“Did fiscal conservatism block plans for a new flood warning system in Kerr County?” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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In the week after the tragic July 4 flooding in Kerr County, several officials have blamed taxpayer pressure as the reason flood warning sirens were never installed along the Guadalupe River.

“The public reeled at the cost,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly told reporters one day after the rain pushed Guadalupe River levels more than 32 feet, resulting in nearly 100 deaths in the county, as of Thursday.

A community that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024, Kerr County constructed an economic engine on the allure of the Guadalupe River. Government leaders acknowledged the need for more disaster mitigation, including a $1 million flood warning system that would better alert the public to emergencies, to sustain that growth, but they were hamstrung by a small and tightfisted tax base.

An examination of transcripts since 2016 from Kerr County’s governing body, the commissioners court, offers a peek into a small Texas county paralyzed by two competing interests: to make one of the country’s most dangerous region for flash flooding safer and to heed to near constant calls from constituents to reduce property taxes and government waste.

“This is a pretty conservative county,” said former Kerr County Judge Tom Pollard, 86. “Politically, of course, and financially as well.”

County zeroes in on river safety in 2016

Cary Burgess, a local meteorologist whose weather reports can be found in the Kerrville Daily Times or heard on Hill Country radio stations, has noticed the construction all along the Guadalupe for the better part of the last decade.

More Texans and out-of-state residents have been discovering the river’s pristine waters lined with bald cypress trees, a long-time draw for camping, hiking and kayaking, and they have been coming in droves to build more homes and businesses along the water’s edge. If any of the newcomers were familiar with the last deadly flood in 1987 that killed 10 evacuating teenagers, they found the river’s threat easy to dismiss.

“They’ve been building up and building up and building up and doing more and more projects along the river that were getting dangerous,” Burgess recalls. “And people are building on this river, my gosh, they don’t even know what this river’s capable of.”

By the time the 1987 flood hit, the county had grown to about 35,000 people. Today, there are about 53,000 people living in Kerr County.

In 2016, Kerr County commissioners already knew they were getting outpaced by neighboring, rapidly growing counties on installing better flood warning systems and were looking for ways to pull ahead.

During a March 28 meeting that year, they said as much.

“Even though this is probably one of the highest flood-prone regions in the entire state where a lot of people are involved, their systems are state of the art,” Commissioner Tom Moser said then. He discussed how other counties like Comal had moved to sirens and more modern flood warning systems.

“And the current one that we have, it will give – all it does is flashing light,” explained W.B. “Dub” Thomas, the county’s emergency management coordinator. “I mean all – that’s all you get at river crossings or wherever they’re located at.”

Kerr County already had signed on with a company that allowed its residents to opt in and get a CodeRED alert about dangerous weather conditions. But Thomas urged the commissioners court to strive for something more. Cell service along the headwaters of the Guadalupe near Hunt was spotty in the western half of Kerr County, making a redundant system of alerts even more necessary.

“I think we need a system that can be operated or controlled by a centralized location where – whether it’s the Sheriff’s communication personnel, myself or whatever, and it’s just a redundant system that will complement what we currently have,” Thomas said that year.

By the next year, officials had sent off its application for a $731,413 grant to FEMA to help bring $976,000 worth of flood warning upgrades, including 10 high water detection systems without flashers, 20 gauges, possible outdoor sirens, and more.

“The purpose of this project is to provide Kerr County with a flood warning system,” the county wrote in its application. “The System will be utilized for mass notification to citizens about high water levels and flooding conditions throughout Kerr County.”

But the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which oversees billions of FEMA dollars designed to prevent disasters, denied the application because they didn’t have a current hazard mitigation plan. They resubmitted it, news outlets reported, but by then, priority was given to counties that had suffered damage from Hurricane Harvey.

Political skepticism about a windfall

All that concern about warning systems seemed to fade over the next five years, as the political atmosphere throughout the county became more polarized and COVID fatigue frayed local residents’ nerves.

In 2021, Kerr County was awarded a $10.2 million windfall from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which Congress passed that same year to support local governments impacted by the pandemic. Cities and counties were given flexibility to use the money on a variety of expenses, including those related to storm-related infrastructure. Corpus Christi, for example, allocated $15 million of its ARPA funding to “rehabilitate and/or replace aging storm water infrastructure.” Waco’s McLennan County spent $868,000 on low water crossings.

Kerr County did not opt for ARPA to fund flood warning systems despite commissioners discussing such projects nearly two dozen times since 2016. In fact, a survey sent to residents about ARPA spending showed that 42% of the 180 responses wanted to reject the $10 million bonus altogether, largely on political grounds.

“I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.

“We don’t want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We’d like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”

When it was all said and done, the county approved $7 million in ARPA dollars on a public safety radio communications system for the sheriff’s department and county fire services to meet the community’s needs for the next 10 years, although earlier estimates put that contract at $5 million. Another $1 million went to sheriff’s employees in the form of stipends and raises, and just over $600,000 went towards additional county positions. A new walking path was also created with the ARPA money.

While much has been made of the ARPA spending, it’s not clear if residents or the commissioners understood at the time they could have applied the funds to a warning system. Current Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, and Thomas have declined repeated requests for interviews. Moser, who is no longer a commissioner, did not immediately respond to a Texas Tribune interview request.

Many Kerr County residents, including those who don’t normally follow every cog-turn of government proceedings, have now been poring over the county commissioners meetings this week including Ingram City Council member Raymond Howard. They’ve been digging into ARPA spending and other ways that the county missed opportunities to procure $1 million to implement the warning system commissioners wanted almost 10 years ago, and to prevent the devastating death toll from this week.

A week ago, Howard spent the early morning hours of July 4 knocking on neighbors’ doors to alert them to the flooding after he himself ignored the first two phone alerts on his phone in the middle of the night.

In the week since, the more he’s learned about Kerr County’s county inaction on a flood warning system, the angrier he has become.

“Well, they were obviously thinking about it because they brought it up 20 times since 2016 and never did anything on it,” Howard said, adding that he never thought to ask the city to install sirens previously because he didn’t realize the need for it. “I’m pretty pissed about that.”

Harvey Hilderbran, the former Texas House representative for Kerr County, said what he is watching play out in the community this week is what he’s seen for years in Texas: A disaster hits. There’s a rush to find out who’s accountable. Then outrage pushes officials to shore up deficiencies.

It’s not that Kerr County was dead set against making the area safer, Hilderbran said. Finding a way to pay for it is always where better ideas run aground, especially with a taxbase and leadership as fiscally conservative as Kerr’s.

“Generally everybody’s for doing something until it gets down to the details paying for it,” Hilderbran said. “It’s not like people don’t think about it … I know it’s an issue on their minds and something needs to be done.”

Howard, the 62-year-old Ingram city council member, came to Kerr County years ago to care for an ailing mother. Although he has now been diagnosed with stage four cancer, he said he intends to devote his life to make sure that his small two-mile town north of Kerrville has a warning system and he already knows where he’s going to put it.

“We’re going to get one, put it up on top of the tower behind the volunteer fire department,” he said. “It’s the thing I could do even if it’s the last thing I do …to help secure safety for the future.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-commissioners-flooding-warning/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The post Why Kerr County balked on a new flood warning system appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Right

This article presents a mostly factual and balanced overview of Kerr County’s flood warning system challenges within a politically conservative community. It highlights the county’s strong conservative stance on limited government spending and skepticism toward federal aid, reflecting typical right-leaning priorities such as fiscal conservatism and wariness of federal involvement. The coverage is careful to present multiple perspectives, including official statements and local residents’ concerns, without overt editorializing or ideological framing. The tone and content suggest an objective report focused on local governance dynamics rather than promoting a partisan agenda, though the conservative context is clearly emphasized.

SUMMARY: Devastating floods in Texas have caused significant damage and at least 120 deaths, with many still missing. Central Texas wildlife is struggling too. All Things Wild Rehabilitation in Georgetown is caring for over 500 animals affected by the floods, including orphaned, injured, and displaced wildlife. The nonprofit urgently needs donations, volunteers, and more land to continue its work. They have already admitted nearly as many animals in 2025 as all of last year, emphasizing the ongoing impact of extreme weather. All Things Wild provides extensive care and safely releases animals back into natural habitats. They encourage public support and offer guidance for reporting injured wildlife.

Read the full article

The post Georgetown wildlife rehab caring for more than 500 animals, many taken in after Texas floods appeared first on www.kxan.com

Avantika Gori is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Houston’s Rice University who is currently examining how to improve flood hazard detection and resilience in rural counties in Texas. Her three-year project began in 2025—so far it’s been funded with $1 million from the National Science Foundation. That’s only enough, she says, to conduct thorough research for two counties in South and West Texas. Several others were recently hit by devastating flooding in the Hill Country that killed more than 100 people. Gori spoke with the Texas Observer this week about deadly floods, what can be done to prevent the next one, and what she’s learned from her flood research. 

TO: This has been a really sad week. The Fourth of July weekend flood in the Hill Country will likely be the one of the deadliest in modern Texas history with more than 100 confirmed deaths and even more still missing. What makes the Hill Country a more dangerous place for flooding? 

There’s a combination of factors. The main reason why the Hill Country is known as “flash flood alley” is because of the terrain here. Because of all the hills, you have a steep ground surface. So when you get intense rainfall, the rain falls on the ground and it runs off quickly because of those steep slopes and it really just accumulates in rivers and becomes this deadly wave of water that travels downstream very fast. So that is what makes that area particularly dangerous in terms of floods.

Other parts of the state, the coastal areas, have floods but the terrain is more flat so people usually have time to find safety during heavy rainfall events.

More than 5 million Texans, or one in six people in the state, live or work in areas susceptible to flooding, per a draft of the first-ever statewide flood plan, which was mandated under a 2019 law passed after Hurricane Harvey. Do you know how many homes are vulnerable in the Hill Country? 

I don’t know. [The Texas Water Development Board] is currently remapping the floodplain, so presumably they’ve created updated flood models for all of the river basins. Some of them have already been released. I think that can be a really valuable resource because those are going to be updated with the latest data and conditions that we know of.

There have been conflicting reports about whether Kerr County and other counties in the Texas Hill Country already have warning systems and whether they were deployed. Does your work include examining local warning systems?

The National Weather Service has its own nationwide warning system, so they have their forecast models and then they issue either a flood watch, a flood warning, or, in this case, it ended up being a flood emergency. … So that system is in place.

I think one of the issues in the Hill Country is that cell reception can be pretty spotty. So I know there’s a lot of reports of people not necessarily getting those alerts. The question is whether a localized warning systems could be effective in some rural counties that would rely on local water level sensors, rain gauges, or some kind of modeling efforts that would trigger some kind of alert that is sent out to residents of the county. 

In general, those systems can be effective. But it’s not clear that even if that type of system had been in place, that the outcomes would have been materially different for this flood just because it was so extreme, the water levels rose so fast, and all of this occurred in the middle of the night when most people were sleeping. 

There have been reports, notably by the Houston Chronicle, that some of the hardest hit areas, including buildings at children’s camps, were in the 100-year-flood plain or even in the floodway of the river. Many people probably didn’t know that. Experts also say the nation’s floodplain maps are outdated.

In general, in most rural counties across the U.S., the flood maps are probably outdated. To remap the floodplain is a significant effort and rural counties don’t have the resources that urban counties do. … I know from work in other parts of Texas that in a lot of rural counties the flood maps can be decades old. The general public probably doesn’t interact with these flood maps ever … so I think it’s quite feasible that many people probably would not have known they were in a flood-prone area.

Tell me more about your current study of floods in rural Texas.

We’re working with one county in West Texas and one that’s on the coast, but they’re rural counties similar to the rural counties of the Hill Country in terms of resources. We’re working with Hudspeth County, which is close to El Paso, and Jim Wells County, which is on the southern Texas coast. Hudspeth is basically flooding from the Upper Rio Grande area; Jim Wells is mostly heavy rainfall from the Gulf storms that come in. 

This was initially work that done through colleagues at Texas A & M–the Digital Risk Infrastructure Program (DRIP)—where they were reaching out to many different rural counties across the state and trying to help them organize and consolidate and understand their data related to flooding to help them better understand their flood risk. 

From that initial work, these two counties requested the most assistance. We’re working on how can we improve the models and methods, and how could we evaluate potential solutions that could then alleviate some of that flood risk?

Extreme weather and very intense rainfall events are being reported more frequently in Texas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Hill Country gets an average rainfall of 15–34 inches per year. In this event, as much as 15 inches of rain fell in a matter of hours in some areas. How common is that kind of rainfall across Texas? 

In any part of the state that’s going to be an extreme amount of rainfall. Even in the east part of the state that’s more wet, to get 15 inches of rain in a day is a very, very extreme event and I think that is part of the challenge. It’s hard to find a very compelling trend if we zoom into one location. 

If we look generally across the state, the total amount of rainfall is not really changing but it is being condensed into more of these short, high-intensity events and then longer periods of drought. So we’re basically getting more drought and more floods because the rainfall is being condensed into these high intensity events.

Are there enough rain gauges to accurately measure increasing rainfall events  in the Hill Country and elsewhere in rural counties to help measure local risks?

In general there is a lot less flood data available in rural counties, whether that’s rainfall gauges, water level gauges [and] in some parts of the state, the weather radar rainfall coverage is pretty spotty so all of those things make it really challenging to understand the current flood risk at a specific location.

What other factors are you looking at in your current studies in rural Texas? What’s the goal?

We are trying to first understand, by collecting reports from residents, about where it has flooded in their community in the past and compare that with what the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) floodplain shows. So basically, trying to quantify how different is the current flooding compared to what the FEMA floodplain map shows. 

The second [goal] is to figure out how we can improve the flood map to better reflect the reality of flooding. So we’re going to collect new data specific to each community on the ground … and see if having a richer data set can improve our flood modeling … and then, given that these are resource-constrained communities, to find some realistic solutions that would be low-cost, easy to implement, and could potentially help alleviate some of the floods these communities have experienced in the past few years.

What could those solutions be? 

A low cost-flood warning system. Maybe deploying additional water-level or rain gauge sensors and then if rainfall or water exceeds an amount, triggering a warning or alert for residents. 

Other options are temporary or deployable flood barriers [since it’s often] not feasible to implement levies or hard structures because they’re very costly. There are increasingly new kinds of deployable temporary flood barriers that could be helpful. 

If you were advising the rural counties in the Hill Country on next steps, what would you suggest?

I think as much as possible, gathering and implementing systems that collect more data will really pay off in many ways, like first alerting people when there is flooding. But also helping us build better models. If we can enrich our dataset of flood observations then I think we can improve our ability to predict floods in the future and our ability to potentially mitigate them.

There certainly were a lot of camps and RV parks in the flood zone or in the 100-year floodplain, and there’s going to be debate about whether they should be moved.

It’s a challenging issue because people want to be by the river. It’s a beautiful natural resource we should use in a recreational sense. But maybe thinking about risk-averse decision making, there may be a lesson going forward about what actions to take given a future flood watch or future flood warning. Those spaces in the floodway can and should be used when it’s not flooding, but we need to know more about what are the situations [when] we need to evacuate from there. And we need to make those decisions in a timely way. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The post In the Hill Country and Beyond, Rural Texas Counties Lack Resources for Flood Detection appeared first on www.texasobserver.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This article presents a factual, research-focused discussion on flood hazards and resilience in rural Texas without evident ideological framing. It relies on expert insights from a university professor and cites government agencies, avoiding partisan language or policy advocacy beyond practical suggestions for improving flood warning systems and data collection. The tone is objective, emphasizing scientific understanding and community safety. While it touches on government efforts and challenges, it does not promote a political agenda or critique any political party, maintaining a neutral, informative stance.