Houston asks oilman to help with hard choices
HOUSTON — As Houston confronts the immediate and long-term crisis created by Hurricane Harvey, it’s turning once again to an oilman.
The choice of former Shell president Marvin Odum to advise the mayor on storm recovery efforts reflects Houston’s history as a Texas oil town, long before it became the nation’s fourth-largest city with a sprawling mix of skyscrapers and multiethnic strip malls on the Gulf of Mexico.
Several oil companies are headquartered in Houston, and oil money helped build its downtown, its priciest neighborhoods and its cultural centers.
One of the biggest challenges facing Odum, a native Houstonian, in his job as recovery officer will be pushing Houston away from its roots as a city that’s long chosen development over conservation, paving over critical wetlands to make way for new buildings. Some advocates working on those causes wonder whether someone from the city’s most powerful interest can get leaders to make better choices for the future.
“The decisions that Houston makes about how it develops in the future are going to be decisions that affect businesses, and I hope that a businessman can make those tough calls,” said Brian Zabcik, an advocate at the group Environment Texas.
Houston has flooded each of the last three years, and while Harvey caused unprecedented damage in many neighborhoods, storms in 2015 and 2016 also displaced people and destroyed hundreds of homes. And Houston’s proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, combined with the effects of climate change, make it a certainty that lifethreatening weather will remain a threat.
The problem has worsened because Houston lost a third of its wetlands in the last three decades, reducing places for rainwater to settle before flooding.
In announcing Odum’s appointment, Mayor Sylvester Turner acknowledged the city has to change how it develops and that it has to invest in mitigation projects that could cost billions of dollars. He said he hoped Odum would help create change and not just produce “a report” telling him what to do.
“There will be another storm. That is very, very clear,” Turner said. “The question will be whether or not we will take advantage of this moment to put us in a better position for the next storm that certainly will come.”