Houston Mayor, Texas Land Commissioner Forge New Bonds

On his first day in office, Mayor John Whitmire received a call from Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham.

His message? “We want to work with the city of Houston,” Whitmire explained at an April 17 council meeting.

Whitmire shared the contents of the call at the start of Buckingham’s visit to City Hall — a trip largely intended as a reset of the relationship, and one that the land commissioner was quick to note herself.

“It’s wonderful to be invited here, because the last time I tried to raise awareness, I was disinvited,” Buckingham told council members.

After years of verbal and legal battles between the former mayor and the former land commissioner, Whitmire and Buckingham appear ready to usher in a new era of cooperation between their new offices. With experts predicting an active hurricane season in the Gulf, the potential for improved relations between the city and the state agency could come at just the right time.

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Every time a disaster hits Texas – whether it’s a wildfire, winter storm or hurricane – it’s the state’s General Land Office that retains primary responsibility to distribute federal funds among cities and counties requesting statewide assistance. The agency is also responsible for ensuring that the cities and counties they award funds to spend them properly.

But despite the rhetorical reset, Houston remains on the outside when it comes to Hurricane Harvey funds. The city is still not expected to receive a single dollar of the $4.3 billion in federal funds approved for flood mitigation after the 2017 storm.

Houston’s history with the GLO has been rocky since Harvey. After the storm, the GLO, then led by George P. Bush, was charged with distributing federal funds for home repairs and flood mitigation.

Bush’s office, at the time, claimed that Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration had mismanaged housing funds awarded to it and was determined not to provide the city with funds for flood mitigation. The city argued that the GLO made the process of applying for and receiving funds difficult and called the state agency an overbearing partner.

Since then, Buckingham has taken over the GLO office and Whitmire has taken over the mayor’s office. The two men have a long-standing relationship as former colleagues who worked together in the Texas Senate, and the new mayor said that relationship will only continue in the days to come.

“There will be strong collaboration with the GLO and our state partners,” Whitmire told the Chronicle.

Federal hurricane relief funds are generally earmarked for two purposes: recovery efforts to cover the cost of rebuilding, and flood mitigation projects, intended to make communities more resilient to future storms.

Houston received a total of $1.3 billion to rebuild and renovate homes destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, including $427 million earmarked for rebuilding homes damaged by the hurricane and $350 million to build affordable apartments.

HURRICANE HARVEY: Houston and Harris County have requested $1.3 billion in flood aid. The GLO offer: $0.

But these housing stimulus funds quickly became mired in controversy. The GLO sued the city in 2020 to regain control of the city’s entire $1.3 billion portfolio, and both sides ultimately agreed to eliminate most of the city’s program responsible for reconstruction and renovation of houses.

The GLO then came back and withdrew more money from the city, claiming it had failed to meet spending benchmarks, and the city argued the state agency had not seen the progress that she had realized. Houston ended up with $664 million, about half of its original allocation.

And the conflict was not limited to housing funds. Even though the GLO received more than $4 billion for federal mitigation measures to prepare cities and counties for future storms, the state agency decided not to give any cash to Harris County nor in Houston – who were expecting $1 billion each.

Regional leaders, like Commissioner Adrian Garcia, speculated that the move was politically motivated. The GLO, however, maintained that the application process had been fair.

Harris County later received $750 million from the GLO after a bipartisan outcry and a federal finding that the decision violated the Civil Rights Act. Houston, however, is still not ready to receive funds.

When Buckingham took office in 2023, she made clear that she did not intend to deviate from the post-Harvey plan that denied mitigation funds to Houston, and that she would continue efforts that eliminated half of the city’s housing reconstruction funds.

But once Whitmire was sworn in, Buckingham wrote a letter to the new administration offering to help the city spend the rest of its rebuilding aid on building more housing. The city has about $151 million in federal grants remaining.

As a show of good faith, Buckingham’s office conceded a small portion of the stimulus funds for a property where 120 single-family homes are planned on the site of a former business park near NRG Stadium.

At the April 17 council meeting, Buckingham said the GLO was willing to extend the time the city had to build on the land, just as the city was preparing to abandon the program before the deadline.

With GLO granting a HUD extension to use the funds on April 17, the city may be able to build single-family homes on the Stella Link Road property. The city started with a $60 million budget for its single-family home program and has so far invested $44 million in other housing projects. Housing Director Mike Nichols told the Chronicle that the project’s price tag has not yet been fully determined, but he expects federal dollars will be able to cover the cost.

But expanding GLO does not guarantee the viability of the program. The city will have to prove it will build and sell the homes on the property before the GLO sets a new deadline to spend the money. The rest of the city’s recovery portfolio, including efforts to build apartment complexes and buy up flood-prone properties, will have to be spent before the initial deadlines of August 2024 and February 2025.

When asked how the GLO and the city were working to rebuild their relationship, spokespeople for Whitmire and Buckingham circled back to the two men’s April presser.

“The recent press conference I held with GLO Commissioner Buckingham to help some Houstonians post-Harvey exemplifies the strong partnership I am building between the city and state,” Whitmire said in a statement. “We are former colleagues in the state Senate and she understands we represent the same people.”

That rekindling of relations will likely fall on the shoulders of Whitmire’s intergovernmental relations chief, Joshua Sanders, who told the Chronicle that the mayor’s office communicates regularly with the GLO.

“Our enhanced relationship will result in increased efficiency in providing much-needed support to Houston residents,” Sanders said.

Brittany Eck, Buckingham’s spokeswoman, called Buckingham’s pre-existing relationship with Whitmire “valuable.”

“Not only do they want to work together, but they also have an existing relationship where they can pick up the phone and call each other and have that conversation,” Eck said.