Need for Performance Audits To Ensure Timely Flood-Plan Implementation

8/20/25 – Everyone understands the need for financial audits; they prevent fraud. But what about performance audits? They can prevent waste. Yet how many government agencies routinely audit the implementation of plans they adopt?

Vermont Failed to Implement Half of Priorities in Emergency Plan

In Vermont last year, the state audited its performance in achieving its five-year hazard-mitigation plan. According to the Associated Press story, the plan is developed by Vermont Emergency Management every five years to identify natural hazards facing the state and take steps to reduce risk, including flooding risk.

But an audit released last year after a major flood found that only a third of the 96 actions, and half of the priority actions in the 2018 plan had been completed. Had flood-mitigation measures been completed in a timely manner, the audit says, communities affected by the floods would have been better able to withstand them.

State lawmakers said they were gravely concerned over the lack of progress. “The findings in this report are shocking and deeply troubling,” one said.

The director of the State’s Emergency Management Department called the plan “aspirational.”

But the audit focused on missed opportunities that could have lessened the severity of the floods, such as improved building codes, that would have helped communities recover faster. That sounds pretty practical to me.

Improved Harris County Building Codes Reduced Flood Damage 20X

A study by a former Harris County Engineer John Blount found subdivisions built to new, higher building codes before Hurricane Harvey experienced 20 times less damage than those that weren’t. Building codes are updated internationally every year, but Texas last updated its building codes in 2021.

New Floodplain Maps Years Past Due

Everyone agrees on the need for updated flood maps based on Atlas 14. But Harris County’s are years behind schedule. And some counties still base their flood maps on data acquired in the 1980s. In the meantime, people keep building and buying in floodplains based on outdated information. And one in every five Texans lives in a floodplain. Are we creating the conditions for future disasters?

Plans Without Financial Pathways

Why do we continually build plans that are not actionable? That are so long, no one can read or remember them?

We spent seven years building a state flood plan. It has a $54.5 billion price tag. But since 2019, the state legislature has allocated only $1.4 billion to the state’s Flood Infrastructure Fund.
Houston’s Resilience Plan? Just five years after its introduction, it’s now a maze of dead links and appears to have virtually disappeared from the web.
Harris County’s Flood Bond? Eight years into a ten year plan that’s 40% complete, HCFCD’s executive director claims they are $1.3 billion short already, but has been trying for months to explain why.
Ike Dike? Hurricane Ike struck Houston in 2008. Congress approved the project in 2022. The Corps estimated the cost at $57 billion in 2023. TWDB is still studying ways to break it down into bite sized chunks.
Flood Tunnels? In 2022, HCFCD produced a 1,860 page study projecting the cost for eight to be $30 billion. We’re still studying pilot projects on that one.
In the summer of 2020, the San Jacinto River Authority, City of Houston, Montgomery County and Harris County Flood Control District released a 3,600 page study about how to reduce flooding in the San Jacinto River Basin. At the time, it had a $3.3 billion price tag. So far, the partners have not constructed one recommendation.

We Need More of a Business Mentality in Government

In my opinion, we need less nonsense and more commonsense. Who would accept a position with a job description that’s 3,600 pages long? Or a monumental list of deliverables without any budget?

It’s good to dream. But we need government leaders who know how to produce results on a budget. Just like business leaders do.

I’d rather see one project in construction than a hundred sitting on a credenza.
Bob Rehak

Perhaps performance auditors can help us turn that around.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 8/20/25

2913 Days since Hurricane Harvey and 6183 since Ike