West Street Recovery and Northeast Action Collective (NAC), formed by Houston residents impacted by flooding issues since Hurricane Harvey, are asking the city to allocate more funds for the city’s drainage and street improvement projects.
What happened?
In January, Houston lost an appeal at the Texas Supreme Court. The court ruled that the city failed to allot the necessary millions of dollars to fix drainage issues by not putting aside enough of its property tax revenue toward these projects.
If the city had followed its ordinance and set aside 11.8 cents for every $100 of taxable property, it would have avoided its shortfall and used a $420 million fund to address drainage and street issues. Upon losing the appeal, Houston now has to put $100 million toward mitigating these issues this year.
City Controller Chris Hollins said earlier that the city does not have the funds for this and will end the fiscal year in June with a $200-$250 million budget deficit. With the additional $100 million ordered to be spent on flood mitigation, the budget deficit will increase to more than $300 million.
In February, the city proposed taking $50 million from METRO to offset the shortfall, but no other plans were communicated. In October 2024, at-large Council Member Sallie Alcorn said that while the city will not see a property tax increase this year, thanks to the approval of a $50 million fund for debris removal in counties for last year’s storms, infrastructure should be a top priority for the council.
“People want more investment in infrastructure, streets, drainage and sidewalks. We all know the need is great,” Alcorn said. “And while we will never have enough to cover all our needs, we will need help from the taxpayers at some point when the timing is right.”
“All signs are pointing to the city attempting to violate the court ruling and transfer less than $100M to drainage funding this year,” said Alice Liu, NAC member and communications director. “The NAC has been fighting since 2018 for drainage equity and increased flood protection for Black and Brown communities in Northeast Houston.”
With Houston’s budget for FY26 due in four months, the city has not yet specified its plans for increasing spending in accordance with the court decision. Mayor John Whitmire said in January that the city “plans to comply with the court decision.”
“It doesn’t have to be a disaster event. It can be heavy rain and people’s houses flood,” said Doris Brown, co-director of community research, organizing and special events at West Street Recovery and co-founder of the NAC. “We have people that have flooded five times in their home. They build it up, get it ready, and as soon as it rains again, really, really hard, you get flooded in again.”
NAC and West Street Recovery propose using part of the funding to boost two drainage programs, the Ditch Re-Establishment Program and Local Drainage Projects.
The community organizations are also demanding a say in how the city spends $314 million in federal disaster relief funds following last year’s derecho and hurricane, for which Harris County received an additional $67 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“This is flood infrastructure money,” said Kourtney Revels, Water Justice Organizer at Bayou City Waterkeeper. “We don’t just have the rights as taxpayers, we have the responsibility as taxpayers to make sure that we’re holding our mayor and our city council members accountable…We’re supposed to be able to trust our elected officials. We’re supposed to be able to trust that our elected officials are going to put our best interest first.”
