Abbott, Houston mayor to meet amid tension over Harvey recovery money
Amid skirmishing over Harvey recovery money, Gov. Greg Abbott will meet with Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and hold a joint news conference at Houston City Hall on Friday.
The governor and the mayor exchanged letters, and some words, this week about the mayor’s request that the governor call a special session of the Legislature to direct money from the state’s $10 billion Economic Stabilization Fund to help Houston avoid having to raise property taxes to help pay for the costs of Hurricane Harvey.
The governor has said that the fund, also known as the rainy day fund, will almost certainly be tapped to help pay for recovery and rebuilding after Harvey, but that he, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus agree that it is not necessary or wise to call a special session. Instead, other state monies can be deployed as needed and replenished by a supplemental budget that would almost certainly include rainy day fund money when the Legislature next convenes in January 2019.
In the meantime, Abbott sent Turner a reply letter Tuesday ask- ing that their respective teams have a chance to meet to “review all available funding sources and to ensure all federal reimbursement opportunities have been exhausted for recovery expenses
incurred by the city of Houston in response to Hurricane Harvey and the flooding that followed.”
“The lieutenant governor and the speaker agree with me that Texas will need to tap into the Rainy Day fund. The appropriate time to do this will be when we have an understanding of all potential financial obligations,” Abbott wrote Turner.
“As of now it would be impossible to determine the highest and best use of ESF, because we do not yet know the extent of the losses,” Abbott said. “As a result, the lieutenant governor, speaker and comptroller have all informed me that Texas should first use the full array of state financial resources and federal resources already available to us to respond to our current challenges.”
The Houston Chronicle ran a blistering editorial Wednesday criticizing Abbott under the headline: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”
It begins: “A grandstanding Texas governor tempts us to appropriate that bluntly succinct headline from the New York Daily News, circa 1975. Then, it was President Gerald Ford refusing to authorize federal loans to New York City as it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Now, it’s Gov. Greg Abbott refusing to tap into the state’s so-called Rainy Day Fund to help Houston pay for damage from Hurricane Harvey or to call a special session of the Legislature to authorize its use and to vote on other recovery measures that require state approval.”
In his letter, Abbott noted that he had already sent Houston a check for $91.2 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Harris County got a separate $44.5 million FEMA check for debris removal costs, and that more would follow once he receives invoices from the city and county that he has promised to pay on within 10 days.
Turner, in his letter to Abbott, said Houston was still on the hook for 10 percent of the debris removal costs, which, he estimates, will leave the city having to pay $25 million on what he projects to be a $250 million debris removal bill.
John Wittman, Abbott’s press secretary, said the governor had negotiated with FEMA to get it to pay 90 percent of the cost of debris removal, compared with the usual 75 percent.
In his letter to Turner, Abbott said, there “are other financial solutions for cities that are already provided by the federal government to meet the very needs you have.”
Abbott also reminded Turner of a Friday deadline for local officials to submit requests for federal funding to the Governor’s Commission to Rebuild Texas, which is compiling a list of the state’s needs and potential funding sources.