Three weeks after flash floods in Texas’ Hill Country killed more than 100 people, state lawmakers chastised Kerr County leaders for rejecting money a year earlier to create a warning system that could have alerted residents to rapidly rising water.
Several lashed out as a Kerr official representing the local river authority tried to explain why it declined money from a $1.4 billion state fund to help guard against destructive flooding.
One state senator on the special legislative committee tasked with investigating the deadly floods called the decision “pathetic.” Another said it was “disturbing.” State Rep. Drew Darby, a Republican from San Angelo, said the river authority simply lacked the will to pay for the project.
But Kerr leaders were not the only ones who rejected the state’s offer, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. In the five years since the fund’s launch, at least 90 local governments turned down tens of millions of dollars in state grants and loans.
Leaders from about 30 local governments that the news organizations spoke with said the state grants paid for so little of the total project costs that they simply could not move forward, even with the program’s offer to cover the rest through interest-free loans. Many hoped the state program would provide grants that paid the bulk of the costs, such as the ones from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which typically supply at least 75%. They believed that they could raise the rest.
Instead, many were offered far less. In some cases, the state offered grants that paid for less than 10% of the funding needed.
In Kerr’s case, the state awarded a $50,000 grant for a $1 million flood warning system, or roughly 5%. It said the river authority could borrow the rest and repay it over the next three decades, but local officials were not sure they would be able to pay back the $950,000 — and failure to do so could carry state sanctions.
City officials in Robinson, located between Dallas and Austin, sought about $2.4 million in funding to buy and tear down homes directly in the floodway. The state offered $236,000 and required that the city conduct an engineering study that would have eaten up more than half of those grant funds, the city manager told the news organizations.
The state also proposed giving the East Texas city of Kilgore a fraction of what Public Works Director Clay Evers had anticipated for a drainage study aimed at minimizing flooding. The city needed the money, Evers said, but the state’s offer required a far larger match than the council members had planned to set aside based on the federal grant system as a guide. The state also required the city to go through a second application process to secure the grant, which Evers said would further strain resources.
So, Evers dropped out.
Four years after he turned down the state funding, Evers watched in shock as lawmakers lambasted Kerr leaders. It could have just as easily been him trying to defend a choice he never wanted to make in the first place.
“I don’t have this unlimited pot of money,” Evers said. “That is an incredibly difficult decision, and when the impossible, improbable, traumatic happens, how do you defend the decision you just made?”
Several Texas leaders who created and oversaw the fund defended the program as a significant investment and said that local communities must also be willing to invest in flood warning and mitigation projects.
Local officials, particularly those in smaller, rural communities, said a limited tax base, along with continued state restrictions on their ability to raise new taxes, have made it difficult to fund necessary projects.
After learning of the newsroom’s findings, two lawmakers and a former state employee who helped launch the fund expressed concerns over the high number of communities that turned down the money. Though state Rep. Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso, and Darby said that the state can’t pay for the entirety of every project, they acknowledged lawmakers created a flawed system.
“I absolutely know that what we’re doing now is not adequate for the people that we represent,” Moody said. “It’s OK for us to admit that the system isn’t good enough. We shouldn’t be afraid of saying that. The question then is, what are we going to do about it?”
Moody and Darby said the state program merits a thorough review by lawmakers during the next legislative session in 2027.
“It is a frustrating prospect that we have this program that’s designed to be important to help people’s lives, and the Legislature determined it to be a priority, and we put money in, and to find it still in the bank accounts, and not being deployed,” Darby said. “We need to fix it.”
I know I had critical things to say about Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, though I’m not able to find the posts now. I appreciate the clarification, and of course it makes sense that the state would take the cheap way to do this. I hope they follow through and address this in the next session. The state can afford it, that’s for sure.
(There were of course other reasons to criticize Kerr County officials following those deadly floods.)