HCFCD Data Shows Spending Going Up and Down Simultaneously

7/1/25 – Caution: This post will make your head swim; but it’s better than drowning in the next flood. Harris County Flood Control District (HCFCD) data presented to the public differs radically from data presented to commissioners last week. One audience sees spending going up. The other sees spending going down.

Commissioners used confusing, contradictory data like this, at least in part, to cut 80% of the remaining projects in the flood bond last week with a claimed 25% funding shortfall.

Some areas will get little or no support from HCFCD while others that have already received hundreds of millions of dollars will get hundreds of millions more. My conclusion: flood-mitigation decisions have become purely political, not data driven under this commissioners court.

How Reliable is the Data?

So how reliable is the data? In this and upcoming posts, I’ll look at several different examples. Today, let’s look at two trend lines: one presented by HCFCD Director Dr. Tina Petersen last week to commissioners. The other comes from HCFCD’s public-facing website.

Here is a graph from the last page of Petersen’s presentation. It paints a pretty rosy picture. Work and spending going straight up for five years. If you’re a commissioner, you’re probably thinking, “Gee, I better get my project completed before the money runs out.”

*See graph on last page of Petersen’s transmittal to Commissioners Court.*

But buried on HCFCD’s website several layers down is this graph. It paints a bleaker picture. If you’re a resident, you’re probably asking, “With billions of dollars in the bank and inflation eating up bond dollars, why is mitigation activity slowing down? Hurry up and finish my projects!”

Another portion of the page below shows that HCFCD has only spent $1.5 billion from the bond so far, but Petersen’s presentation shows they have $5.2 billion when you include partner funds.

Declining graph — *Screen Capture from HCFCD on 7/1/25*

This is a very concerning graph that raises questions about the efficiency of HCFCD and how much of the bond has been lost to inflation.

To show the differences between the two trends, I combined them in a third graph. It’s one thing to paint rosy projections for your bosses. And it’s another to overcome years of lost momentum. But there’s an even bigger problem. Look at the years where lines overlap in the middle. The data for past spending doesn’t agree. Oops!

Series1 represents reported spending data except for 2025, where I annualized first-quarter spending.
Series 2 takes reported and projected spending from Petersen’s bar graph.

Where the lines overlap, the graphs should match perfectly, but they don’t. So I called for an explanation.

HCFCD explains the difference by saying the dark line uses calendar-year data and the orange line uses fiscal-year data. They vary by three months and $23 million. But HCFCD says that otherwise the two sources “numerically align.” I asked what that meant and was told “They match.” Ooooookayyyyy….

But according to data obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests in previous years, HCFCD spent:

$217 million in FY2023, not the $175 million shown in Petersen’s bar graph.
$254 million in FY2024, not the $210 million shown in her bar graph.

Now my head is swimming. We have THREE values that vary by $42 million for 2023 and $69 million for 2024. See below.

You could build a major project with $69 million!

Unanswered Questions and Uncertainty

An old proverb says, “A man with two watches never knows what time it is.”

Harris County Flood Control District has a real problem. Their financial projections have all the certainty of a 5-year weather forecast. They can’t even agree on LAST year’s weather.

Yet they’re making policy decisions that affect people’s lives with this data. And in the process, they’re destroying trust in government.

There may be a logical explanation. But it’s not apparent or explained anywhere with the data people see.

Why are their numbers different in different places? Who is getting the truth and who is not?

More examples to follow. This is Part One of Three.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/1/25

2863 Days since Hurricane Harvey