Governor Greg Abbott’s first special session is coming to an abrupt end after House Democrats’ fled the state to protest the Texas GOP’s cynical exploitation of the deadly Fourth of July Hill Country floods to enact redistricting that would, at President Donald Trump’s orders, rig the maps to deliver Republicans up to five new seats in Texas. Upon adjournment Friday, Abbott said he will immediately call another special session with the same agenda.
Before decamping to Illinois and other blue states, Democrats argued Governor Abbott’s emergency powers already grant him the ability to unilaterally enact flood relief for the tragedy-stricken Hill Country. In a July 21 letter, House Democrats called on House Speaker Dustin Burrows to prioritize flood response before any other business, arguing the GOP is deliberately holding flood relief hostage to Trump’s redistricting plan by putting the maps first on the agenda. Republicans have in turn attacked Democrats for abandoning their posts—and Hill Country flood victims.
In fact, the Texas GOP has had years to prioritize such critical disaster-response legislation but has instead refused to engage with hundreds of such proposed bills to better prepare for disasters and ensure more resilience to climate change. Such bills are once again going ignored as part of a longer pattern of climate-reactive discussions at the Legislature in which Republicans pull their collective fingers out of their ears only to offer piecemeal relief in the aftermath of deadly disaster.
Democratic state Representative Ron Reynolds, for instance, refiled a bill—one he’s carried for several years now—in the first special session aimed at creating a Climate Change Impact Assessment Council to study the impacts and cumulative costs of climate change on the state and measures that would mitigate flooding, erosion, drought, and wildfires. Democratic Representatives Erin Zwiener and Mary González likewise filed bills in the 89th regular session directing the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Texas State University to undertake similar climate impact studies.
“This effort of some of these bills goes back quite a ways, even back to when Eric Johnson was in the House,” said Public Citizen Texas Director Adrian Shelley, referring to the now-Republican mayor of Dallas who served as a Democrat in the Texas House until 2019. Johnson filed a similar bill as early as 2015 that would have mandated certain state agencies draw up strategic plans every two years to address climate vulnerabilities.
It’s just one example in a long history of bills planning for extreme weather that have been effectively dead on arrival in the Capitol. “It’s been an open secret in the Legislature for a while that if your bill has the word ‘climate’ in the caption, it’s not getting a hearing,” Shelley told the Texas Observer. “That has been true for many sessions.”
The fate of regular session’s HB 2618, authored by state Representative Rafael Anchía, a Dallas Democrat, underscores Shelley’s point. That bill would have directed several agencies including TCEQ, the Department of Public Safety, the Public Utility Commission, and the Texas A&M Forest Service, among others, to draw up “severe weather” adaptation plans every other year. The word “climate” is absent from the text. Anchía got two Republicans to sign on as joint authors, and the bill passed the House with bipartisan support (though it ultimately died in the Senate).
The word “climate” has also been missing from important disaster-response hearings. The phrase “climate change” did not come up once during the House Investigative Committee on the Panhandle Wildfires hearings near Amarillo last year, nor did it appear in the committee’s final report, which nonetheless noted the especially hot, windy, and dry conditions that fueled the flames in February.
But things may be starting to change—ever so slightly—this time around. The Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, who is tasked with studying state climate impacts, brought up climate change up during his recent testimony before the Senate and House Select Committees on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding in Kerrville in the context of his work with the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) to map trends in extreme rainfall and estimate future risks.
Nielsen-Gammon made several recommendations to the committee, including improving monitoring of air masses arriving from both the Gulf and Mexico, improving coordination among state agencies regarding longer-range forecasts, and partnering with the Texas Division of Emergency Management to develop a real-time weather app. He and other meteorologists from the TWDB hope to form a technical committee to develop the recommendations into legislation for the next regular session.
But other recommendations from the same state agency Nielsen-Gammon is partnering went ignored—until July 4. TWDB’s first-ever statewide flood plan, adopted in August 2024, outlined at least nine specific legislative proposals, including one to prioritize and expand “funding for implementing flood early warning systems on a regional scale, with emphasis on rural areas.”
That policy recommendation, along with those aimed at maintaining the Flood Infrastructure Fund and improving low-water crossing and dam and levee safety, are largely precautionary and were the product of an intensive outreach process.
Still, as of now, the primary flood response bills in the special session currently address only one of those recommendations: the installation of early-warning systems. The joint committee is working to hone an interoperability and disaster-response bill that largely resembles House Bill 13 from the regular session—which died in the Senate—that would have created a similar interoperability council to administer a statewide disaster-response plan and grant program for counties to build new warning and communications systems.
Beyond that, at least one other bill filed in the first special looked to be directly modeled on the TWDB’s recommendation to authorize counties to collect drainage fees to fund flood mitigation and regulate land for flood management—an issue that has proved central to the July 4 catastrophe, with Camp Mystic being just one of at least 12 camps built in or near hazardous flood areas in unincorporated areas.
A number of other climate mitigation and resilience bills—almost entirely authored by Democrats—went ignored in the regular session and surely would suffer a similar fate in any special session, too. Those included bills from state Representative Jon Rosenthal that would have eliminated routine flaring at fracked gas wells and directed the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) to implement weatherization rules for fracked gas facilities. Another measure that would have required state agencies and higher educational institutions to lower energy consumption 5 percent over six years passed the House and died in the Senate.
Other bills took a proactive approach to disaster response, including measures from state Representative Christina Morales, a Houston Democrat, to create an alert system to notify nearby residents of toxic chemical releases from manufacturing facilities. At least four bills were filed with the aim of requiring backup generators at nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
While the GOP-dominated Legislature did approve measures to secure the state’s drought-stricken water supply during the regular session, lawmakers simultaneously passed laws that would supercharge climate impacts by delivering another $5 billion to the Texas Energy Fund to support the building of new fracked gas plants and fast-tracking the permitting process for liquified natural gas terminals.
Climate justice advocates remain concerned that another bill to bar all political subdivisions from using taxpayer dollars to fund environmental projects—like pollution reduction, and clean air programs—reared its head again in the first special session.
In fact, the only bill ever passed by the Texas Legislature that explicitly references climate change was a 2023 measure aimed at shutting down the adoption of climate policies by municipalities.
“I wish that we could just focus on what is important to Texans. Nobody asked for redistricting,” Public Citizen’s Shelley said. “One man asked for it.”
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