Posted on March 5, 2018
By Mike Morris, Houston Chronicle
In the six months since Hurricane Harvey battered the Houston region, local leaders have talked at length about not just restoring flood-damaged neighborhoods and infrastructure, but hardening the area against future disasters. Not surprisingly, much of that will depend on massive amounts of funding, much of it from the federal government. Houston’s Hurricane Harvey recovery czar, former Shell president Marvin Odum, visited the Houston Chronicle editorial board Friday to discuss the city’s recovery efforts. The following Q & A has been edited for length.
What do you see as the key accomplishments in the city’s recovery process thus far?
Odum: We’ll tick off the one we just did, which was re-looking at the city ordinances and saying what needs to change to put the city in a better position going forward. So, there’s a lot of work going on there and Chapter 19 (the city floodplain ordinance) has now been put on the table. The next stage of that one will be, what about outside the floodplain? The simple logic that I use is, not only did a lot of areas flood that aren’t in the floodplain, but the floodplain is meant to, of course, address riverine flooding and surge flooding. It’s not actually meant to address just rainfall and buildup of water. That’s not what a floodplain is. There’s a lot of areas that need to be considered outside of Chapter 19, which is just a floodplain ordinance, but that was the right place to start.
What is happening on the housing recovery front?
O: The city of Houston has made the formal request to HUD for what’s called technical assistance. This is basically us saying, ‘We don’t want to do this all on our own.’ HUD brings tremendous capacity, money for studies, resources, ideas. It helps keep the city, for all its different tugs and pulls for different priorities, on track with what it wants to do. (Broadly speaking) The money that comes won’t be enough to meet the need, but it will be big enough to be transformative to the city. What that means is, how you strategically spend that money, how much it’s focused on what are you trying to get to in terms of affordable housing and where is that affordable housing and what are the characteristics of it. You can’t lose sight of that by spending just very near term for assistance that’s clearly there. You could use all of that money in just sort of spot areas where ‘you need help here, you need help here, you need help here,’ and you don’t transform the system at all.
When you say ‘transformative,’ what does that look like for Houston?
O: The way I would describe it is, it’s the result of a strategic approach toward a designed outcome, as opposed to just a very organic, ‘We have what we have.’ The sort of basic elements of affordable housing should be near to where the jobs are, along major corridors, with access to public transportation. Those kind of links are enormously important to the city functioning well in the future, and that’s not what we have today. And without some guidance, it’s never going to get there.
Where does the recovery stand when it comes to mitigating future floods?
O: There’s lots of ideas out there. Some things that have been basically engineered and designed and are waiting for money, and then there’s more new and innovative things outside of that. To me, it looks like there’s an emerging set of just slam-dunk, ‘go do these projects, period.’ The kind of things I’d put into that category are the bayou projects. Then I think it‘s debatable still what the situation is with the third reservoir. If you talk to the mayor, he’d put that in the slam-dunk category, no question, so this is more of a personal point of view. What I’d really love to see is the fixes on Barker, the fixes on Addicks, what impact does that have, and then what exactly do you need in terms of a third reservoir and where should it be. Then you have the coastal spine piece, which is the most cloudy for me. I don’t doubt its importance. I don’t have any difficulty recognizing the risk of a hurricane coming up the bay and the ship channel, but the mechanism by which that gets moved to the right place in the priority list in funding, that one is still in the cloudy area that we have to sort out. As that money starts to flow through, the confidence level that there will be enough to do those slam dunk projects is increasing pretty rapidly.
What about regulatory fixes on businesses so the mitigation work isn’t undone?
O: Particularly as you think about that San Jacinto area, clearly something has to be done. My first question is, what regulations are in place around those mining operations that clearly aren’t being followed but now immediately have to be enforced. And what are the consequences of that? The question that will have to be answered as part of that is, can you prevent that migration of sand by doing it right or do those mining operations need to be somehow differently impacted? It’s clear you’ve got to dredge through that area, but dredging has consequences too. Getting a studied answer to when to dredge, how to dredge, where to dredge, and then getting into the whole question of the levels of the two lakes and outflow capacity, this whole idea of a dam and a set of gates at the bottom of Lake Houston.
Are there regulatory steps the city needs to take so future development doesn’t undo the mitigation investments?
O: We don’t have zoning, of course, and we talk about unfettered development and no control over that. I see plenty of levers to do the right thing just through the ordinances and the rules of the road that we can put in place. You see us making that step on housing, new homes first, and some impact on existing homes in terms of expansion. But I think a very strong concern we’ve heard is, “OK, if I have a house and I’m going to add on a room and a bathroom because my mother in law is moving in with us or my parents are moving in with us, I’m going to have to raise that section three feet in the air. I don’t like that.” I think what you’ll see is … We’ll shift to a footprint measure rather than a value measure. So, it will be a footprint-type measure and it will provide a lot of leeway for people in existing homes to do something with their home.
It’s just about moving houses to where they’re not going to flood. So we’re not going to negotiate on, ‘OK they can flood a little bit.’ I don’t consider that necessarily the compromise. It is important to understand the data we’re using and where we’re going. This is by no means stiff-arming the building community. But it is about moving them (the houses) out of harm’s way. I used to sit on the industry side and I understand exactly this approach. There’s a tendency at the very least to say, let’s design to exactly that so if it didn’t flood during Harvey, we sure shouldn’t be touching it now. That’s not the perspective that we’re taking. We’re saying, “What do we need to prepare for in the future?”
What keeps you up at night?
O: The No. 1 thing that worries me is a long-term funding strategy which is very much, ‘How long does the door stay open where you have the enthusiasm to do this stuff?’ Not only do I want to see the projects in the various categories, I want to see them in rank-order and I want to see an open discussion around how do you fund these. The good news is a lot of them are going to get funded on the front end. Ultimately, at the bottom of that list is taxes. I don’t think you can get there, ultimately, without having that be a part of it. (Also) how much control the city has on the money is a big hig- level issue for me because I do think the city’s in the best pace to do it set that strategy and commit to that spending on achieving that strategy. But we need control over the money to do it.
Source: Houston Chronicle
