By Ken Kramer
As previewed in the inaugural column last month, the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), the state water planning and development agency, held a series of interactive listening sessions around the state of Texas and online this past month to get public input on how best to implement new state flood funding and planning legislation enacted last spring by the Texas Legislature. [See last month’s “The Water Column” for the details of the new legislation.] TWDB held 14 flood outreach workshops – three of which were in the Houston-Galveston area (including a last-minute-scheduled one at the Houston city Hall) – and two online webinars to ask Texans for their opinions about how best to make decisions about allocating $793 million in fund project funding and how to structure the new state and regional flood planning process. Sierra Club members attended a number of the workshops and participated in the online webinars.
Complete statistics from the workshops and webinars have not yet been released by TWDB, but – based on reports from people attending the events – at least a thousand Texans participated in this process. I was at the workshop in Bastrop, where 200+ people attended. We in the environmental community often are super-critical about the actions of Texas state agencies that deal with the state’s natural resources, but TWDB is to be commended for the diligence of its staff in seeking public input on the implementation of the new flood laws and the hard work put into conducting the workshops and webinars on a very ambitious schedule. TWDB used interactive, real-time polling data to get quick responses to questions posed by the agency staff at the workshops and webinars and to compile and display those responses immediately.
TWDB also solicited written responses to questions about administering the new flood laws that were posed in an Issues document released by key agency prior to the workshops. The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, state-level partners in the Texas Living Waters Project, submitted joint responses to those questions to the agency via email prior to the August 30th comment deadline. Those comments are available on the Lone Star Chapter website.
Among the issues/questions posed by TWDB and responded to by workshop attendees and online webinar participants were the following:
- Should funding for flood projects be primarily grants or loans? Grants are important to local governments without major resources to repay loans, especially low-income communities, and may be essential for “nonstructural” flood management projects (like purchase of undeveloped land to be retained for natural drainage). On the other hand, loans that are repaid provide more money for flood projects over the long-term. The response from stakeholders at the workshops and webinars was primarily that there be a balance of grants and loans based on local situations.
- What types of flood projects are the most impactful at addressing loss of life and property from flooding? Although the responses were quite varied, many respondents named “nature-based” solutions (like greenspace preservation, riparian restoration, etc.) as most impactful, a recognition that natural measures for flood management rather than the traditional emphasis on concrete solutions like channels that move flooding to other areas is gaining recognition and support among tflooding? The sentiment of workshop and webinar attendees appeared to be strongly in favor of buyouts.
- What interests other than those spelled out in the flood planning legislation (which specifies categories of interests such as environmentalists, municipalities, county governments, etc.) should be represented on the regional flood planning groups that will prepare regional flood plans? Sierra Club and others called for land trusts and conservation land managers to be included to make sure that nature-based or natural solutions for flood management will get serious consideration in flood planning.
- What time frame should the flood planning process cover? 10 years? 20? 30? 40? 50? There is no clear answer to this question, but the Sierra Club and others feel that the process should be long enough to consider the impacts of continuing climate change on flooding and related problems.
Over the next several weeks the TWDB staff will be struggling with sorting among all the responses to these and other questions to draft a set of rules to implement the flood funding and planning legislation. If you didn’t have a chance to participate in the flood outreach workshops or webinars, there will be another opportunity to provide comments on the draft rules as well as opportunities for public input during the regional flood planning process. In coming months “The Water Column” will keep you posted on ways in which your voice on flooding issues may have the greatest impact.