Evolution of Harris County Flood-Project Prioritization

11/1/2025 – On 10/28/25, members of the Harris County Community Flood Resilience Task Force received a brief presentation about how flood-mitigation projects get prioritized by Harris County.

Below are several key slides from “Overview & History of the 2018 Bond Program’s Prioritization Framework.”

How Prioritization Started

Before the 2018 bond election on the anniversary of Hurricane Harvey, language was inserted into the proposal that voters went on to approve. Specifically, note Paragraph 14G. It called for developing a process for the “equitable expenditure of funds.”

Another year later, the county (under the guise of Harris Thrives) adopted two resolutions. The first instructed Harris County Flood Control District to adopt a framework for the equitable expenditure of Bond Program funds. The second set up a community-based Task Force.

“Harris Thrives” is the name of a resilience strategy adopted by Harris County after Harvey. It claims to be a “fast, fair, smart” approach to flood control, but also includes housing. Specifically it claims the county will be:

• Fast: Cutting through red tape to complete flood-control projects quickly.
• Fair: Prioritizing projects to help the most people as efficiently as possible, while ensuring vulnerable communities are never left behind.
• Smart: Relying on science, technology, and data as a guide to be more proactive about how mitigation, preparation, and recovery.
• Broad: Including programs for housing recovery, emergency preparedness, and community engagement. 

Admirable goals. But it appears that Harris Thrives’ website has not been updated since February 2023, despite a promise to update it quarterly at that time. Only history and the Freedom of Information Act will tell us whether the county achieved those goals.

How Prioritization Framework Evolved

The Framework has gone through several iterations over time as commissioners’ priorities have changed.

• After Harvey, the focus was speed.
• Two years later, the focus was prioritizing certain projects and de-emphasizing others.
• Five years later, the focus became tweaking the framework to ensure dollars went where commissioners wanted.
• Six years later, commissioners asked HCFCD to rank projects already initiated into quartiles to ensure pet projects could be fully funded.
• Eight years later, it became clear there wasn’t enough money to do all the projects promised in the flood bond. So commissioners voted to focus on projects in the top quartile.

Commissioners later also agreed to follow up on projects that had already received partnership funds (not shown above).

Regaining Transparency

Under previous management, HCFCD updated the status of every project for every commissioners court meeting. And those updates were posted online.

But since a change in management and priorities in 2022, it has been hard to identify where projects, budgets, and construction stands. Bond updates became annual as projects slowed to a crawl.

The old, simple-but-effective text-based lists with GANTT charts have been replaced by a series of somewhat confusing dashboards that work occasionally and with mixed effectiveness in different browsers.

Clicking on the dots calls up information about the associated project. But gone are the old, intuitive Gantt charts that gave you timing, lifecycle, and status information at a glance.

Sigh. At least they’re trying. And in fairness, they are improving. The Microsoft PowerBI spending charts on the HCFCD Activity Page are a valuable addition, even though that information is updated quarterly.

Changing Priorities

Through the years, priorities changed. The presentation showed the current scoring matrix.

However, it did not show the scoring matrix in the original 2019 Prioritization Framework. See below.

Comparison shows that flood-risk reduction and partnership funding (combined weight of 35%) have been eliminated from consideration. In their place, population and housing density (aka project efficiency) have increased by a similar amount. That favors projects near the city center, but eliminates severity of flooding as a consideration, which is why the largest watershed in the county with the worst flooding has received only 2% of spending to date.

Eliminating partnership funding is a curious switch, too, especially since more than half of bond-project funding relies on matching partnership dollars.

For More Information

Those who would like more information can:

• Consult the HCFCD Bond Pages
• See this page appended to the presentation
• Review entries under the HCFCD tab on the ReduceFlooding Reports Page
• Search on the tag “equity prioritization” in the search bar of this website.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 11/1/25

2986 Days since Hurricane Harvey

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