City, county still unhappy with GLO aid plan
State’s proposal for Harvey relief would send $750 million to Harris but nothing to Houston
Harris County and the city of Houston this week blasted the Texas General Land Office’s revised plan for distributing billions in federal Hurricane Harvey aid, saying that while it is an improvement over the $0 the state originally awarded the local governments, it still is woefully inadequate.
Mayor Sylvester Turner and Steve Costello, Houston’s chief recovery officer, said in a letter Wednesday that GLO’s proposal to send $750 million to Harris County and still nothing to Houston ignores what Congress wanted when lawmakers approved the aid package for Texas in 2018 — to help communities devastated by Harvey.
“It is unconscionable that the State would expect that this amount in any way represents an amount that is sufficient to address the extensive mitigation needs in Houston and elsewhere in Harris County,” the pair wrote the land office.
The city and county want at least $1 billion each, which they say is fair since that sum would be roughly half of the $4.3 billion in federal aid that GLO manages and Harris County has about half of all the residents in the 49 counties eligible for the funds.
They suggested the state could abandon its proposal to send more aid to regional government entities, including the HoustonGalveston Area Council, to free up more money for Houston and Harris County.
GLO spokeswoman Brittany Eck questioned whether the city of Houston is a reliable steward of federal aid, noting that the city has spent just 9 percent of the federal housing aid dollars it received last year. She said the agency also has launched an investigation into whether Houston was following program regulations, a week after the city’s housing director alleged Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration had steered an affordable
housing contract to a specific developer.
The dispute with GLO has enormous consequences: Harris County is counting on federal aid to help complete projects in its $2.5 billion flood bond program, and Houston desperately wants to improve urban drainage so neighborhoods no longer flood before stormwater can flow into bayous.
The GLO in May announced the results of a $1 billion funding competition for the disaster mitigation aid, which completely shut out the city and county governments, despite the fact that Harris County sustained the most fatalities and property damage from the 2017 storm.
A Houston Chronicle investigation found the scoring criteria GLO used discriminated against populous areas and the state disproportionately steered aid to inland counties with a lower risk of disasters than coastal ones most vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. Land Commissioner George P. Bush claimed falsely that federal rules were to blame for the result.
After criticism from Houston-area Democrats and Republicans alike, the GLO said it would revise its plan for spending more than $1 billion in additional federal aid it has yet to distribute. Instead of holding a second scoring competition as originally planned, GLO intends to award $750 million directly to Harris County, which it can share with Houston and other cities at its discretion.
An additional $667 million would be divided amount regional government entities, including the Houston-Galveston Area Council. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development must approve the revised plan.
In a letter of its own to GLO on Wednesday, Harris County walked a fine line between thanking the state for offering the $750 million and making a case for why it remains insufficient.
Given its own need to fund flood bond projects, the county is disinclined to share its allocation with cities within its boundaries. Instead, County Administrator Dave Berry said county leaders support Houston’s request for a $1 billion allocation.
“The majority of the amount of the State of Texas (federal) allocation — by far — was due to Hurricane Harvey and the documented damage suffered in Harris County and the city of Houston,” Berry wrote. “Congress clearly intended for this money to go to communities most impacted and distressed by Harvey.”
Eck said lawmakers in Washington could have mandated certain sums go directly to Houston and Harris County but chose not to.
Berry added that the GLO’s plan to send additional aid to the HoustonGalveston Area Council is an impractical solution, since its board of directors is dominated by smaller government entities. Wharton County Judge Phillip Spenrath, chairman of the H-GAC board, did not respond to a request for comment.
The cancellation of the second funding competition also dashes the hopes of other local governments that had hoped to see their projects funded after being snubbed in the first round. Aransas and Nueces counties, where Harvey made landfall, did not receive a dime. Neither did Jefferson County, which suffered widespread flooding and recorded the highest rainfall totals during the monster storm.
Officials in each coastal county were baffled when communities with a lower risk of disasters — some more than 100 miles inland — won funding for their projects.