With 25% Funding Shortfall, 80% of Flood-Bond Projects Cut

6/30/25 and 7/3/25 – Updated to clarify a distinction between Bond Projects and Bond IDs, and also correct several entries in tables.

6/29/25 – Analysis of documents released after the Harris County Commissioner’s Court meeting on 6/26/25, shows that because of a claimed 25% flood-bond funding shortfall, the county will stop funding 80% of Bond IDs and 75% of Bond projects. Precinct 3 will bear the most cuts.

Usually, precincts share equally, but in this case, Precinct 3, the lone Republican-led district will retain only 14% of active projects.

Before the meeting, the county had released only one blank page about what turned out to be the disappearance of more than a billion dollars.

Even worse, to make up for the claimed shortfall, Democratic Commissioners voted 4:1 along party lines to defund most of the remaining projects voters approved in the 2018 Flood Bond.

Something’s not adding up that demands an explanation.

Huh? 80% of Projects Cut after Losing 25% of Funding?

The $2.5 billion Bond was sold with a project list that totaled roughly $5.1 billion. However, partner funding more than made up the difference. Harris County Flood Control District (HCFCD) has commitments for another $2.7 billion – bringing the total available to $5.2 billion. A $1.3 billion shortfall is 25% of that total.

Questions:

• Why the shortfall?
• Why the disproportionate cuts?
• Why are we only learning now – seven years into the bond?
• Are the proposed cuts fair?

Reasons Proposed for Shortfall

In her presentation Dr. Tina Petersen, executive director of HCFCD, attempted to explain the shortfall by alluding to:

• Cost increases (i.e., due to inflation)
• Grant requirements
• Changing regulations
• Right-of-way acquisitions
• Program structure

Others have alluded to:

• Scope creep
• Cumbersome processes related to Ellis equity formula
• Slow execution
• Political interference
• Need for more money in the original bond
• Changes in leadership at HCFCD
• Personnel turnover at lower levels
• Unnecessary bureaucracy that adds cost without adding value
• Covid
• Low initial estimates
• Addition of projects
• IT system issues

Why Such Draconian Cuts?

Why are the cuts so disproportionate to the shortfall?

High on the list of possible explanations would be the motion that Democratic members of Commissioners Court approved.

It called to focus only on projects in the top quartile of Ellis’ Equity Prioritization Index.

But it also called to fully fund future costs associated with those projects. That builds scope creep into the bond.

If, for instance, the Flood Bond only included a preliminary engineering review for a project, it will now include full engineering, design, right-of-way acquisition, construction, landscaping, turnover costs and bagels.

In other words…

Funding for projects that voters approved is being cut to pay for projects they didn’t approve.

It’s a fundamental breach of public trust.

Why Are We Only Learning Now?

Since Harris County Democratic Commissioners brought in new management, HCFCD has largely gone dark. For example:

• The District, once a paragon of transparency, efficiency, and speed under the previous leadership, has largely stopped updating its website as performance decreased.
• Harris County Flood Control bid only three projects last year.
• Active projects used to be updated weekly. Now they’ve disappeared from the website.
• Bond-update frequency fell from monthly to quarterly to semi-annually to whenever-we-get-around-to-it. The last one took more than a year.
• When commissioners asked for an update in February, it took HCFCD five months to produce an overly complicated report that few understood.
• The County’s Flood Resilience Task Force is still waiting for flood-risk data it requested years ago.

The lack of information masks serious issues that have built for years concerning the efficiency and transparency of Flood Control.

In last week’s discussion, Judge Lina Hidalgo complained repeatedly and bitterly about her lack of understanding, a lack of transparency and her inability to get simple, straight answers.

But hey, what kind of manager puts up with that? For seven years!

Are Cuts Fair?

The County uses Rodney Ellis’ Equity Prioritization Index to rank flood-mitigation Bond IDs from 0 to 10 using a multi-factor index. Some Bond IDs contain multiple projects. But whether you assess the cuts by Bond ID or Projects, P3 still suffers the most.

After a marathon 5-hour discussion, Commissioners voted to continue funding only projects scoring above 7.5. The rest will die.

Ellis’ scoring matrix gives 65% weight to factors such as race, household income, social vulnerability, population density, and housing density.

It gives no weight to flood damage, severity of flooding, flood frequency, or flood risk.

Ellis cherry-picked statistics to gerrymander flood-control dollars, not reduce damage.

Many of the remaining dollars in the bond will go to watersheds that have already received hundreds of millions of dollars in mitigation funds. Meanwhile…

Other watersheds that have been shortchanged will now have their pockets picked.

Precinct 3 had the highest flooding in the county during Harvey.

Yet Precinct 3, the lone, Republican-led precinct, bore the brunt of the funding cuts wide margins.

Here’s a breakdown of the totals by quintile and precinct. Because projects sometimes cross precinct boundaries, when a project did so, I counted it once for each precinct it benefitted.

Next, look at Bond IDs. A bond ID may contain multiple projects. And again, when a Bond ID benefited two precincts, I counted it twice. Percentages change slightly. But the same basic picture emerges…only more so:

Barrett Station is in Precinct 3. It’s one of the poorest areas in the county. And it had its funding cut. That shows this is more about politics than concern for the poor.

To compile these tables and the pie chart above, I counted Bond IDs and Projects in each quartile in this spreadsheet,

The funding cuts likely won’t affect a subset of 29 projects funded by HUD because those are 100% federally funded. Regardless…

The county will now pursue only one in four or five of the remaining bond projects/IDs.

Stunned citizens are struggling to comprehend the scope of the cuts, which will negatively impact roughly 80% of the county.

No wonder the county kept a tight lid on its analysis and didn’t post anything for the public to review before the meeting. Protesters might have showed up to counter two hours of testimony by Ellis’ surrogates last Thursday.

We Need to Demand…

• Answers.
• Action.
• Accountability.
• Fairness.

And we need them fast. Frankly, I’m surprised no one has filed a lawsuit yet. This feels like slow-motion voter fraud.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 6/29/25 and updated on 6/30/25

2861 Days since Hurricane Harvey

The thoughts expressed in this post represent opinions on matters of public concern and safety. They are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the Anti-SLAPP Statute of the Great State of Texas.