As HCFCD Tries to Accelerate Projects, Woodridge is Still Crawling
6/28/2026 – Harris County Flood Control District’s (HCFCD) contractor on the Woodridge/Taylor Gully Project apparently didn’t get the memo about billing as much work as soon as possible.
Harris County Commissioners Court approved Brice Construction and Design LLC’s $29.4 million contract in their March 31, 2026, meeting. It took Brice two months to mobilize for the job. And they have accomplished little in the month since they actually started moving dirt.
Looming Deadline on Community Development Block Grant Projects
The County is scrambling to bill $322 million dollars of Community Development Block Grant funds (CDBG) from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by a 2/28/27 deadline to avoid losing the money.
To do that, the Texas General Land Office (GLO), which administers HUD funds in Texas, is letting Harris County bill completed work on both CDBG-Disaster Relief (DR) and CDBG-Mitigation (MIT) projects against the $322 million allocated to DR projects.
The Woodridge/Taylor Gully Project falls into the MIT category which has a longer deadline. According to the contract, the contractor must finish the project no later than December 2027. However, if the company works faster, it can help save up to about 10% of that $322 million for its client.
Slow Going
But with 15% of Brice’s contract time elapsed, the contractor has barely scratched the surface. Aerial photographs show that little has changed in the three months since Brice’s contract was approved.
The contractor is working with a skeleton crew and minimal equipment for a job of this size. So far, they’ve excavated only a small area near the entrance to the job site and broken up some old storm sewer pipe.
Contract documents said HCFCD expected them to work on both Taylor Gully and Woodridge simultaneously. But so far, they have worked only on Woodridge…and only a small portion of Woodridge at that.
The contract includes excavating more than a million cubic yards of dirt to form a 421-acre-foot detention basin, rebuilding the bridge over Taylor Gully at Rustling Elms, and increasing the carrying capacity of approximately 2 miles of Taylor Gully itself.
Let’s look only at the Woodridge portion of the job for a second. Dividing a million cubic yards by the carrying capacity of heavy-duty dump trucks (10 cubic yards) suggests that Brice will have to haul off 100,000 loads of dirt. That boils down to 180 loads per day, 22 per hour, or about one every three minutes per 8-hour work day. I certainly haven’t seen that kind of activity so far.
And those calculations assume the contractor works seven days per week…which they are not…at least so far.
As you look at the photos below, keep in mind that most of what looks like the detention basin was excavated under a previous contract by a different contractor. The million cubic yards is in addition to that.
Pictures Showing Starting Point to Now
The first picture below shows how Woodridge looked when Brice actually started work at the site.
All of the excavation you see above was done previously by Sprint Sand & Clay under an Excavation and Removal (E&R) Contract. HCFCD cancelled the E&R project so that it could apply for HUD funding; projects cannot change by law during the application period.
Here’s how the looks another month later.
On Saturday June 27, 2026 I saw an excavator, a front end loader, and one dump truck carrying one load during about a 20-minute flight over the site.
To be fair, more dump trucks may have visited the site during the day, but I didn’t see any during the time I was there. The activity looked anemic compared to the TC Jester site I had photographed only an hour earlier. I counted more than a dozen dump trucks and three excavators hard at work during the same period of time – a bustling activity level consistent with the hypothetical calculations above.
And contrary to HCFCD’s expectations about working on Woodridge and Taylor Gully simultaneously…
A Challenge for Stuckett
This is just one of the issues that HCFCD’s new executive director Marcus Stuckett will face when he starts on 6/29/26.
How can he accelerate the few projects actually turning dirt at this point to save as much of that $322 million as possible? At the present rate, will Brice even be able to meet its contractual deadline? Or the March 31, 2028 deadline for CDBG-MIT projects?
Posted by Bob Rehak on 6/28/26
3225 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.
