Angry residents rally to confront MUD board
Woodlands neighbors demand action on flood control, conflicts of interest
It’s rare for residents to jam a monthly meeting of a municipal utility district board. Meeting on weekday afternoons when many people are at work, MUD boards regularly convene in front of a handful of constituents — and sometimes none at all.
That was not the case Thursday afternoon, when the board of the Harris Montgomery Counties MUD 386 gathered in a classroom at Lone Star College Creekside Center.
They were met by about 75 residents of The Woodlands — many wearing bright yellow “Stop the Flooding” T-shirts and holding “Fix the Drainage!” signs. They voiced their grievances — at times loudly — about flooding in the Timarron and Timarron Lakes neighborhoods, and pressed for solutions.
Some also demanded that the board adopt a policy barring conflicts of interest involving board members, consultants and developers.
The board took no action on the proposals, but the spectacle of homeowners angrily confronting a MUD board was remarkable in
itself. MUDs, which serve as de facto local governments in many unincorporated communities in the Houston suburbs, typically operate below the radar. Members are not required to live in the communities they serve, often have close ties to developers and usually hold their meetings in the offices of downtown law firms.
Homeowners in Timarron Lakes assert that the flooding of 100 homes during Hurricane Harvey in August was most likely caused by a faulty drainage system that they had asked MUD officials to overhaul after flooding in May 2016. They were joined at the meeting by residents of the Timarron neighborhood, where 200 homes were flooded by water overflowing from Spring Creek.
Conflicts of interest
Don Hickey, a Timarron Lakes resident who worked for 15 years for the developer of The Woodlands, the late George P. Mitchell, told the board that conflicts of interest are a “serious problem in all of our MUDs.”
“Did our developer build our flood system on the cheap? Were they more aggressively building in the flood plain? We really don’t know the answer,” said Hickey, a bank executive. “How can we rely on the engineers of the district to help us know that when those engineers are the same ones who designed our system?
“How can we know whether the attorneys representing the district are really representing us? In the case of the engineer and the legal counsel, their next deal comes from the developer; it doesn’t come from us. Are they truly looking out for our best interests? I don’t think so,” he said.
MUD 386 was created in 2001 by the state Legislature at the request of The Woodlands Land Development Co., which was represented at the time by Schwartz, Page & Harding. The same law firm now represents MUD 386. The developer is now a division of the Howard Hughes Corp.
Howard Cohen, a partner at Schwartz, Page & Harding, said Hickey’s remarks contained “lots of factual errors and misconceptions.” He declined to elaborate.
MUDs have powered the explosive development of Greater Houston. They have vast authority to sell tax-exempt bonds on behalf of developers to finance roads, parks, drainage and water and sewer systems, and then to levy property taxes on homeowners, who repay the bonds over 25 years, with interest.
Developers say MUDs have enabled growth and have helped keep housing prices low in Texas. But some taxpayers’ advocates contend they are beholden to the developers who create them, not accountable to homeowners and at least partially responsible for higher property taxes.
‘Level of protection’
The sharpest exchanges came when Rich Jakovac, president of the MUD’s board of directors, and board member Zachary Toups responded to comments from residents.
Jakovac, seeking to put the Harvey-related flooding in context, noted that in another part of The Woodlands, about 5 percent of the homes flooded, compared with 6 percent in the area where Timarron Lakes and Timarron are located.
“Are you saying that’s acceptable?” a resident shouted at him.
“I’m just saying that’s a fact,” replied Jakovac, a business executive.
Toups, who works for an engineering firm in The Woodlands, told the audience that residents need to decide on the “level of protection” they want from flooding.
His comment was met with shouts.
“We want no more houses to flood!” said one resident.
“We flooded drastically,” said another.
“We’ve had two floods in 15 months,” yelled a third.
Bernie Otten, 57, urged the board to embrace an online petition signed by about 1,500 people that calls on the district to hire an independent engineer to approve a drainage plan. The petition also urges the board to adopt a policy forbidding conflicts of interest.
Residents said that during the May 2016 flooding, water rushed out of storm drains into the streets. Six homes were flooded in Timarron Lakes and Timarron.
The residents concluded that the storm drains in Timarron Lakes had been inundated by water from Timarron, where Spring Creek had spilled over its banks. Timarron Lakes’ storm drains had filled with water, residents said, because a 10-foot-deep drainage ravine that had previously allowed water to flow back into the creek had been filled in during the neighborhood’s development.
No mutual trust
Earlier this year, months before Harvey, residents asked the MUD to build a culvert where the ravine had been so that in a future flood, the water flowing into Timarron Lakes from Timarron could drain back into Spring Creek. But the MUD determined such a culvert would not make much of a difference.
All told, 200 houses flooded in Timarron, and 100 flooded in Timarron Lakes, neighbors estimate.
Cohen, the partner at Schwartz, Page & Harding, has said he knew of no evidence showing the drainage system had ever malfunctioned and that nothing could have prevented the flooding from Harvey.
After the meeting, Hickey said he didn’t think it had accomplished much.
“The community doesn’t trust the board, and the board doesn’t trust the community. The board hasn’t responded to the issues of the conflicts of interest. That is the 500-pound gorilla with all of these MUDs. Are the MUDs supporting the developer or are they supporting the residents?,” Hickey said.