7/4/2025 – Let the fireworks begin early today. Comparing the two most recent flood-bond updates – Year End 2024 and First Quarter 2025 – shows that HCFCD spent about $44 million in the first quarter. But more than a billion dollars has disappeared from “funds remaining” during the same period.
Totals should offset each other, but they don’t.
This isn’t simply moving money from one side of the ledger to the other. Something else is going on here that’s hidden from plain view. Below is the raw spending data reported by HCFCD for the two time periods.
As I stared at these, problem after problem emerged. For instance, HCFCD “spent” only one dollar in the Spring Creek Watershed, but “funds remaining” mysteriously went down by almost $12.5 million. It’s like that for virtually every watershed.
We need an immediate audit by an independent state agency.
Harris County Flood Control District (HCFCD) released the reports after the last commissioners court meeting on 6/26/25. In that meeting, HCFCD executive director Dr. Tina Petersen claimed the county could be short as much as $1.3 billion to fulfill promises made to the public during the 2018 flood-bond election.
Four Democrats on Commissioners Court then used that as an excuse to reallocate all remaining funds to projects that scored the highest on Rodney Ellis’ Equity Prioritization Framework. Only the lone Republican, Tom Ramsey, raised an objection.
A Billion Dollars Goes MIA with Suspicious Timing
Interestingly, HCFCD released the two bond updates simultaneously but AFTER the court discussion. The timing precluded any public analysis of the reports before the meeting in which Commissioners reallocated all the remaining money in the bond to “equity” projects. The timing also precluded any public comment on the accounting and reallocation.
Debits and Credits Don’t Match
The two Flood Bond updates contain lists of watersheds with “money spent” and “remaining money available.” But the columns are not totaled. That’s always a suspicious practice from an accounting point of view.
So, I totaled and compared them:
HCFCD spent only $43.9 million in the first quarter. But $1.1 billion less remains in the till.
And no one thought to explain that!? Where did the money go? The public needs an answer!
Large Amounts Disappear In Virtually Every Watershed
Here’s how the billion dollars that mysteriously vaporized affected the San Jacinto Watershed.
After spending only $168thousand, “funds remaining” decreased by almost $143million without explanation.
Backup documentation in the report showed only one line item changed during this time period and only for $169,000. It provides no clue where $143 million went.
Other notable unexplained decreases included:
$726.7 million in Countywide Funds
$168 million in the Clear Creek Watershed
$77 million in the Buffalo Bayou Watershed
$59 million in Halls Bayou
One Billion Dollars Goes “Poof”!
Such unexplained decreases added up to the mysterious disappearance of $1,073,078,534.
Only Greens Bayou and Brays Bayou showed substantial increases. They totaled $80.3 million – not nearly enough to compensate for decreases in other watersheds. So this was not simply about moving money from one watershed to another.
Open one report and you see the cash. Open the next and you don’t. No explanation provided.
But it gets worse.
No Mention of Trouble in Bond Updates
Neither of the bond updates warns the public about any impending crisis in bond funding. Just the opposite.
The 2024 Year-End Report says…
The County is “exceeding the original goal of the program and removing any funding uncertainty.”
Page 6 of 2024 Year End Bond Update
If this were the private sector, the Securities and Exchange Commission would investigate that.
Smoke and Mirrors Should Trigger Immediate Audit
There’s too much here that just doesn’t add up. We need an audit by the Texas Attorney General or U.S. Department of Justice immediately to see if money has really disappeared. I’m not alleging fraud. This could simply be a case of incompetence, sloth, mislabeling, bad proofreading, or the sloppiest financial reporting ever.
Yet Dr. Tina Petersen, head of HCFCD, just received a salary increase of almost $90,000. She now makes $434,000. That’s $65,477 dollars more than HCFCD spent on 11 of the county’s 23 watersheds in the first quarter – combined! Altogether, those 11 watersheds received only $368,533 from HCFCD.
Read them. Then write your county and state representatives today and demand an investigation.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/4/25
2866 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.
https://i0.wp.com/reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Slide1.png?fit=1100%2C825&ssl=18251100adminadmin2025-07-04 12:41:092025-07-05 13:27:03Unexplained Billion-Dollar Discrepancy in HCFCD Flood-Bond Reports
7/2/2025 – Part 2 of a 3-Part Series about the integrity of HCFCD’s information and its transparency. On 6/26/25, HCFCD’s director testified in Harris County Commissioners Court that the 2018 Flood Bond could have a $1.3 billion shortfall.
HCFCD Executive Director Dr. Tina Petersen testifying before Commissioners Court on Flood Bond shortfall on 6/26/25.
But two flood-bond updates (Year End 2024 and Q1 2025), strangely released after her testimony, make no mention of a shortfall and starkly contradict her testimony. The disconnect is stunning.
Bleak Testimony in Commissioners Court
Dr. Tina Petersen claimed a flood-bond funding shortfall of $1.3 billion – 25% of all bond and partner funds. Four Democratic commissioners used that to justify cutting 80% of all remaining projects in the bond.
They then reallocated all remaining money exclusively to projects with a high “equity” component. They also decided to fund those projects all the way through construction, even if the bond included only a preliminary engineering review. But…
Bond Updates Make No Mention of Shortfall, Just Sunshine Galore
In stark contrast to the bleak discussion in commissioners court, HCFCD released two Flood-Bond Updates hours after the meeting– one for Year End 2024 and the other for First Quarter 2025.
Petersen’s Year End 2024 report is full of sunshine. It never mentions a shortfall. Instead, it talks about “Achieving Funding Stability.” It brags about “closing the funding gap” and how the District can now “move forward with financial stability, ensuring we can deliver projects with confidence and certainty.”
Further, it says, “This report provided clarity and accountability across all 181 bond IDs, providing alignment between budgets, project scopes and goals of the program.”
That’s a pretty rosy picture compared to the dire report she had just delivered in Commissioners Court.
The Q1 ’25 update never mentioned an impending shortfall either.
And just this April, I captured the screen image below. At the time, HCFCD claimed no projects would be cancelled.
Voters I talked to felt blindsided by this whole mess.
Suspicious Timing
The timing of the release of the bond updates is suspicious. Affected voters had NO WARNING and NO CHANCE to protest the re-allocation of the tax dollars they approved for projects in their areas.
After listening to two hours of one-sided public comments from Rodney Ellis surrogates, Democratic commissioners voted 4:1 to reallocate all money remaining in the flood bond to projects that will benefit only communities with the highest equity scores, regardless of the volume of flood damage elsewhere. The motion they adopted will penalize 1.2 million Precinct 3 residents disproportionately.
Stay tuned for more on this topic as we head into another Harris County budgeting cycle.
I suspect the Democrats are getting ready to tell us they need another flood bond if we want to complete the previous flood bond. County Judge Lina Hidalgo has mentioned it already.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/2/25
2864 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.
https://i0.wp.com/reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Tina-Petersen.jpg?fit=1100%2C608&ssl=16081100adminadmin2025-07-02 14:02:182025-07-02 21:26:53HCFCD Bond Updates Make No Mention of Surprise $1.3 Billion Shortfall
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.
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.”
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.
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
https://i0.wp.com/reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Actual-and-Projected-Bond-Spending-e1751425476898.png?fit=1100%2C665&ssl=16651100adminadmin2025-07-01 22:16:392025-07-02 11:22:54HCFCD Data Shows Spending Going Up and Down Simultaneously
Unexplained Billion-Dollar Discrepancy in HCFCD Flood-Bond Reports
7/4/2025 – Let the fireworks begin early today. Comparing the two most recent flood-bond updates – Year End 2024 and First Quarter 2025 – shows that HCFCD spent about $44 million in the first quarter. But more than a billion dollars has disappeared from “funds remaining” during the same period.
This isn’t simply moving money from one side of the ledger to the other. Something else is going on here that’s hidden from plain view. Below is the raw spending data reported by HCFCD for the two time periods.
As I stared at these, problem after problem emerged. For instance, HCFCD “spent” only one dollar in the Spring Creek Watershed, but “funds remaining” mysteriously went down by almost $12.5 million. It’s like that for virtually every watershed.
Harris County Flood Control District (HCFCD) released the reports after the last commissioners court meeting on 6/26/25. In that meeting, HCFCD executive director Dr. Tina Petersen claimed the county could be short as much as $1.3 billion to fulfill promises made to the public during the 2018 flood-bond election.
Four Democrats on Commissioners Court then used that as an excuse to reallocate all remaining funds to projects that scored the highest on Rodney Ellis’ Equity Prioritization Framework. Only the lone Republican, Tom Ramsey, raised an objection.
A Billion Dollars Goes MIA with Suspicious Timing
Interestingly, HCFCD released the two bond updates simultaneously but AFTER the court discussion. The timing precluded any public analysis of the reports before the meeting in which Commissioners reallocated all the remaining money in the bond to “equity” projects. The timing also precluded any public comment on the accounting and reallocation.
Debits and Credits Don’t Match
The two Flood Bond updates contain lists of watersheds with “money spent” and “remaining money available.” But the columns are not totaled. That’s always a suspicious practice from an accounting point of view.
So, I totaled and compared them:
And no one thought to explain that!? Where did the money go? The public needs an answer!
Large Amounts Disappear In Virtually Every Watershed
Here’s how the billion dollars that mysteriously vaporized affected the San Jacinto Watershed.
Backup documentation in the report showed only one line item changed during this time period and only for $169,000. It provides no clue where $143 million went.
Other notable unexplained decreases included:
One Billion Dollars Goes “Poof”!
Such unexplained decreases added up to the mysterious disappearance of $1,073,078,534.
Only Greens Bayou and Brays Bayou showed substantial increases. They totaled $80.3 million – not nearly enough to compensate for decreases in other watersheds. So this was not simply about moving money from one watershed to another.
Open one report and you see the cash. Open the next and you don’t. No explanation provided.
But it gets worse.
No Mention of Trouble in Bond Updates
Neither of the bond updates warns the public about any impending crisis in bond funding. Just the opposite.
The 2024 Year-End Report says…
If this were the private sector, the Securities and Exchange Commission would investigate that.
Smoke and Mirrors Should Trigger Immediate Audit
There’s too much here that just doesn’t add up. We need an audit by the Texas Attorney General or U.S. Department of Justice immediately to see if money has really disappeared. I’m not alleging fraud. This could simply be a case of incompetence, sloth, mislabeling, bad proofreading, or the sloppiest financial reporting ever.
Yet Dr. Tina Petersen, head of HCFCD, just received a salary increase of almost $90,000. She now makes $434,000. That’s $65,477 dollars more than HCFCD spent on 11 of the county’s 23 watersheds in the first quarter – combined! Altogether, those 11 watersheds received only $368,533 from HCFCD.
For More Information
Here are the full 2024 Year End and 2025 First Quarter Reports. See pages 8 and 9 in the 2024 report and page 6 in the 2025 report (shown in screen capture above).
Read them. Then write your county and state representatives today and demand an investigation.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/4/25
2866 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.
HCFCD Bond Updates Make No Mention of Surprise $1.3 Billion Shortfall
7/2/2025 – Part 2 of a 3-Part Series about the integrity of HCFCD’s information and its transparency. On 6/26/25, HCFCD’s director testified in Harris County Commissioners Court that the 2018 Flood Bond could have a $1.3 billion shortfall.
But two flood-bond updates (Year End 2024 and Q1 2025), strangely released after her testimony, make no mention of a shortfall and starkly contradict her testimony. The disconnect is stunning.
Bleak Testimony in Commissioners Court
Dr. Tina Petersen claimed a flood-bond funding shortfall of $1.3 billion – 25% of all bond and partner funds. Four Democratic commissioners used that to justify cutting 80% of all remaining projects in the bond.
They then reallocated all remaining money exclusively to projects with a high “equity” component. They also decided to fund those projects all the way through construction, even if the bond included only a preliminary engineering review. But…
Bond Updates Make No Mention of Shortfall, Just Sunshine Galore
In stark contrast to the bleak discussion in commissioners court, HCFCD released two Flood-Bond Updates hours after the meeting– one for Year End 2024 and the other for First Quarter 2025.
Petersen’s Year End 2024 report is full of sunshine. It never mentions a shortfall. Instead, it talks about “Achieving Funding Stability.” It brags about “closing the funding gap” and how the District can now “move forward with financial stability, ensuring we can deliver projects with confidence and certainty.”
Further, it says, “This report provided clarity and accountability across all 181 bond IDs, providing alignment between budgets, project scopes and goals of the program.”
That’s a pretty rosy picture compared to the dire report she had just delivered in Commissioners Court.
The Q1 ’25 update never mentioned an impending shortfall either.
And just this April, I captured the screen image below. At the time, HCFCD claimed no projects would be cancelled.
Voters I talked to felt blindsided by this whole mess.
Suspicious Timing
The timing of the release of the bond updates is suspicious. Affected voters had NO WARNING and NO CHANCE to protest the re-allocation of the tax dollars they approved for projects in their areas.
After listening to two hours of one-sided public comments from Rodney Ellis surrogates, Democratic commissioners voted 4:1 to reallocate all money remaining in the flood bond to projects that will benefit only communities with the highest equity scores, regardless of the volume of flood damage elsewhere. The motion they adopted will penalize 1.2 million Precinct 3 residents disproportionately.
Stay tuned for more on this topic as we head into another Harris County budgeting cycle.
I suspect the Democrats are getting ready to tell us they need another flood bond if we want to complete the previous flood bond. County Judge Lina Hidalgo has mentioned it already.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/2/25
2864 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.
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.”
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.
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!
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:
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