Legislators express 'collective dissatisfaction' with GLO decision to exclude Harris County, City of Houston from receiving flood funding

Harris County lawmakers have joined together to rebuke the Texas General Land Office (GLO) for not including Houston and Harris County for Hurricane Harvey federal funding.

Houston was denied funding even though Hurricane Harvey inundated the city and surrounding areas with around 60 inches of rain in 2017 and other massive storms flooded thousands of Houston homes in 2015 and 2016, reported Courthouse News. 

"A bipartisan group of members from the Harris County Delegation sent this letter to @txglo expressing our collective dissatisfaction with their decision not to allocate any recent federal disaster mitigation money to Houston/Harris Co. We need our own money back, #txlege," State Rep. Armando Walle (D-Houston) wrote in a May 25 Twitter post.

According to Courthouse News, critics have said that GLO is using a scoring system to determine funding recipients that puts counties with large populations at a disadvantage. Houston is the fourth largest city in the U.S. and Harris County is the third-most populous county in the U.S. with more than 4.5 million residents.

"With the increased frequency of flood events in our already flood-prone region, effectively penalizing Houston and Harris County for their population size seems particularly unwise given the massive impact on life and livelihoods every storm has in our area," the lawmakers wrote in their letter to GLO. 

In 2018, Harris County residents approved a $2.5 billion bond measure, funded by an increase in property taxes, with the hope that their contributions would be matched by federal dollars for flood-mitigation funding.

"For the state to not contribute to the local flood-control infrastructure amounts to a disappointing rebuff to the residents of Harris County who have proven willing to invest their own money to do so by the overwhelming passage of the 2.5 billion flood bond in 2018," the lawmakers continued in their letter.

Hurricane Harvey left $195 billion worth of damage in its wake, the most expensive storm in U.S. history. 

Houston residences accounted for more than 30% of the properties that took in floodwater.

Rice University has invented a new flood tracking system for the city, according to CultureMap Houston.