The Texas Supreme Court on Friday refused to entertain the City of Houston’s appeal in a long-running legal dispute brought by two local engineers, forcing the already financially challenged city to spend extra money on street and drainage projects.
The engineers, Bob Jones and Allen Watson, who live in Houston, backed a 2010 and 2018 amendment to the city charter that required the flood-prone city to set aside 11.8 cents of every $100 in property taxes for a special fund for road and drainage repairs. In 2019, Jones and Watson filed a lawsuit against Houston’s mayor and city council members, claiming that they had unlawfully changed the drainage allocation to account for the city’s income cap, which caused a roughly $50 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 2020.
Last April, the Fourteenth Court of Appeals concurred with Jones and Watson, overturning a lower court’s ruling that the city’s revenue cap could no longer affect the drainage fund distribution. By refusing to consider the issue, the Texas Supreme Court essentially maintained that ruling.
Additionally, Jones stated on Friday that the decision “will almost immediately add $100 million to the available funds on an annual basis.”
“I think that’s going to cause the city to have to look through its budget and figure out what it’s going to do,” Jones stated. “We have a lot of streets and drainage facilities in the city that are in need of repair.”
An email requesting comment on Friday was not immediately answered by a representative for Houston Mayor John Whitmire.
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The city intends to fight the appeals court’s decision, Whitmire stated in April of last year, adding that he didn’t “believe drainage infrastructure should compete with public safety funding.”
Reaching a $1.5 billion settlement and contract with the city’s firemen, who had been without a labor contract for years under former Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration, was one of Whitmire’s first actions after taking office as mayor in early 2024.
Whitmire stated last April, “I do believe Houstonians would elect to do that through a court order that funds drainage infrastructure at the expense and sacrifice of public safety or quality of life services.” I do agree that the city has to invest more in addressing our infrastructure issues.
Jones pointed out on Friday that while less than 150,000 Houstonians supported Whitmire in his 2023 mayoral triumph over the late U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, roughly 350,000 voted in favor of the charter amendment that established the special drainage fund.
“The people of Houston overwhelmingly want their streets and drainage fixed,” Jones stated. “It’s terribly unfortunate that we had to go through this, and that the will of the voters was denied for five-and-a-half years until we won this suit.”
