the Senate refused to consider despite it passing the House by a wide margin. Better late than never and all that, but spare me the “we’re hard at work” talk.
This is one of those times when the Lege may have to compel local Republicans to do something they don’t want to do if they’re serious about this.
In 1988, a year after a devastating flood killed 10 teenagers trying to evacuate from a riverside summer camp in Kerr County, leaders at the local river authority made a difficult decision: They raised their tax rate by nearly 50% to help pay for an early flood warning system.
The rate hike was controversial at the time. But the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which levies property taxes in order to manage the river that flows through Kerr County, decided it was worth the political fallout.
“If it saves one life down the road, it will be worth it,” Dick Eastland, who was a member of UGRA’s board of directors and also ran the riverside Camp Mystic, told the Associated Press that summer.
The river authority initially spent $225,000, about half a million in today’s dollars, on what was then described as a “world-class” warning system. Local officials said it was a crucial way to save motorists from being swept away on low-lying roadways, which is what had happened to the teen campers.
Yet nearly three decades later, when an engineering study determined that the system needed a $1 million upgrade, a tax increase was not on the table.
That didn’t change in subsequent years, even as local officials failed to secure significant funds from federal and state officials. It held true even after UGRA built up a $3.4 million reserve fund for an unrelated project that later fell through, leaving the river authority with so much extra money that it lowered taxes.
And so the region was left without a modern flood warning system on July 4, when flash flooding along the Guadalupe killed more than 100 people in Kerr County alone, including 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic. Eastland was among the dead.
County officials have faced pointed questions about their hesitancy to pay for a flood warning system, and state leaders have promised to step in. But experts say the spotlight also belongs on the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, one of dozens of obscure governmental agencies that manage Texas waterways.
“Obviously, they felt like it needed to be done in the 80s, so why is that not relevant 30 years later?” said Mark Rose, former general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority, which serves the Austin region and dozens more communities downstream. “That’s not a lack of resources, that’s a lack of willpower.”
UGRA staff did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Nor did most of its current board members, all of whom were appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott. Three of those nine members lead summer camps along the Guadalupe, including Eastland, who Abbott reappointed in 2022.
Bill Rector, president of the board, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that the river authority recently decided to pay for a new flood warning system on its own. (When reached for further comment this week, he referred reporters to UGRA staff.) But documents show that members have only approved spending a sliver of the system’s total cost so far, out of an annual budget of $2.3 million.
The local taxpayers have shown that they’d rather save a few bucks than spend this money. Maybe this will change their mind, but we all know what the capacity is for forgetting what has happened before and moving on. Now is the time to push this through, if indeed the likes of Abbott and Patrick and Bettencourt care about it. We’ll see. The Trib and the Chron have more.