$2.5B bond would be a drop in flood control bucket
Imagine $2.5 billion in crisp $100 bills. If you tried to fit that amount of money inside your house, it would fill your living room and your kitchen; it would stick out of the extra cabinet underneath your sink. It’s not a quantity of money that is easy to conceptualize.
Yet that is Harris County Flood Control’s estimate for the cost to protect us against a flood of 100-year magnitude. When you add in the cost to build flood prevention infrastructure in Galveston, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties, the price tag soars to $57.9 billion.
Juxtapose those two numbers against the quantity of funds available to Harris County.
$5 billion — the amount the Federal government has awarded the Gulf Coast in post-Harvey recovery aid to date.
$2.5 billion — the amount Harris County is currently requesting in the local flood bond election on Saturday.
Adding these two sums together will not give our region the money it needs for flood prevention. The majority of the $5 billion federal dollars are earmarked for a coastal spine, a project from Sabine pass to Galveston County designed to deflect a devastating storm surge. This coastal spine will give some protection from a “worst case scenario storm,” but it doesn’t address needed basic infrastructure improvements.
On the other side, the $2.5 billion requested by the Flood Bond will cover 227 “nuts and bolts” projects including a large backlog of drainage, dredging and home buyout projects that have been languishing unfunded for years.
In between the coastal spine and the 227 projects covered by the flood bond rests a list projects that may go unfunded, including a third reservoir that experts agree is needed to supplement the holding power of our existing reservoirs. So how will we pay for all of this?
A large part of the county’s plan is to attract federal matching dollars. Some estimates put the size of the potential matching funds available at close to $10 billion — that’s $3 in federal money for every $1 that Harris County puts in.
However, even with $10 billion in federal matching funds on top of the $2.5 billion flood bond and the $5 billion in aid already awarded, our region will still not have enough to cover all its infrastructure needs. That’s where the state of Texas needs to come in.
Our state government has yet to pay its share of post-Harvey rebuilding. Harvey impacted more than 60 Texas counties. While Gov. Greg Abbott did authorize $90 million to pay for debris removal after the storm, he has not issued a special session of the Texas Legislature on Harvey, and he has declined to use the state’s Economic Stabilization Fund, also known as the Rainy Day Fund, to pay for infrastructure projects.
Harris County cannot prevent flooding alone. At least 30 watersheds were involved in Harvey flooding and many county governments will need to be involved in flood prevention.
In addition, the residents of Harris County already pay a significant amount of property taxes — at rate of more than 2 percent of home values. The flood bond will be financed by raising taxes even higher — by up to 1.4 percent. Homes worth less than $200,000 and residents over 65 will be exempt from the change.
Nevertheless, a household with a home valued at $500,000 could see just over a $100 per year increase in property taxes by 2035. Houstonians should put skin in the game and contribute to infrastructure improvements, but they should not bear this cost alone.
The state of Texas has more than $10 billion in the Rainy Day Fund. Some of those funds should be used to cover the gap between what federal dollars can cover and local tax payers are already contributing. Hurricane season started again on June 1, and as Judge Emmett stated recently, “If Harvey came next week, we’d be in a world of hurt.” We cannot wait until the Legislature reconvenes in Jan. 2019 for state action.
We all deserve streets with adequate drainage and reservoirs that can protect against 100-year floods. The residents of Harris, Galveston, Fort Bend, Montgomery and Jefferson counties are all Texans. If we want to keep the Texas stars and stripes big and bright but also high and dry, then we need action from the state today.