Harvey haunts ballot box for Turner
As Sylvester Turner faces a referendum on his first term as mayor in the Dec. 14 runoff election, the largest event of his tenure — Hurricane Harvey, the worst rainstorm to hit the continental U.S. — is still hanging over him two years later.
Houston has made little progress building new flood-control infrastructure since the 2017 storm ravaged the region, and, as of Oct. 31, had helped just 71 homeowners through the main home-repair program meant to ensure a full recovery for storm survivors.
These points provided fodder for Turner’s opponents throughout the year, and millionaire trial lawyer Tony Buzbee, the remaining foe Turner will face in the runoff, continues to say the mayor has failed to prepare the city for the next major storm.
“The reason people are still waiting is simple: because rather than get busy helping people, the mayor has instead pushed the relief contracts to his friends, partners, and donors who are illequipped to do the work,” Buzbee said. “When I am mayor, you will see rapid action. We will fast track flood relief for those devastated by Harvey.”
A spokeswoman for the Turner campaign said the mayor “has a long list of accomplishments on flooding.” She cited city council’s move to toughen regulations for homes built in floodplains and the mayor’s proposal to advance a $43 million loan to Harris County to widen Brays Bayou, among others.
“Mayor Turner knows people are still suffering and the city is moving as fast as it can, given the frustrating limitations on the use of federal funds,” said Sue Davis, communications director for Turner’s campaign. “Constructive criticism is always welcome — but Mr. Buzbee’s assertions are simply not true.”
Harvey, which made landfall on Aug. 25, 2017, as a Category 4 hurri
cane before stalling for four days over the Texas Gulf Coast, dumped unprecedented amounts of rainfall on the region — more than 60 inches in some parts — and caused catastrophic flooding. The disaster was blamed for the deaths of 36 people in Harris County alone and the flooding of 150,000 properties in the Houston area.
Houstonians consider flooding the top issue in the election, with 41 percent of likely voters in an October poll listing it as the city’s most important problem — almost double the next highest response.
Despite the political salience of the topic, however, Buzbee has largely focused his attacks on alleged corruption, wasteful city spending and crime, and his $10 million self-funded campaign war chest overshadowed vanquished candidate Bill King’s heavier emphasis on flooding.
The polling results suggest Turner’s opponents have done little to sway public opinion against the mayor’s performance on flood control, said Nancy Sims, a local political analyst who is not affiliated with any mayoral campaign.
“Buzbee has not made it a primary campaign plank, and neither has the mayor,” Sims said. “It’s one of the top issues that people are concerned about, but it’s just a very complex issue. I am surprised Buzbee hasn’t capitalized on it more.”
The issue has received greater attention in city council races, Sims said, likely because candidates vying for local district seats have an easier time conveying their vision for a small patch of the city, instead of the challenge of offering a flood control fix for the entire 660-square-mile city.
“The thing about the storms we’re having these days is that they hit a different neighborhood every time,” Sims said. “This is why I look at it as a decentralized issue.”
‘Pace and quality’ issues
Turner chalks up the absence of clear post-Harvey improvements to money: The city doesn’t have enough in its coffers to make the required multibilliondollar investments, and so must wait on the byzantine federal aid process.
The first dollars to arrive came from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA funded one housing program that gave 8,200 city and county homeowners up to $20,000 in temporary, often poorlyinstalled fixes to let people shelter in their homes, and another that provided up to $60,000 for each house but served fewer than 260 families citywide.
Then, last December, a long-awaited $1.3 billion in home repair funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development arrived. These dollars, which are intended to help several thousand families fully recover from Harvey, are also those over which the city has the most control. But most survivors are still waiting.
After shepherding four families through the complex application process — which is governed by HUD and administered in Texas by the state General Land Office — in April, the city finished May without helping any more homeowners. The city’s Harvey housing recovery chief left in early June amid “pace and quality concerns,” as city housing chief Tom McCasland put it, and he redirected staff to the effort.
The city appears unlikely to meet McCasland’s goal of providing aid or finishing repairs for 250 homeowners by the end of the year, however; as of Oct. 31, repairs were done or underway on 47 homes and 24 homeowners had been reimbursed for repairs they had already completed with their own funds.
Pointing to the city’s pace of housing repairs, Republican
Gov. Greg Abbott said last month that the single largest block of Harvey aid — $4.3 billion for flood control projects that is expected to arrive next summer — would be administered entirely by the state GLO. The city and county “have proven that they are unable to ensure victims are receiving resources in a timely manner,” an Abbott spokesman said.
Turner, a former Democratic state legislator, blasted the announcement as a “disingenuous … money grab” that obscured the state’s role in reviewing and approving every recovery dollar Houston spends.
Buzbee cast Abbott’s announcement as further proof that Turner has “failed to do anything to prepare our city for the next storm,” and he launched a TV ad soon after that said Turner’s “mismanagement forced state authorities to remove a billion dollars in recovery funds from his control.”
The phrase appeared to be a reference to city and county officials’ repeated statements that they each expected to receive about $1 billion from the $4.3 billion in flood control aid the state will now control.
Though the slow pace of recovery allowed Abbott to justify the move, Sims said, Turner has been able to frame the debate within the broader battle between state and city governments in a way that allows him to shake off some of the potential political damage.
“I do think it’s been clear that the state isn’t happy with local governments, and of course we have Republicans in control of state government and Democratic mayors in every major city,” she said.
‘The fall guy’
Chrishelle Palay, executive director of the Houston Organizing Movement for Equity (HOME) coalition, which focuses on housing, flooding and access to jobs in under-served areas, said she often hears a sense of dissatisfaction with the lack of tangible improvements since Harvey, partly because the storm just exacerbated an already bad situation in many neighborhoods.
“What we see today is the result of a long history of decisions made by several administrations. I don’t know that it would have been much better under anyone else’s administration,” she said. “Oftentimes the mayor is looked at as the fall guy, but a lot of this is beyond just his control alone. He does, however, have control of setting a precedent to right past wrongs that existed long before Harvey made landfall.”
In a recent stump speech, Buzbee did not mention Abbott’s decision, choosing instead to focus on his pledge to stop diverting revenue from the city’s drainage fee to street and traffic work.
The monthly fee generated controversy throughout the campaign, with Buzbee and other candidates accusing Turner of rerouting the funds from their intended purpose.
Turner has insisted that street projects — many of which involve replacing the drainage pipes under the street — make up part of the city’s drainage system.
Most of the drainage fees and the other revenues flowing into the city’s Build Houston Forward infrastructure repair program go to repair or replace roads, ditches and pipes street by street.
Houston does invest in larger drainage facilities such as detention basins, but typically these largerscale improvements are built by the Harris County Flood Control District. Broadly, the city’s role is to carry rainwater from residents’ roofs to the nearest bayou, with the county taking the water from the bayou to Galveston Bay.
Thanks to the $2.5 billion bond voters approved a year ago, the Flood Control District has 50 percent more work in progress than it did before Harvey.
City officials, without a comparable source of local funds, have acknowledged Houston is no more prepared for a flood than it was when Harvey hit, partly because flood-control aid has been slow to arrive. A recent exception has been small grants the city secured from a $1.1 billion pot of FEMA mitigation money for which all Harvey-damaged jurisdictions in Texas are competing.
If the engineering plans the city will now develop are to FEMA’s liking, Houston could receive tens of millions more dollars from that bucket of money to build a large detention basin in Inwood, a huge diversion channel at the north end of downtown, and flood gates on the Lake Houston Dam.