Emergency management officials from Kerr, Travis and Williamson counties are set to testify before Texas House and Senate lawmakers during a July 31 committee hearing at the Hill Country Youth Event Center in Kerrville.
It will be the 18-member Disaster Preparedness and Flooding Committee’s second meeting to review how state and local leaders prepared for and responded to flooding that killed at least 137 people across Central and West Texas July 4-5.
Twenty-five officials and experts were invited to speak to the bipartisan panel July 31, including:
- Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly
- Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator William Thomas
- Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring Jr.
- Travis County Judge Andy Brown
- Williamson County Judge Steven Snell
- San Antonio Fire Chief Valerie Frausto
- Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon
- Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Meteorologist John Honoré
- Surface water hydrologists and civil engineers
The committee was also scheduled to hear from Texans impacted by the floods.
The background
During a July 23 hearing in Austin, lawmakers grilled state agencies and regional river authorities for nearly 12 hours about the events leading up to the deadly floods.
TDEM Chief Nim Kidd said better communication and oversight are needed to improve future disaster response, noting that the state does not have policies to ensure local emergency management teams receive urgent weather warnings or are prepared to evacuate residents.
“There seems to be a disconnect in making sure the person making that call is awake, alert and doing it,” Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, said July 23.
Kidd also testified July 23 that there are “no minimum qualifications” to become a local emergency management coordinator in Texas. Emergency management entities do not have an incentive to work together or coordinate with the state, he said.
Lawmakers criticized Kerr County leaders’ flood response during the July 23 hearing. City and county officials from the flooded regions were not invited to the July 23 hearing because lawmakers did not want to “pull those local officials away from their disaster-related duties to testify,” committee co-chair Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, said.
Committee members also reprimanded the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which is in charge of a roughly 38-mile stretch of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, for neither raising local property taxes nor accepting a zero-interest loan from the state to fund a $1 million flood warning system in 2024.
UGRA general manager Tara Bushnoe told lawmakers July 23 that the river authority’s board members decided a grant offered by the state was not enough to move forward with the project, which lawmakers said they found “extremely disturbing.” The state offered a $50,000 grant and a $950,000 loan with 0% interest for the flood warning project, according to testimony July 23.
The committee is scheduled to meet at 9:30 a.m. in Kerrville, and a livestream of the hearing is available here.
House and Senate lawmakers are expected to hold separate hearings to consider specific flood-related legislation in the coming days, as the 18-member joint committee cannot vote on bills. Texas’ special legislative session began July 21 and will last for up to 30 days.
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