The Houston Sierra Club (HSC) provided input to the Galveston Bay Estuary Program (GBEP) about funding for its Subcommittees so they can implement research, monitoring, water and sediment quality, natural resource, and public education projects.  Each year, as part of the budget that the Galveston Bay Council (the implementation body for the GBEP) approves for the Galveston Bay Plan, there is about $800,000 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that is recommended and dispersed among the Monitoring and Research, Public Participation and Education, Natural Resource Uses, and Water and Sediment Quality Subcommittees. 

The HSC provided comments to three of these Subcommittees about project proposals submitted by entities like Texas A&M, University of Houston Clear Lake, U.S. Geological Survey, Texas Agri-Life, Houston Advanced Research, Galveston Bay Foundation, Texas Water Resources Institute, and others.

Some of the comments were general in nature and focused on how project proposals could be better worded so the public could understand them.  Other comments were more substantive and requested that the proposals more clearly state which communities and priority areas in the Galveston Bay Plan would benefit from the project proposals. 

The HSC attended several of the Subcommittee meetings where the project proposals and tentative ranking or prioritization of the proposals were discussed.  The HSC was surprised to find out that its comments on project proposals were the first to be submitted by the general public in many years. 

The HSC brought up at one Subcommittee meeting the need to make State of the Bay and Status and Trends funding part of the regular programmatic GBEP budget.  This ensures that these important administrative functions are funded each year and do not compete with funding for other Subcommittee project proposals.  The Monitoring and Research Subcommittee agreed with this suggestion and eliminated these two items from the ranking process for project proposals. 

Contact Brandt Mannchen (brandtshnfbt@juno.com, 713-664-5962) or Evelyn Merz (elmerz@hal-pc.org, 713-644-8228) about HSC comments.  For more information about the GBEP contact Sarah Bernhardt, GBP Program Manager, at sarah.bernhardt@tceq.texas.gov or call 281-218-6461.

Brandt Mannchen

September 22, 2016