Disaster preparedness and flood recovery are at the top of the agenda for Texas’ special legislative session starting next Monday, July 21. Many of the measures likely to come up for debate were previously considered months or years before the deadly flash flood in the Hill Country on July 4.
Gov. Greg Abbott's proclamation for the special session includes flood warning systems, flood emergency communications and disaster preparation and recovery.
"When a state tries to make their state stronger following a disaster, that's the wrong time. You need to be doing it before the disaster," said Michael Coen, chief of staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. "These investments should have been made in the past. There was decisions made at the state level not to invest in alert and warning and additional mitigation measures, and now we're seeing the costs of that."
Lawmakers tried as recently as this year’s regular session to pass a bill (House Bill 13) that would have provided at least $500 million in funding for local governments to upgrade emergency communications systems. That bill overwhelmingly passed the Texas House earlier this year but then became bottled up in the Senate Finance Committee, which never held a hearing on it. Had it passed, the bill would not have taken effect until Sept. 1, long after the flood that swept through the Texas Hill Country and led to more than 100 deaths, with many of the victims from the Houston area.
"What I think the state legislature's going to now address is providing funding to local governments to have better alert and warning, so that we don't see the loss of life that we saw in Kerr County," Coen said. "Unfortunately, [for] the families that have lost loved ones ... it's too late."
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The Texas Legislature is set to return next week to a packed special session agenda. In addition to flood recovery and disaster preparedness, Abbott's proclamation includes regulation of hemp-derived products containing THC and a rare mid-decade round of congressional redistricting.
U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-Houston) — whose district is one of the targets of the redistricting proposal, introduced under pressure from the administration of President Donald Trump — condemned the move as an attempt to cover up the state's failure to adequately prepare for natural disasters.
"This can become the distraction from the investigation that needs to take place as relates to this flooding ... of the Guadalupe River," Green said. "The Guadalupe River has taken many lives. I think the governor was welcoming something like this so that they can use it as a distraction as well. But I won't let it become a distraction, because we're going to fight it."
Abbott's office did not respond to a request for comment.
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