Currently, about five million Texans live in areas threatened by floods, but starting to address the problem statewide could cost billions, according to the state’s comprehensive flood plan.

The State Flood Plan, published in December by Texas Water Development Board, ranks the most urgent flood prevention needs. The plan breaks the needs into three buckets: projects, surveys and strategies. If every flood solution was completed, it would remove more than 840,000 people and 214,000 buildings from the 100-year flood floodplain.

The total cost for all of the needs is $54 billion.

Nearly half of the project funding — $24 billion — is for the first one on the list, the Galveston Bay Surge Protection Coastal Storm Risk Management Project. It would go to improvements to things like the sea wall and bayou gates. The top two rated needs under surveys and strategies both had to do with the Trinity Basin in North Texas.

To date, the state has committed $669 million through its associated Flood Infrastructure Fund — or a little more than 1% of the total.

“That is a drop in the bucket in a lot of ways,” said Derek Boese, general manager of the San Antonio River Authority, and chair of the planning group that covers 2.2 million people across 16 counties, including Bexar. “But it’s more than we’ve seen in the past.”

The deadly Hill Country floods are pushing Texas to redouble its efforts on flood planning and mitigation. As of Wednesday, 131 are dead and still 97 missing. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered lawmakers to return to Austin this month to address the problem.

“We want to make sure that when we end that session, we end it by making sure these communities are better, more resilient and have the resources that they need,” Abbott said last Tuesday.

“These storm events are happening more frequently, and they’re causing more damage,” said Suzanne Scott, with Nature Conservancy, a global nonprofit, and member of the same regional planning team as Boese. “I think that people are coming to the realization that we have to be more proactive about our planning.”

The Needs 

Despite leading the nation in flood-related property damage, Texas has long neglected a statewide comprehensive approach to protecting communities from deadly natural disasters.

The State Flood Plan was created to address this problem in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which directly claimed the lives of 89 people and caused more than $125 billion in property damage. The flood plan took a bottom-up approach, utilizing plans created by 15 regional flood plan groups spanning the state.

The Texas Water Development Board, working with these groups, identified more than 4,600 flood solutions in its first plan in the three categories. Each category had its own risk matrix, weighing the urgency of the need by things like population affected and structures in the area.

Projects make up the largest share of the total cost at $49 billion, flood evaluations are $2.6 billion and flood strategies have $2.8 billion in needs. Here are the top three needs in each category.

Flood Mitigation Projects (615 total)

1. The Galveston Bay Surge Protection Coastal Storm Risk Management Project tops the list at a cost of $24 billion.
2. Two million dollars is proposed for Wichita Falls storm water improvements
3. Fort Worth could get $84 million for a detention pond to help with stormwater runoff

Flood Evaluations (3,097 total)

1. An assessment of the Trinity Basin and how to use nature-based solutions and land use would cost about $742,000.
2. A plan to use National Weather Service rain gage height’s to forecast floodplain on the Trinity River would cost about $2 million.
3. A flood preparedness plan using streamgaging and flood inundation mapping could be used to create an early flood warning system for the Nueces River authority, costing $250,000.

Flood Strategies (897 total)

1. Trinity Basin Stakeholder planning and analysis project costing $1.9 million.
2. The acquisition and demolition of 46 flood-prone properties in Dallas County would cost $5 million.
3. Ector County wants $75,000 to create an outreach program on drainage criteria.

A study for an early warning system that would include sirens for Kerr county — one locals said could have saved lives in the recent deadly floods — would cost about $50,000, according to the State Flood Plan. This project ranks 1560th in terms of funding importance of the more than 3,000 identified “flood evaluations.”

These early warning systems with public announcement speakers and sirens were pointed to as critical to public safety for floods along the Guadalupe River by residents for years. One engineering study presented in 2016 highlighted a cost of around $1 million for a system. The county attempted to get funding from the Texas Department of Emergency Management, FEMA and the first round of Flood Infrastructure Funds. It failed and abandoned the plan.

The chapter highlighted how desperate local communities are for funding. The State Flood Plan estimated that as much as 90% of community flood project implementation costs need financial assistance.

The few flood early warning systems did not rank exceptionally high on the list of flood mitigation projects. But these systems will likely be top of mind in the special session.

“Hopefully it will put it to the top of the list, because those are projects that I mean in the scope of things … they’re not that expensive, and the benefit is so great,” said Scott.

Legislative actions

The July 4 floods have forced Texas to face its needs. Many of the legislative recommendations authored by the Texas Water Development Board and its local flood groups in the statewide plan have not been prioritized, and bills related to floods and emergency alert systems failed to pass in last year’s legislative session.

“It’s unfortunate that it took a tragedy like this for people to pay more attention to a bill that was, in our estimation, critically important earlier this year,” Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, told NPR.

Lawmakers did reappropriate funds for the Water Board’s Flood Infrastructure Fund and put forward a $1 billion dollar budget for water projects to be voted on this November. Much of those dollars are earmarked for water supply for a thirsty Texas rather than floods.

The state must also reappropriate funding for the fund each session — because it hasn’t given it a regular budget — which makes planning difficult, one Texas Water Development Board staff member told The Texas Tribune last year.

As a result, floodplain managers will be eagerly watching to see what comes out of the special session, hoping their previous recommendations might be revived.

Legislative reforms around a county’s power to raise funding for flood mitigation are two major issues brought up by the plan’s local partners. Currently only cities can tax residents for drainage projects that reduce flood risk. Counties cannot tax unincorporated areas for similar projects, leaving them unfunded.

“This limits counties’ abilities to self-finance flood mitigation and drainage projects and provide adequate ongoing maintenance of drainage and flood mitigation infrastructure,” according to the State Flood Plan.

Texas also has significant gaps in its knowledge of where floods will happen.

In places like the Panhandle and West Texas, the State Flood Plan shows spotty data and has holes in the data quilt they built, where studies of floods have not occurred because those communities lack the resources to conduct them.

Complicating other data is that new federal rainfall data has rendered some maps outdated.

Several dozen surveys around flood management and planning were included in the 140 projects recently funded by the Flood Infrastructure Fund. Several hundred more await consideration under the statewide plan.

Despite the $700 million appropriated by the Legislature in 2019 and an additional $660 million appropriated in 2025 being a tiny fraction of the estimated need, the flood plan and funding mechanism are still massive steps for the state.

“Given the impacts that flooding has had throughout the state for decades it really hasn’t risen to the level of a leading issue,” Scott added, saying the flood plan is “going to bring more of a focus to the needs.”