Texas

Commissioners' Court Regular Session 01/09/17 Discussing the recommended warning system

COMMISSIONER MOSER: The cost of that whole thing is going to be like 976 thousand dollars. That's a lot of money. All of it, and the reason we're here today and moving so quickly is that there is a FEMA grant that's available until as long as we apply by January the 20th.

JUDGE POLLARD: Which is when President Obama goes out of office.

(Laughter.)

JUDGE POLLARD: Well, the reason I mention that is because he authorized this particular thing, and it's going to --

MS. KIRBY: It's a coincidence.

COMMISSIONER MOSER: Going on the record with that it's a coincidence. And so there has to be a presidential declaration of disaster to be able to have these kinds of funds available. So it goes away just so happens to be when he leaves office.

COMMISSIONER MOSER: So we've talked about, you know one of the things we said sirens and we said we don't want sirens, too many many people said they did not want sirens when they had these -- when we had these gatherings. Code Red, and I don't know if Dub wants to chime in on this, but Code Red is the same that's going to get information to a lot of people; not to everybody, okay. One of the things that we'll do is identify a point of contact in all of the camps, we won't communicate with everybody in the camp, but we have a point of contact at the camp so that they can disseminate people within -- to people within the camp, like during the summer when kids are there, or to RV parks. Now, if the RV parks want to have a siren themself when something goes up that's up to them. That's not part of our thing. So getting the information to the public is the end item of this whole thing. The first thing is sense a flood, then communicate that information to the local authorities, to the right authorities, and then for them to have a system by with which to disseminate the information to the public.

SHERIFF HIERHOLZER: The only thing I have to remind people, unfortunately, I guess I'm one of the ones that – Harley maybe has been around here to see some very devastating floods and quite a bit of loss of life. No matter what we do it's going to be up to the public, okay. The notification is great. I think the -- just the markers, the posts at the crossing is one thing, but it actually oughta state that at that level that your car may wash off, get people's attention at that crossing. The only other thing is, and as Bob can attest to, most of the time it has been informal where we call people. Unfortunately, the time we had the most devastating one down on the east end of the County down at the camps, I was working that night, spent 72 hours pulling kids out of fences. But we call people, we called camps, they made the decision that they thought they could beat that ride, and then that no matter what we do and no matter what we install there's going to be loss of life. It's educating people.

COMMISSIONER REEVES: And I will say and, Sheriff, you can correct me if I'm off base on this, the camps have had a very good system of letting down river if there's a rise, they're phoning their competitors or colleagues down river and letting them know what happened. It's informal as you said, but it's been a very good system to let them know over time.

SHERIFF HIERHOLZER: Right. The camps and they do, they notify each other, we notify them, they notify -- there's a lot of informal things that really do work real well. It's not totally those unless they try to get them out too quick in trying to beat it. Because this river can come up in a instant, we all know that with the drainage. But it will go down just as quick if they just hold tight with what they've got. But the whole key is just getting people that are traveling up here from somewhere --

COMMISSIONER REEVES: That's my concern is ones that don't live here.

COMMISSIONER MOSER: That's everybody's concern.

JUDGE POLLARD: So this is kind of an offer, or to see if it's accepted by and also agreed to by UGRA and the City.

COMMISSIONER MOSER: Correct.

JUDGE POLLARD: And if they don't then where are we with this?

COMMISSIONER MOSER: If they don't then we just forget the whole project.

JUDGE POLLARD: Just dead in the water.

COMMISSIONER MOSER: Dead in the water, right. It's dead in the water.

COMMISSIONER REEVES: Question --

COMMISSIONER MOSER: Or the pun for the Flood Warning System.

JUDGE POLLARD: Dead in the water.

After failing to secure a grant, they continued to kick the can down the road.

2021 rolls around and they have over 5 mil in ARPA funds in their bank and wind up with a grand total of over 10 mil.

Commissioners' Court Regular Session 10/25/21 discussion of communication systems

COMMISSIONER LETZ: Well, I think that's good. I just think that -- you know, I'd like to get an idea of what the Sheriff's radar systems are going to cost. I mean I just don't want to send -- go out and get public input on something and then us just not be able to follow up because we have a priority that's different and we have additional information.

JUDGE KELLY: Well, but let me just explain. What all of these are intentioned to do is to initiate the education system. We need to get the Court educated. We need to get the public educated. Everybody knows that we have over $5 million sitting in our bank account that the Federal Government sent us for these ARPA funds. And they're not really grants, they're funds.

…

MRS. LAVENDER: And as the Judge said, there's a huge category. There's a bunch of things that you can spend the money or -- or secure the money to spend. And when we use the term grant, grant is not really what this is. It's just funding that's been made available through this American Rescue Plan Act. It doesn't require a match. It doesn't require, you know, that kind of structure. But it does have strings attached. It's not free money.

…

COMMISSIONER LETZ: And that's my concern, Judge. My concern is that from my understanding what the -- well, I won't say LCRA because I know what their number is. The number from the Sheriff's Department, the number from internal communications, we're already over 5 million dollars, so I don't want to go out to the public requesting -- we have no money to do it.