Three weeks after flash flooding killed more than 100 people in Texas’ Hill Country, the state Legislature criticized Kerr County leaders for refusing funding a year ago to create a warning system that could warn residents of rapidly rising water levels.
Several people slammed Carr officials, who represent local river authorities, when they tried to explain why they had rejected funding from a $1.4 billion state fund meant to prevent devastating flooding.
One state senator on the special legislative committee tasked with investigating the deadly flooding called the decision “pathetic.” Another said: “It’s disturbing.” State Rep. Drew Darby, a Republican from San Angelo, said the river authority simply lacked the will to pay for the project.
But Carr was not alone in rejecting the state’s proposal, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune revealed. In the five years since the fund’s creation, at least 90 local governments have rejected tens of millions of dollars in state grants and loans.
Leaders of about 30 local governments interviewed by news organizations said they were unable to move forward with the program, which would cover only a small portion of the total cost with state subsidies and interest-free loans for the rest. Many had hoped that state programs would provide grants to cover most of the costs, such as grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which typically provide at least 75%. They believed they could raise the rest.
Instead, many were offered for much less. In some cases, states provided grants that paid less than 10 percent of the needed funds.
In Kerr’s case, the state gave him a $50,000 subsidy, or about 5 percent, for a $1 million flood warning system. The river authority says it can borrow the rest and pay it back over the next 30 years, but local officials aren’t sure they’ll be able to repay the $950,000 or face state sanctions.
Officials with the city of Robinson, located between Dallas and Austin, have sought about $2.4 million in funding to directly purchase and demolish homes within the spillway. The state provided $236,000 and required the city to conduct an engineering study that would use up more than half of the grant money, the city administrator told news outlets.
The state also proposed giving the city of Kilgore in East Texas a portion of the money that Public Works Director Clay Evers had anticipated for drainage studies aimed at minimizing flooding. Evers said the city needed money, but the state’s proposal required far more money than city councilors expected to set aside based on the federal grant program. The state also required the city to go through a second application process to secure the grant, which Evers said would further strain funding.
So Evers left.
Four years after cutting off state funding, Evers watched in shock as lawmakers denounced Kerr’s leadership. It could have been as simple as trying to protect a choice he didn’t want to make in the first place.
“I don’t have this unlimited amount of money,” Evers said. “It’s an incredibly difficult decision. How can you defend the decision you made when something impossible, impossible, and traumatic happens?”
Several Texas leaders who created and oversaw the fund defended the program as an important investment and said local communities also need to be proactive in investing in flood warning and mitigation projects.
Local officials, especially those in smaller rural areas, said limited tax sources and continued state restrictions on new tax increases make it difficult to fund needed projects.
After learning of Newsroom’s findings, two legislators and a former state employee who helped launch the fund expressed concern about the number of districts that had been denied funding. State Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, and Darby said the state cannot pay for all projects in full, but acknowledged that lawmakers have created a flawed system.
“We absolutely know that what we are doing now is not appropriate for the people we represent,” Moody said. “It’s okay to admit that the system isn’t good enough, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
Moody and Darby said the state plan deserves a thorough review by lawmakers during the next legislative session in 2027.
“It’s unfortunate that Congress made this a priority and we put money into this important program that saves lives, and it’s still sitting in bank accounts and not being utilized,” Darby said. “We need to fix that.”
During the 2016 Kilgore flood, Turkey Creek, which flows through town, flooded nearby neighborhoods. Residents were rescued from their homes by emergency management authorities. Michael Cavazos writes for ProPublica and the Texas Tribune
too little for some
In 2019, lawmakers approved a flood infrastructure fund, making Texas one of the few states in the country with a dedicated program to help cities and counties pay for flood protection projects, experts say.
The investment was made in response to the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey two years ago. Applicants seeking to qualify for the grant must meet criteria such as securing additional federal funding, having a median household income below the statewide average, or meeting a narrower definition of a rural community than those used in other programs in Texas.
Lawmakers ordered the Texas Water Development Commission to create a ranking system for proposed projects and determine how much money each community would receive. The board awarded $670 million to 140 projects, with the largest grants awarded to applicants with the lowest median household incomes.
That meant communities with higher median incomes, like Carr, received far less money than other areas where the need was considered less pressing.
A spokesperson for the water board defended the distribution of the grant money, saying the goal was to fund as many projects as possible across the state. The agency had received some feedback from the community who felt the offer was too low to be a viable option, but spokeswoman Casey Woodrome said it was difficult to attribute the choice to decline funding to a single root cause.
Tom Entzminger, a longtime water board employee who helped launch the fund, said he and his colleagues were tasked with figuring out how to distribute the money before they knew how many local agencies would apply, what projects they would propose or how much it would cost. He said there was no “particular logic that anyone could defend” behind the exact grant amount.
“We needed to get through the funding cycle before we realized the money was too little for some people,” he says.
The state launched a second round of funding last year, but its leaders made few changes to the rubric used to distribute funds. So far, we’re getting similar results.
Entzminger, who left state government in 2021 to take a consultant job, believes the program was an overall success. Still, he said the fact that so many local governments and municipalities with fewer than 20,000 residents rejected state funding meant an overhaul of the board’s grant process was likely needed. About $100 million had gone unspent for years, the newsroom found.
Among the local governments that rejected the funding was Trinity Bay Conservation District, which provides water service to 6,000 customers in two rural counties in southeast Texas. It was to receive 9 percent of the nearly $12 million needed to fund projects to widen local bayou and alleviate flooding in the area. Rosehill Acres, a town of 300 people near Beaumont in southeast Texas, also received a 14 percent grant for $12 million in flood mitigation efforts.
Another similar community is Kilgore, which has fewer than 14,000 residents.
The city needed $575,000 to evaluate and create an updated map of its drainage system. Without that, Evers had to rely on a map left by a previous city employee in a green spiral notebook dated 1965, which allowed him to guess which pipes needed replacing before the old ones failed.
Dozens of pipes have collapsed since 2018, when his office began tracking destruction that left sinkholes in people’s yards, church grounds and, in worst cases, in the middle of busy roads. The chaos led Evers to prioritize emergency funds to fix the city’s most dangerous basketball-sized hole, only for another hole to appear in a citywide game of whack-a-mole.
“It’s only going to accelerate. Every year that goes by, the infrastructure that’s still underground is a year older,” Evers said. “I’m trying to get ahead of it.”
The announcement of the State Water Development Board’s program gave him hope that sufficient funds would be available for the needed projects. But that feeling quickly dissipated when the board released a master list ranking all projects and outlining how much funding each project could receive.
Kilgore was provided a grant that covered 13 percent of the cost of the wastewater study. To continue winning grants, the program required applicants to submit another lengthy application, which would have required hiring expensive consultants, Evers said. The board had given Kilgore such a low rating among hundreds of projects that Evers felt the city was unlikely to receive funding.
Evers was faced with a choice many other applicants told news outlets. The question was whether to spend more resources on a chance to win state money or cut losses now.
“We are disappointed with this ranking,” Evers said in an email to the Water Development Commission, declining to move forward with the application. “Our small town clearly has to pale in comparison to the other 200 projects that are coming up.”
Evers points to a map showing areas flooded in the 2016 flood. Michael Cavazos for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Kilgore’s 1965 comprehensive plan map depicts the city’s stormwater drainage system. Michael Cavazos writes for ProPublica and the Texas Tribune
still waiting
After leaving the national program, the need for wastewater research became more urgent, so Evers looked for other sources of funding. Water pipes continued to break, roads and homes were flooded, and the city was forced to tap into dwindling emergency funds.
Finally, Evers won a $300,000 federal grant this year. Although they were unable to cover the entire cost of the project, Evers said they would start by looking at the most flood-prone areas and then scale up.
“It won’t be 100%, but it would be good enough to at least have some sort of grasp of something like a starting plan,” he said. “I got lucky.”
But Carr wasn’t so lucky.
Guadalupe River Authority Executive Director Tara Bushnoe, who applied for funding for the state program but was turned down, said in an email that the government has approved the use of funds from the budget in phases for flood warning systems, but it could take years to complete a complete system with all the planned sirens to alert residents.
Immediately after the deadly floods, state leaders pledged help and said they would allocate additional funding specifically for such warning systems.
“We’re not going to be able to stop everyone from dying,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican. “But if they heard the sirens and went to higher ground, they could have gotten a lot of people out of the way. That’s the best thing you can do, as a deputy, try to save lives.”
This summer, lawmakers passed Bettencourt’s bill, which provides $50 million for flood sirens in some Texas counties.
But in Kerr County, the state won’t automatically help pay for the warning system because the state injected money into the county in the wake of the devastation that followed the flood.
State lawmakers put money into a new fund with a new selection process that targets dozens of flood-prone counties.
Kerr leaders will have to reapply.
