Odum, Houston’s Harvey recovery czar, steps down
Securing control of aid funds among accomplishments
Marvin Odum, the former Shell Oil president who Mayor Sylvester Turner tapped as Houston’s volunteer recovery czar shortly after Hurricane Harvey, announced his departure from that role Wednesday to broad praise for his efforts to tweak bureaucracies from City Hall to Washington for the benefit of Houstonians.
Odum had committed to coordinate Houston’s storm recovery until the arrival of the first significant chunk of federal aid, and Houston is now expected to receive $1.17 billion in housing assistance within a month.
Departing with him as of Friday — following another trip to D.C. to advocate for funding and project proposals — will be Niel Golightly, a Shell vice president who has been on loan to the city as Odum’s chief of staff.
Steve Costello, a drainage engineer and former councilman who has served as the city’s flood czar since 2016, will replace Odum. Houston plans to hire a new chief resilience officer (Costello’s formal title) to replace him.
“This is by no means the end of the recovery,” Turner said. “They’ve taken us through Phase One and we begin now to launch Phase Two, but we’ve just been very fortunate to have the benefit of their expertise, their intellect over the last 15 months. The city could not have asked for a better team to assist us.”
Odum and Golightly worked with only one to two staff devoted to the recovery, but they convened weekly meetings of city department heads, some of whose employees spent some work time on recovery tasks; Odum was quick to credit this broader team.
Among the group’s accom-
plishments was securing local control over the housing aid that the city and Harris County will receive, rather than having that money routed through the state General Land Office, as state and federal officials originally intended.
Bob Harvey, president of the Greater Houston Partnership, participated in meetings with Odum and state and federal officials on the issue and said Odum’s presence was key.
“It certainly was important in Washington and in Austin that the former president of Shell Oil had taken on this role and had immersed himself in it to the degree that Marvin did,” Harvey said. “He had a very good high-level view of the problem, but he could go as deep as was needed in the moment. No matter who he was dealing with, he had a command of the facts.”
Odum also successfully pushed FEMA to adopt a nationwide policy that lets local governments count volunteer work hours and donated materials toward the local match required for grants to repair damaged facilities. In Houston’s case after Harvey, that local match could top $250 million.
Odum said he was proud his team had tried to think outside the typical disaster recovery process, pointing to the new FEMA policy and to the city’s move to hire data scientists to produce a flood inundation model showing that the $1 billion in housing aid Houston is about to receive — an allocation based on readily available but incomplete damage data —falls $2 billion short of the city’s actual needs.
“‘That’s just the way it’s done.’ Well, actually there’s something better than that,” Odum said. “We just kept saying, ‘Why can’t it be this way?’ ”
Odum highlighted the 14 recovery centers the city, county and nonprofits staffed in affected neighborhoods, linking more than 16,000 residents to services, and pointed to the council’s vote to set stricter development rules in floodplains. Referencing his experience as an industry leader in a heavily regulated field, Odum waded into the intensely lobbied fight, pushing council members to embrace the proposal and helping secure its narrow 9-7 passage.
Moving forward, Odum said, Houston must continue collaborating with county, nonprofit and business groups; push FEMA to fund repairs sufficient to harden city facilities against future floods, not simply fix them; advocate for more funding; and keep seeking the $30 billion, three-decade flood mitigation blueprint he believes the region needs.
Costello, who has led recovery efforts related to infrastructure projects, said he is getting up to speed on housing issues, including a Wednesday night meeting with city housing director Tom McCasland.
“Most of the leadership in these organizations, whether state or federal, knew that Marvin was going to be sort of a shorttimer, so the transition is going to be relatively smooth simply because we’ve been part of the recovery team from Day One,” Costello said. “I know most people that we’re dealing with. It just made sense.”
A Houston Chronicle investigation last year found that the engineering firm Costello left in January 2015 helped develop neighborhoods in the Barker Reservoir flood pool and produced a study showing thousands of properties were at risk of flooding there. Costello has said he personally did no work related to the neighborhood in question, called Grand Lakes, and didn’t recall the study. He said Wednesday he does not believe the issue will affect the public’s confidence in his work.
“I’ve been the flood czar for two and a half years and that hasn’t really come up,” he said. “I’m focusing on providing protection to our neighborhoods, our city and our citizens.”
Some local governments respond to disasters by staffing entire agencies to run their recoveries, but Houston has basically no money budgeted for its recovery team, and Turner said Costello is simply taking Odum’s seat.
Coming federal aid would let the city add staff, but that’s not necessarily the right choice, said Andy Kopplin, who was the founding director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which led rebuilding after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
The structure of the recovery team is less important than its leadership, he said. Whether it is the mayor, the recovery czar, or someone else, Kopplin said, there must be a voice emphasizing the need to select projects of greater impact, even if they are costlier or politically more difficult.
“You’ve got to have somebody who can execute and build the team to get the money out the door,” Kopplin said, “but you also have to have folks who hold true to the vision for building a more resilient city.”