10/1/26 – The San Jacinto Regional Flood Planning Group has issued a list of recommendations for the river basin. The draft recommendations are intended for the next statewide flood plan. The 36 recommendations fall in three categories:

• Legislative (12)
• Administrative and Regulatory (16)
• Flood Planning (8)

To see the complete five-page list, click here. It shows more detailed explanations than the summary below.

Legislative Recommendations

Legislative recommendations focus primarily on funding and regulatory authority.

• L1 – Provide recurring funding for the Flood Infrastructure Fund
• L2 – Establish state dedicated drainage funding, rather than relying solely on federal funding.
• L3 – Provide counties with legislative authority to establish drainage utilities and assess drainage fees to assist in the implementation and long-term maintenance and repair of drainage and flood risk reduction projects
• L4 – Update current statewide building codes with appropriate freeboard or higher flood standards
• L5 – Establish and fund a levee safety program
• L6 – Fund Regional Flood Planning Groups between planning cycles
• L7 – Clarify and expand county regulatory authority for floodplain management, land-use planning, waterway setbacks, permitting, and management of new development in unincorporated areas
• L8 – Develop and fund repair programs that assist owners of aging dams
• L9 – Expand funding for flood early warning systems, stream gages, low-water crossing safety improvements, flood-hazard signage, gates, and roadway warning systems
• L10 – Provide funding and incentives for conservation easements, land conservation, restoration, riparian protection, wetland protection, and landowner stewardship practices in flood-prone areas
• L11 – Expand or create grant programs for ongoing operations and maintenance of existing flood mitigation, drainage, culvert, and natural infrastructure assets. (Most funding prioritizes new assets.)
• L12 – Support creation, consolidation, or reorganization of regional flood authorities, flood-control districts, river authority programs, drainage districts where broader regional coordination is needed.

Most of these seem like common sense. Some have been attempted before. For instance, State Rep. Dennis Paul has tried several times to get a river-basin-wide flood control district. However, his bill failed because some local authorities, like Adrian Garcia, fear loss of control.

Regulatory and Administrative Recommendations

These focus mainly on technical and human issues below the state level.

• A1 – Convert Base Level Engineering (BLE) data into regulatory information or detailed Flood Insurance Rate Maps.
• A2 – Develop model floodplain ordinances for General Law Cities, i.e., those with populations under 5000.
• A3 – Promote public education and outreach regarding flood awareness, preparedness, flood-prone areas, and the importance of protecting floodplains.
• A4 – Educate floodplain managers with low-cost online resources. Many managers in smaller Texas cities and counties have the title without the education.
• A5 – Develop state incentives for local governments to participate in the FEMA National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and Community Rating System (CRS) program. CRS exceeds minimum requirements of NFIP and will help achieve state flood plan requirements.
• A6 – Establish a publicly available statewide database to track flood-related fatalities
• A7 – Help smaller jurisdictions prepare flood-grant applications by making the process easier
• A8 – Model future flood conditions uniformly across the state
• A9 – Reduce barriers that hinder jurisdictions from partnering to provide regional flood-mitigation solutions.
• A10 – Promote nature-based solutions, green infrastructure, floodplain preservation, conservation, and hybrid gray/green approaches
• A11 – Establish statewide building standards for minimum finished-floor elevations above the 500-year floodplain
• A12 – Incentivize voluntary buyouts for repetitively flooded properties and turn them into green space
• A13 – Require TXDoT to build roads above the Atlas 14/100-year floodplain or else the pre-existing 500-year floodplain
• A14 – Improve methods for measuring and documenting flood damages, including uninsured losses, actual flooded structures, financial damages, agricultural damages, and industrial losses, rather than just relying on flood-insurance claims which undercount damages and economic consequences.
• A15 – Support multi-jurisdictional cooperation at the evaluation, strategy and project levels.
• A16 – Clarify roles and responsibilities for floodplain management in extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) areas to reduce gaps or overlaps in responsibility for floodplain management, permitting, and drainage standards.

Flood-Planning Recommendations

These aim to help Regional Flood-Planning groups by changing or clarifying the rules under which they operate.

• F1 – Clarify what constitutes an “emergency.” Regional flood plans must indicate whether a flood-control solution meets and emergency need – without defining emergency. This results in inconsistency across the state.
• F2 – Simplify requirements for flood-mitigation projects. Don’t automatically eliminate projects missing a benefit/cost analysis (BCA), for instance, during the planning phase if the BCA can be supplied early in the design phase.
• F3 – Revise scoring criteria for projects that benefit agriculture so they can compete with urban projects
• F4 – Eliminate bias against lower-population rural areas in scoring of projects
• F5 – Likewise, eliminate scoring bias against nature-based flood-solutions with stand-alone metrics for their evaluation.
• F6 – Reduce future flood risk by prioritizing projects that improve FEMA floodplain maps and Base-Flood Elevations.
• F7 – Improve flood-risk identification by incorporating first-finished-floor elevations and better population-at-risk methods. Many living spaces are elevated above base-flood levels.
• F8 – Simplify the flood-plan amendment process. Let newly developed projects be amended into regional flood plans between full planning cycles.

Grappling with Unknown Flood Risk

Right now, about 20% of the Texas population lives in a mapped floodplain.

But many people face flood risk they may not realize they have. Current FEMA flood maps resemble a patchwork quilt that incorporates risk studies taken by different groups using different technologies at different points in time. And many streams remain unmapped.

Uniformly updating flood risk maps will likely increase the percentage of the population living in floodplains. In areas with outdated or incomplete maps, residents may face risks revealed by newer rainfall data and hydraulic modeling.

Adopting all these recommendations will go a long way toward protecting the public from future floods and filling the readiness gaps that exist across the river basin and state. Without accurate diagnosis of problems, we will never arrive at viable solutions.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 10/1/2026

3320 Days since Harvey