As rescue and cleanup efforts continue in Central Texas, questions have arisen about how Kerr County and other flood-drenched areas could have been more prepared, and what could be done to prevent or prepare for emergencies in the future.
State Rep. Joe Moody represents El Paso in the Legislature. He co-authored House Bill 13, which would have created a grant program for emergency communications systems around the state. It passed the House, but not the Senate.
Moody says the bill would have taken a long-term approach to emergency preparedness for counties that cannot afford the emergency systems they need. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What did House Bill 13 hope to achieve with regard to emergency preparedness?
Joe Moody: Well, the concept behind House Bill 13 was to bring the heft and the weight and the power of the state government and the state coffers to those local governments who don't have the resources to put in certain infrastructure. We're hearing those concerns out of Kerr County. These are things we could have done, but we didn't have the money to do.
And so, where government can do good is to use its resources to be able to bring that to reality for communities like Kerr County, or think about the wildfires in the Panhandle – to communities like that, as well.
So the idea was to build that infrastructure over time so that the different emergencies that can come up in different regions of the state were able to prepare for them better, were able to mitigate them or, in some cases, maybe be able to prevent them on the whole.
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This bill had bipartisan support in the House. Another lead author was Ken King, a Republican whose district, as you mentioned, was affected by those Panhandle wildfires. Were you surprised it didn't make inroads in the Senate?
I mean, it's one of those items that was worked on in a bipartisan fashion in the House. There was a small fraction of members that voted against it, but I was certainly surprised it didn't move in the Senate.
Now, all that being said, the tragedies that occurred in Central Texas certainly wouldn't have been impacted by the passage of that bill, but these are always things that I think the people that we represent expect us to be looking into the future to prevent. This is the forward-looking work that we can always do.
And there's a throughline here. I mentioned the wildfires, but think about Winter Storm Uri. Think about the crisis communication issues in Uvalde, in the shooting – a man-made tragedy. So there are problems that persist through all of those different emergencies.
And that's what House Bill 13 really exists to do, is find those throughlines, figure out how to solve them and partner with our local governments so that they have the resources they need to respond accordingly.
So yeah, it's something that I am certainly hopeful that our new opportunity and special session is going to end in a different way, but I was a little bit surprised that we weren't able to get that across the finish line in a regular session.
Well, let's talk about this upcoming special session. Gov. Greg Abbott has now said response to the Hill Country floods would be at the top of the agenda [for the session, that is] set to start in two weeks. What do you hope that looks like?
Look at it in two ways. There is the immediate need for the families, for the communities that are devastated right now. What can we do for them now? What are the emergency systems to put in place around the state to help create a barrier from this happening again? What can we do today in the here and now?
And then there's forward-looking, and I think that's where our concept like HB 13 comes back into play. What are we putting in place to prepare to mitigate, or even avoid, the next tragedy, whether manmade or not? What are we doing to improve those crisis communications and our operability of our systems so that we can avoid these problems?
Texas is a state that can and should solve these problems. We can do both. We can look at the here and now and look at future.
And I think also part of the special session needs to be understanding the minute-by-minute of what happened in Central Texas. Are there things that we need? What are the things that we need to learn going forward? If there were failures along the way, what were they, how can they be avoided? And you have to continue to learn from those things.
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Do you expect some colleagues who opposed House Bill 13, or weren't motivated to get it passed so urgently, will be more receptive to it now?
Yeah, I think the conversation certainly is different now. Like I said, there wasn't a lot of opposition in the House to it. So I don't anticipate there being any issues moving a bill like that if the governor puts it on the call through the House.
And I think there is an urgency among a lot of members now to look at the tragedy in front of us and work to solve the issues related to that. And we absolutely should.
What we shouldn't walk away without doing is looking at other issues that we've seen in the past and find the commonalities between them and put structures in place – like HB 13 – to be able to prevent those things in the future. We can do both and we absolutely should.
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