Headed into the city’s next bond, San Antonio is creating a new scoring matrix that aims to take the politics out of determining which flood control projects get chosen for city funding.
The idea was born out of the 2022 bond committee, where those tapped to make such decisions suggested the city was putting too much weight on factors like the number of calls it receives from residents when prioritizing its flood mitigation efforts.
Going forward, the city’s Storm Water Advisory Board is working on a system that instead ranks projects through a system that awards points based on factors like how many residential properties it would take out of the floodplain and whether a project will improve roadway safety, where most flood-related deaths occur.
“It makes it a technical issue and kind of takes the squeaky wheel out of it,” said Monticello Park Neighborhood Association President Bianca Maldonado, who represents District 7 on the Storm Water Advisory Board.
On the heels of San Antonio’s deadliest flood year since 1988, this project that the board started roughly a year ago has taken on significantly more weight.
The city, county, state and federal government all have different scoring criteria and budgets for flood control. But policymakers largely agree that most neighborhood flood control projects are the result of years of lobbying and political capital from communities that have already been affected by a major flood.
“I waited tables at my parents’ restaurant off Fredericksburg Road in Five Points, which used to be ground zero for floods in San Antonio,” state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer (D-San Antonio) told residents seeking advice on how to push for such dollars after the June floods that left 13 people dead in San Antonio. “That neighborhood never gave up, if you go [there] today, it’s got tremendous flood control.”
But among the problems with that strategy, however, is that some of the communities at the highest risk haven’t yet lived through a deadly flood event. By the time one happens, the solution is likely years or decades away.
“Drainage projects are not inexpensive, they’re expensive, because we’re not only fixing the current problem,” the city’s Engineering Projects Manager Victoria Escobedo said at the advisory board meeting Tuesday night. “We’re also fixing what historically has been built upon many years of neglect, of not addressing it originally.”
A race against the clock
Huddled in the bowels of City Tower, the board was hustling to put the finishing touches on their new scoring matrix.
Its council- and mayor-appointed members bring all kinds of backgrounds in flood control, conservation and water engineering. Together they had plenty of varying perspectives on how factors like ease of completion or environmental impact should affect a project’s scoring.
“It’s a fundamental values system. What do you value?” said Suzanne Brennan Scott, a former executive at the San Antonio River Authority who holds one of the mayor’s appointed seats. “You value public safety, of course. But then after you meet those criteria, do you value environmental, natural resources? I think we do as a community.”
Underlying the discussion, however, was a sense of concern surrounding the prioritization of flood control dollars altogether.
The goal was to have the scoring matrix done before the city’s next bond program — one of the main sources of funding for local flood control and drainage projects — but the timing of that bond may be sooner than expected.
San Antonio typically operates on a five-year bond cycle, with the last $1.2 billion bond approved in 2022. They allow the city to borrow money against projections of future growth, and are used to fund all kinds of projects across the city, helping bring voters on board.
The 2022 bond program put nearly $170 million toward 23 flood control and drainage projects, which were selected by a bond committee of members appointed by council members, who started their work roughly a year out from the election.
This time around, city leaders have said they want the next bond election to come sooner than the five-year cycle, because they need it to fund roughly $220 million in infrastructure related to Project Marvel, such as a parking garage, streets and sidewalks. At one point they discussed even holding it in May 2026.
“I am getting a little nervous about us being behind the curve, if y’all are being asked to have projects ranked and ready to go,” Scott said to city staff at the board meeting.
City staff didn’t have a clear answer on the timing of the next bond, but Public Works Director Art Reinhardt, who just stepped into the role this month, said the City Council is expected to discuss it in the coming weeks.
Committee members made plans to attempt to wrap up the scoring criteria in their next meeting, having already bumped this one up on the schedule in an effort to hurry things along.
At the same time, an August financial analysis projected that the next bond capacity could also be much lower due to slowed economic growth, with about $500 million to divide up for the various projects instead of $1.2 billion in 2022.
That’s given members of the Storm Water Advisory Board even more concern about what resources will be available once the projects are ranked.
“I share the same concern … about where we factor in,” Maldonado chimed in after Scott. “We are life safety. And if the city is going to pursue a bond for the marvelous project downtown, what does that mean to everything else?”
