Timeline for Lake Houston Floodgates project

Design Finally Starting on New Lake Houston Floodgates

9/20/24 – At City Council Member Fred Flickinger’s town hall meeting last night, discussion of new Lake Houston floodgates consumed a large portion of the meeting. The big news: final design of the gates has started. But design will not finish until the end of 2025. Construction could take another 3-5 years or more. However, enough money is available to get the project started.

During Q&A, several residents expressed surprise and dismay that the project was not further along.

Details of Gates Project from Presentation

Recommendation

The slide below shows the current plan – to add 11 new Tainter gates to the earthen embankment east of the spillway and existing gates. The new gates will bring the total release capacity of the dam up to 80,000 cubic feet per second from 10,000.

Outline of Lake Houston Floodgates recommendation
Alt 1B in the title of the slide refers to one of several alternatives developed during the preliminary-engineering phase.

Note the gray diagram on the right with the red lettering in the slide above. It shows the gates being installed in a U-shaped structure protruding in front of the existing dam. This eliminates the need for a temporary “coffer” dam in the lake during construction.

Timeline

A review of the timeline when the conceptual plans were first proposed in 2022 showed completion of construction in 2026. Now the City hopes to complete the final design by 2026. Construction could take another 3-5 years beyond that.

Could the schedule slip again? Council Member Flickinger emphasized that FEMA has a final deadline that can’t slip: May 26th of 2026 (18 months from now) for final approval of all the upfront work before construction starts.

However, when FEMA made its initial grant of $50 million for the gates project back in 2019, it said that it required the project to be complete in 3 years, i.e., by 2022.

Complexity Blamed for Delays

Flickinger, who only this year inherited this project, has been trying to accelerate it. He suggested that project complexity and cost uncertainty were the main reasons for delays to date.

The initial recommendation was to add crest gates to the spillway portion of the dam. That would have required lowering the dam several feet before adding gates. However, Public Works could not find any contractors willing to bid on the project. The risk with a 75 year old dam was too high. That required a reboot of the entire project.

With the reboot and a new recommended alternative, came cost uncertainty.

Simultaneously, uncertainty surrounded whether FEMA would support the Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA). Traditionally, FEMA wants benefits to exceed damage repair costs. However on this project costs exceeded benefits – until Dave Martin, Flickinger’s predecessor, convinced FEMA to include “social benefits.”

Social benefits include things like avoidance of disruptions to business, commerce, schools and the area’s tax base. Including those brought the BCA up to 2.88 said Martin in December 2022. Suddenly, that made the project doable again.

The slide below shows how the current costs and funding commitments compare. If we can avoid more delays, there’s a chance we have enough money to complete this project. Otherwise, it’s back to the federal trough.

Projected financial commitments currently exceed projected costs.

But inflation is always a worry. So is overly optimistic estimating, which often happens in the early stages of projects because it generates follow-on work. Plus we’ve had turnover in Houston Public Works with the change in administrations.

Finally, given the number of entities involved (City, Harris County, State, Federal, Coastal Water Authority, engineering companies, legal counsel, etc.), coordination is also an issue.

Example: City Council approval of an inter-local agreement (ILA) on 9/11 with FEMA, Texas Division of Emergency Management, and the Coastal Water Authority. It concerned changes to the scope and recommendations in the project.

The ILA finally cleared the way for the project to move forward. But ILA approval came two months after the Coastal Water Authority approved it. And five months after FEMA and Texas Division of Emergency Management approved it. The City legal department had already approved the changes before they went to CWA, according to Flickinger’s office. So why did we lose half a year before it even got on the Council agenda?

This certainly qualifies as a failure of project management. A single accountable person with the authority to mandate and generate urgency is an opportunity.

I could get no good answers from the City although I have heard concerns expressed about excessive turnover in Public Works associated with new leadership in the department. Regardless, we lost another 6 months. Again. This time, for no good reason.

Flickinger said quite bluntly last night, “We need to do a better job of communicating.”

Appointment of Dan Huberty to CWA Board

In that regard, Mayor Whitmire has appointed Dan Huberty to the Coastal Water Authority Board. Huberty, supported this project since the beginning when he was state rep. He also lives on the lake. So, he will be a valuable advocate. He can help fill that communication gap.

CWA Director Dan Huberty (left) addressed Kingwood Town Hall with Council Member Flickinger (right)

Huberty, like Flickinger, said, “Better communication on activity, status, budget, and schedule is needed.”

Overall, our elected officials emphasized that community participation in the conversation will be important. 

Officials also emphasized that community involvement by comments in City Council meetings and in Austin are essential to maintaining urgency.

An estimated 300 people packed the Kingwood Town Hall Meeting

Approximately 300 people attended the Town Hall meeting, which ran 3 hours.

Other Topics, Presenters

Last night’s agenda covered a wide range of topics. In addition to the gates, presentations also included other flood-related topics such as sedimentation, dredging, and sand traps. More on those in another post.

Presentations also included semi-flood-related topics such as Solid Waste Management and Northpark Expansion, which I have covered amply in other posts.

Policing and crime reduction were also discussed. But while fascinating and a large part of the meeting, they are off topic for this blog. So I’ll leave that to others.

At-Large City Council Members Twila Carter and Julian Ramirez also spoke in addition to State Representative Charles Cunningham. So did the heads of several City departments.

For More Information

To see a video of the entire meeting, click here.

To see the entire slide deck, click here.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 9/20/2024

2579 Days since Hurricane Harvey