Flood effort to test county
District ramps up to manage billions in new projects
For nearly two decades, the Harris County Flood Control District has plodded along with an annual budget of roughly $120 million, divided among operations, maintenance and capital expenses. That sum, which remained constant as the county’s population surged along with the number of homes along bayous, forced engineers to divide projects into bitesize portions or shelve them entirely.
As a result, the county made few major flood-protection improvements between Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 and Hurricane Harvey last year, even though 23 storms flooded parts of the county during that period. Even as federal support dwindled, causing delays to partnership projects with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Commissioners Court opted against increasing local funding for flood control.
That way of thinking ended last August, when Harvey swamped more than 204,000 Harris County homes and apartments and exposed how badly the county had under-invested in flood protection.
With the passage of a $2.5 billion Harvey-inspired bond in August, a proposal pitched after three devastating deluges in as many years, the flood control district is poised to make the largest investment in flood protection in the county’s history. Coupled with estimated federal matching funds, the district plans over the next decade-plus to spend more than $5 billion on at least 200 projects , including channel improvements, detention basins, flood plain mapping and home buyouts in each of the county’s 23 watersheds.
“I’ve been here 31 years. This is the first comprehensive drainage and flood control effort that’s ever been done countywide,” said County Engineer John Blount.
The bond program offers the flood control district a golden opportunity: Instead of attempting to catch up with new development, as has been the case for most of its 81-year history, the district can raze entire neighborhoods in the flood plain and design watershed-scale projects to protect against future storms climate researchers say will become stronger and more frequent.
To accomplish this, the district must simultaneously manage more projects than ever before, complete a hiring spree during a booming economy and work closely with local, state and federal partners who may have fewer staff and competing priorities.
Much of this responsibility falls on 42-year-old Russ Poppe, the district’s executive director, and his deputy Matt Zeve, 41. Poppe said when he was promoted to the job in 2016, he never imagined overseeing a project the size of the bond program. He said he was reassured when 86 percent of voters supported the proposal.
“We now understand the investment we’ve got to make in infrastructure to really reduce our flood risk,” Poppe said. “To me, the big challenge now is us executing this work in the next 10 years, and trying to meet the public expectations about how quickly we can expect to.”
The size of the program has forced the pair to alter their roles. Poppe spends much of his time as a Harris County ambassador of sorts, shuttling to Austin and Washington to educate policymakers on the county’s flood control challenges.
Zeve stays behind to oversee the scaling up of an agency that has seen its annual capital budget quintuple overnight. He has hired a replacement for his old role as chief operations officer and pushes department heads to find more efficiencies as their workload increases.
Successfully managing the bond program is crucial for Poppe and his staff. Engineers put the full cost of protecting Harris County against 100-year storms as high as $30 billion, and Commissioners Court has not ruled out coming back to voters for another bond. Should the flood control district bungle this program, residents may balk at paying for another.
Jim Blackburn, co-director of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters Center at Rice University, estimates the bond program will complete a third of the flood protection measures Harris County needs. He said leadership from the incoming Commissioners Court, which now will be dominated by Democrats and include a new county judge and Precinct 2 commissioner, will be essential to getting the county the rest of the way.
“We are in a good position, but it’s not an end position,” Blackburn said. “It’s the beginning for the conversation that needs to occur, which is, ‘where are we headed?’ ”
The region flooded long before the Allen brothers settled at the confluence of the White Oak and Buffalo bayous in 1836. It was not until the 20th century, however, that Harris County created a local entity to manage its water woes.
Floods overwhelmed much of Houston’s growing commercial district in 1929 and 1935, when water submerged 100 downtown blocks and drowned seven residents. In 1937, the Texas Legislature created the Harris County Flood Control District, the primary purpose of which would be to partner with the federal U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on local flood infrastructure projects.
Decades of underfunding
As Houston grew rapidly, the district undertook major projects, including widening and deepening Brays Bayou in the 1960s, White Oak Bayou a decade later and drawing the county’s first flood plain maps in the 1980s. By then, however, neighborhoods skirted the banks of bayous and subdivisions had sprung up inside west Houston’s dry reservoirs, dooming these homes in storms like Harvey.
Throughout its existence, the district has been hamstrung by a lack of political will and funding that arrives late or not at all. An ambitious plan to dig three canals across the county in the 1940s was scrapped. Channel work on Buffalo Bayou, opposed by environmentalists and wealthy homeowners in the 1960s, was canceled.
Project Brays, a $480 million district partnership with the Army Corps, broke ground in the 1990s. It has been hampered by inconsistent federal funding and has yet to be completed. A similar $400 million channelization project on Sims Bayou took 22 years.
The flood control district has issued bonds several times to pay for improvements, including $425 million in the 1980s, but by the 1990s was spending half its revenue on debt service. The district downsized its workforce and opted to pay for future projects up front, which significantly decreased the county’s investment in flood protection to around $15 million per year.
In 2001, after Tropical Storm Allison flooded 73,000 county homes, Harris County significantly increased the district’s funding to $120 million, split evenly between operations and capital projects. That annual sum has remained the same since then, its purchasing power diminished each year by inflation.
Blackburn said Commissioners Court and local members of Congress during this period focused too narrowly on building transportation infrastructure to keep pace with rapid population growth, at the expense of flood control.
“We were, basically, more interested in building the Grand Parkway than we were in fixing Addicks and Barker,” Blackburn said, referring to the west Houston reservoirs the Army Corps listed in 2009 among the most dangerous in the country.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett acknowledged in September that the county could have done more on flood protection in the decade before Harvey, but said he doubted the public would have supported a bond to pay for it.
“Sure, you could say the leader is supposed to get out in front,” Emmett said. “But people were not writing me saying we’ve got to raise taxes and do more for flood control.”
Precinct 3 Commissioner Steve Radack, the longest-serving member of the court, predicted a flood bond proposal during the dry years of the 2010s would have gone down in “sizzling defeat.” He rejected the idea that commissioners erred by neglecting to increase the district’s budget in the past.
“There are people who believe we’ve underfunded indigent health care, underfunded roads, underfunded basically every single thing,” he said. “You’ll never be able to make everyone happy.”
In the nine years between Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Harvey, Commissioners Court kept the flood control district property tax rate at roughly 3 cents per $100 of assessed value, less than 5 percent of the overall county tax rate. That figure omits about 2 cents the county carries on its books in the form of debt service on old flood control bonds.
The rate devoted to flood control was two and a half times higher from 1995 through 2000; it took until this year for rising property values to let the district collect more in property taxes — its main revenue source — than it did in 2000.
It was not until Harvey, the wettest storm researchers have ever documented in the United States, that Commissioners Court members saw the urgency in funding the flood control district.
Emmett, who was so distraught at seeing the damage wrought by Harvey he said he broke down in tears days after the rain stopped, was instrumental in passing the flood bond. With the commissioners, he hawked the flood bond at meetings across county watersheds, calling it the most important local vote in his lifetime.
Flush with cash
Gene Rushing said he believes the trifecta of storms — the Memorial Day Flood in 2015, Tax Day Flood in 2016 and Harvey the following year, finally persuaded the public to invest heavily in protection.
“In the past we’ve had numerous floods, and folks finally got to the point where it’s been so many of them in a row,” the 26-year flood control district veteran said. “It’s the repetition that finally got them to the breaking point.”
Rushing, who keeps two pairs of muddy boots in his office for site visits, is the head of the district’s construction division. He remembers the lean years of the 1990s when the district sometimes had less than $10 million per year for improvements. Starting next year, the district’s budget will jump to $350 to $450 million annually.
In the past, Rushing said the district’s limited budget forced engineers to tailor projects to individual neighborhoods or waterways. The flood bond will allow planners to design large-scale projects that he said are the most successful at reducing flooding.
As a result, he said morale is high among the district’s 320 employees, some of whom wondered for years how much county residents and elected officials valued their work. Dozens of designed projects that been filed away for a lack of funding suddenly have a green light, though some will need updating.
“We’ve been looking at some of these projects for years, and to finally be able to implement them, it’s an exciting time at the district,” said project manager Imelda Diaz, who was hired in 1999.
The scope of the bond program is far larger than the district can handle with its current staffing. Poppe said the district plans to hire 60 to 80 full-time employees, as well as consultants, to handle the workload. The county engineer’s office likewise is staffing up to fill a new division dedicated to flood mitigation in subdivisions.
Under normal circumstances, Poppe said luring professionals from the private sector to the flood control district is a challenge. In the current economic boom, talented engineers often have far more lucrative options than government work. On average, he said, each position has taken two to four months to fill.
Chief Operations Officer Kasey McCall, who started at the end of October, is one of the newest hires. After more than a decade in the energy industry, McCall said he was looking for a job without travel. He was interested in working on the bond program, and recalled how his family opened their Atascocita home to a couple for four weeks after Harvey.
“There’s a good sense of purpose,” he said. “If there’s anybody who enjoys being in Houston and wants to make a difference, this is a good spot for them.”
When the district can get new hires like McCall through the door, Poppe has to find a place to put them. The district headquarters since 1986, a three-story brick building at Loop 610 and U.S. 290, is filled to capacity. Poppe has asked some employees to doubleand triple-up in offices while the district plans to lease 33,000 square feet of new space near Little York and Hollister.
District engineers also must balance the bond projects with ongoing repairs to infrastructure damaged by Harvey, which are only about 10 percent complete. At a Bear Creek work site in Katy recently, inspector Tyrone Camel explained how Harvey’s destructive floodwaters had eroded the channel’s banks, creating a dangerous blockage of silt and muck. A crew is working to fortify the banks with riprap.
“This is not bond-related, but it’s something that’s very critical also,” Camel said. “There’s just so much damage out here.”
New development, which has kept its frenetic pace after Harvey, continues to pose challenges for the district. Houston and Harris County adopted new flood plain building rules after the storm, but they have done little to dissuade construction there. By the time Poppe and Zeve’s team had the funds to buy out homes, private developers already had purchased many of them.
The district’s vision to buy up land along bayous, to allow them to swell naturally without flooding homes and putting lives at risk, could be dashed as the city and county continue to permit hundreds of homes in the flood plain.
“It’s a certainly a competition between us and development,” Poppe said, adding that bond funds allow the district to be far more aggressive with land purchases.
“We’ve been looking at some of these projects for years, and to finally be able to implement them, it’s an exciting time at the district.” Imelda Diaz, project manager