Houston Chronicle 6/18/2018 By Zach Despart
With $2.5 billion, you could run each of Houston ISD’s 284 schools for a year, cover the Astros payroll and still have enough left over to buy the River Oaks mansion of your choice.
Or you could undertake the largest concentrated flood control effort across Harris County in decades.
That is how much Harris County Commissioners Court decided last week to put before voters on Aug. 25, the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey’s landfall and subsequent deluge of southeast Texas, in a bid to harden the area against similar, or worse, flooding in the future.
And county officials are asking residents how to spend that money. Through at least two-dozen public meetings across the county’s watersheds, County Judge Ed Emmett said residents have a crucial role to play as they provide feedback for the projects they think most will benefit their neighborhoods.
“As that comes in, Flood Control can make adjustments,†Emmett said. “You could have some projects just completely dropped. You could have some projects added we hadn’t thought about.â€
The bond vote is an all-or-nothing gamble by Commissioners Court, whose members hope residents will commit to strengthening flood infrastructure after Harvey flooded 11 percent of the county’s housing stock this past August. If the bond passes, Harris County will have access to as much as $2.5 billion to make, over the next 10 to 15 years, the largest local investment in flood infrasctructure in the county’s history. If the bond fails, engineers will be limited to the flood control district’s annual operations and capital budgets, which total a paltry $120 million in comparison.
More:
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Harris-County-pieces-together-flood-bond-12998859.php
