Unknown Speaker 0:02
By

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dying.

Unknown Speaker 0:07
Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Sabine regional flood Planning Group. Today is February 23 2026

Unknown Speaker 0:17
we’ll go ahead and call the meeting to order. I have 134 apologize. I think I was a little bit hearty for getting here. So

Unknown Speaker 0:30
with that, we’ll move on to agenda item two. Roll Call Jeff

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bill, Bruce,

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Johnny Trahan here.

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Jim mullanes Here,

Unknown Speaker 0:46
dad McKee

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woman now.

Unknown Speaker 0:53
Doug Manning is here, Nikki Davis,

Unknown Speaker 1:02
Alvin Bradley,

Unknown Speaker 1:07
Michelle Falcon here, Travis Williams here, Jeff Rogers, rd Griffin here, Ross Gordon, I’m here. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 1:20
Hey. Present. Don voting members, Kathy Salceda,

Unknown Speaker 1:29
Daniel Martinez,

Unknown Speaker 1:34
Andrea Sanders,

Unknown Speaker 1:38
Bob Baker,

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Trey Walker, Watson and

Unknown Speaker 1:46
Katie cosler

Unknown Speaker 1:49
Here,

Unknown Speaker 1:52
Lone Ranger. All

Unknown Speaker 1:56
right, I’m just looking through the list for the people who are online as well. We’ve got a phone number, a, 903-844-9652,

Unknown Speaker 2:07
that ring a bell for anybody?

Unknown Speaker 2:21
Thank you. We’ll

Unknown Speaker 2:35
go ahead and move on to

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the next. Agenda item public comments. Agenda Item three, is there anybody online or in person today that would like to make any public comments

Unknown Speaker 2:48
that would be behind?

Unknown Speaker 2:54
Hearing none. We’ll move on. So discussion approval of minutes

Unknown Speaker 2:59
previously circulated, you should have the board members should receive the minutes for the December 15, 2025, meeting.

Unknown Speaker 3:08
They’re also included in your packet. Are there any comments or changes or anything on the minutes as presented?

Unknown Speaker 3:18
Hearing, none. I would entertain a motion to approve. The December 15, 2025, minutes

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second.

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Got a motion from Johnny a second from Michelle,

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all those in favor, say Aye.

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Any opposed? Say, nay.

Unknown Speaker 3:42
Motion passes, all right.

Unknown Speaker 3:46
Agenda Item five, update from the chair. I’ll have anything other than in your package. You should see

Unknown Speaker 3:54
kind of the invoices to date that we’ve asked that SRA has paid on behalf of the group for reimbursement. Matt, I think everything is in line right now. I don’t know that we’ve received any updated invoices from you guys, from freak Nichols, at this time again, just real quick. Initial balance was 2.1 5 million, and

Unknown Speaker 4:15
we’ve got a balance of 1,557,000

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left. So

Unknown Speaker 4:21
if y’all have any, get them or review them, get them passed through. But I think water zone board’s been much quicker, as well as our internal process of getting everything turned around and getting all things as soon as possible. So

Unknown Speaker 4:35
with that, I’ll move on to Agenda Item six update from the Texas Water Development Board, Amy. I’ll turn it over to you.

Unknown Speaker 4:46
Good morning, everybody. The

Unknown Speaker 4:49
technical memorandum was due to the board on January 7. We issued administrative completeness reviews, and staff have notified. It notified.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
With our disputes, deed to task five day, we will provide informal comments in summer 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:06
we posted an SME for small communities, frequently asked question document on the second cycle flood planning website. Topics include background information, timeline and general questions. The ordered list of SMEs for the Texas Water Development Board to perform. Perform under task IB is due on or before March 26 2026 prior to submission, regional flood planning groups should approve the FME list as well as the metric user determines following rural communities with limited resources were the FM ease before and by twdb, a reminder an email was sent on January 20 the

Unknown Speaker 5:41
scope of work and community affirmation forms for all FME s on the FMI list performed by the Texas Water Development Board is due on April 24 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:50
a reminder, the goal of task 4c performance of flood management evaluations is for regional flood planning groups to perform a subset of potential FM es included in task for a and in doing so, identify and evaluate additional fmps or FMS is that could be recommended under task five A, you have flexibility in showing which identified FME should be formed under task 4c and to prove that list at a regular regional flood planning group meeting, we contracted with the Texas A and M Agra Life Extension Service to create a model for calculating economic losses due to flooding events on agricultural lands. This project is now complete, and the tool and the guidance document have been published on our website,

Unknown Speaker 6:32
and that’s all I have. Let me know if you have any questions.

Unknown Speaker 6:38
All right, does anybody have any questions for Katie at this

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time. Katie the FIU piece for the FIS, 2627

Unknown Speaker 6:48
the webinar that was scheduled through Friday was canceled. Can you provide any update on when that FIA when we can expect the

Unknown Speaker 7:00
FIU P to be released.

Unknown Speaker 7:04
There isn’t like that email was the update? Like, we don’t have it ready yet, but hopefully soon, like, we’re scheduling these webinars for a reason, so hopefully it will be pretty soon that it will be posted for public comment.

Unknown Speaker 7:17
Thank you. Bye.

Unknown Speaker 7:24
Any other questions,

Unknown Speaker 7:27
not we’ll move on to Agenda Item seven for Doug Manning nature’s regional Flood Safety Group for tour. Sure attended the natures meeting last week. We went through and talked about all the projects that we were going to submit they were going to submit. They had quite a bit of a discussion on nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 7:52
We touched briefly on the separate pot of money that Matt and I were actually discussing before the meeting for the small rural communities. And that was explained to the board as well. And so

Unknown Speaker 8:06
about it, I feel like we, there are a meeting ahead of us. Mostly there they

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got a

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good definition of rural communities.

Unknown Speaker 8:18
They seem to, they seem to. That gave me a little concern, because something’s vague. It’s normally for a reason. It always gives me some concern.

Unknown Speaker 8:31
Okay, thank you, Doug. We’ll move on to Agenda Item eight,

Unknown Speaker 8:36
presentation of nature based solutions. Allison, I will turn it over to you. Okay, thank you, Travis, so you guys are all familiar with me, but I’m here with Justin comes back. He is the Nature Conservancy.

Unknown Speaker 8:50
We have been working principles in the Nature Conservancy have been working together to create a guidance manual on nature based solutions. Ultimate goal is to teach communities, non elected government officials, city engineers, county engineers, regional flood planning groups, what nature based solutions are and how they can be used for flood resilience. Our focus is much more flood resilience, flood mitigation, less so water quality. They absolutely have a water quality benefit, and a lot has been written with that angle, but the intention of our guidance is to provide more information on the flood mitigation benefits that each big solution can provide. So

Unknown Speaker 9:37
I

Unknown Speaker 9:39
am having trouble with my my zoom, so I won’t be able to share my screen. If you can follow along in your packet. We’ll walk through together and Allison, I’ll stop jumping. Just a note there. I remember there was a couple meetings back, maybe about eight to 10 months back, where Pat had actually asked about these. I know y’all been working on some updates. So.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Just kind of follow up yes to his

Unknown Speaker 10:03
request, I guess, at that point in time as well. And there was a conference we were going to try to end the scheduling didn’t work out.

Unknown Speaker 10:12
We’ve

Unknown Speaker 10:13
been talking about this for a while. We have

Unknown Speaker 10:17
it’s, I mean, ultimately, there is a ton that has been written. Thank you. There’s a ton that’s been written about this topic, and our goal has been to synthesize a lot of the research make it easier to understand in more of a flow of project development. So go ahead and get started.

Unknown Speaker 10:44
This

Unknown Speaker 10:46
is you? Okay, wonderful. Thank you. One time I can give it over,

Unknown Speaker 10:51
okay, oh, wonderful, I’ll have you Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:10
Have your mouth. You

Unknown Speaker 11:16
know,

Unknown Speaker 11:21
sorry about that. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:28
Okay, all right, thanks for the intro, Allison, nice to meet all of you happy to be here. Thank you for your time. I’m going to talk a little bit about the purpose of this. Allison touched on it briefly. Go into a little bit more detail, offer a very brief definition. Folks have been talking about this for a long time. We want to offer some clarity on what we’re talking about today and why this project is happening. I’ll hand it over to Alison and talk a little bit about the publishing schedule, what’s actually in this document, and how to promote it through your efforts here and local communities and through the regional flood planning and just a few key takeaways in there.

Unknown Speaker 12:07
So one of the purposes of this document stemmed from the realization that a lot of folks aren’t really familiar with what nature based approaches to flood mitigation are. The Texas Water Development Board looked at the state, the first day flood plan, they saw some

Unknown Speaker 12:23
uncertainties in what these are, and only saw eight nature based solutions project in the plan. Now that’s a little bit of misleading. Those are just eight projects that were in the plan that were identified as nature based solutions, but if you recall in those tables, there’s a column that says, percent nature based there were, I think, 212 or 202 and 12 or 202

Unknown Speaker 12:44
total projects that had a non zero number or percent nature, based by cost, right? So these are ideas that are out there that are in the plan. We’re trying to build this up, provide this manual for that purpose, to increase the number of these projects and future plans, future regional plans, and across the state. So

Unknown Speaker 13:03
what are the specific goals of this project? Nature based solutions aren’t new. They’ve been around for a long time. We’ve been using nature to solve problems for longer than anybody in this room has been around.

Unknown Speaker 13:15
There’s a lot written on nature based solutions. There’s a lot written on that topic, but there are less things focused specifically on using them to address flood risk.

Unknown Speaker 13:27
There’s also a lot, not as many, that are written specifically for the state of Texas. So the purpose of that is to take all of that research, pull it together, get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense for the Texas context, and also focus on that flood risk resilience aspect of it, right? The types of projects that are used in nature to solve the flood problem put those in that plan. The second goal was to provide some strategies and tools, right? These are hands on things. These are things that communities can look to use to

Unknown Speaker 13:55
kind of overcome some of the challenges or the barriers that are associated with a new approach or a new way of thinking about,

Unknown Speaker 14:02
you know, addressing our flood problems,

Unknown Speaker 14:05
those barriers and challenges weren’t just pulled from some academic article, from some textbook or, you know, just from our heads. We surveyed. We had a statewide survey that had close to 300 responses to it. We talked with folks who work at academic institutions, and public agencies and state city offices that have worked on these types of projects and have a lot of experience on the coast, inland, dry areas, wet areas of the state, you name it, across the state. We talked to those folks and as well as like looking at the research, right? What is the Army Corps of Engineers said about this? What have other groups said about these types of approaches, and we pulled that together to, you know, try and structure this document about addressing those barriers and challenges to these projects. And then three, we want to, we want this manual to support the implementation of these types of projects at the local level and through regional flood planning. So we’re actually talking to every regional flood planning group. And.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
About this manual, try to highlight it and then talk about some ways to move through that

Unknown Speaker 15:07
intended users. Allison covered this. You all local government officials, city engineers, floodplain managers, are a big one,

Unknown Speaker 15:15
practitioners and developers, right? We are targeting this at a local official, but this will also have importance for people who are actually out there, building and developing properties, putting projects on the ground, developing those types of things as a certified floodplain manager. I’m particularly interested in this because floodplain managers have been talking about maintaining the beneficial use of floodplains for a very long time, longer than the term nature based solutions has been around. So that is one of those key critical ways in which we can reduce flood risk now, as well as not add to flood risk in the future. And that’s also a nature based solution here. So that’s another audience for this manual.

Unknown Speaker 15:55
I’ve talked about this a lot.

Unknown Speaker 15:58
There are a lot of long definitions for nature based solutions, most of them, I fall asleep while trying to read them. I kind of lose interest. In short, you can just think about it as using nature to solve the problem, right? Using nature is some kind of natural process to solve an issue that we have. And again, we’re focused on flood risk here, but the added benefit of these types of projects that you get other co benefits, right? Our communities have flooding issues, but they’re not the only issues we’re dealing with. We deal with water quality issues. We deal with lack of access to green space and air quality issues. We deal with public health and community health issues. Water supply issues is a big one in the state. Drought hits us. Sometimes, flood hits us. Sometimes. These are the types of solutions, the types of projects that can help chip away at multiple problems while addressing that primary issue of flooding to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 16:48
Next slide, please.

Unknown Speaker 16:53
So when we talk about this, we’re very much aware we’re not starting with a blank slate. We have a lot of existing infrastructure. We also know that it’s not always going to be the right answer in the right place, but the important thing is to think about this in a planning stage, in the modeling stage, to see where are these opportunities, where it can be put in these types of projects. For example, I have noticed in your plan, you have a couple of sections on property acquisition and reclaiming that space for floodplain storage. That’s great, right? You need to avoid, you know, you have a large usable space. If you take a group of properties that are all voluntarily, you know, coming in to get themselves removed from that flood risk. And you can create an asset for a community with that. Or you can create a natural space, right? You can put, create a place to store water, slow it down, infiltrate it.

Unknown Speaker 17:40
You know, that’s not an entirely natural approach. That’s more of a hybrid approach, right? It takes some engineering to recreate and reconstruct that floodplain area, but in some areas, you’re not going to have that option. You’re constrained by space, you already have existing infrastructure, you have that levy that you have an entire city depending on, right? This isn’t going to be the right solution in all of those right places, but you have to think about this as that spectrum. Where do we capture the most value for a project, not necessarily looking at the cost right? We only have to get the 1.01 to be a benefit to be cost effective. Could we be more cost effective? Could we get more value out of that project, thinking about these types of projects, next slide please, just

Unknown Speaker 18:21
a couple of examples. And we use these because the two most common types of example, types of projects in the state plan is channel improvements. So largely, we kind of think about, you know, Grease lightning racing in the movie Greece, right? That trapezoidal channel that we’re so familiar with all over the place, and then the other is a detention pond, right? This is an example of what those might look like in a more nature based approach. Significant engineering and design needed for both of these still need to meet that same standard, you know, of performance, but you then wind up with more green space of getting more, you know, water quality, environmental benefits, recreational benefits, at the same time that you’re providing the flood mitigation benefits on those rare but sometimes increasingly frequent occasions when you do need that flood risk benefit, right? It’s not just sitting there not doing a whole lot for us unless there’s a flood. It’s kind of providing some more more value to us. I

Unknown Speaker 19:22
won’t go through this whole thing, but we kind of think about projects as structural and non structural. Anything that’s moving earth is kind of structural. We have at the watershed scale. These are the three types of NBS projects that are in the manual at the watershed scale. These are larger scale. They’re kind of collecting water from elsewhere, from upstream, almost think about it as riverine flooding. You have your stream restoration, floodplain restoration, levee setbacks, wetland restoration, fire Lake restoration, that one might not be too applicable to this area, but these are those large areas that are connected in a system that can.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Hold water, store it infiltrate it will slow it down. Really provide some downstream or sometimes depending on the hydrology, upstream flood relief your neighborhood. Nature

Unknown Speaker 20:11
based solutions is kind of an umbrella term. A lot of these are more what people think of as lid low impact development, green infrastructure, green storm water infrastructure, those types of approaches, you really try to manage the water that’s existing on that single site. You’re not really going to reduce flood risk from downstream or elsewhere. But if you implement those at scale, across a catchment, across a watershed, you can really take the peak off of a large flood event. We have some examples

Unknown Speaker 20:40
in the manual, where that has been modeled and that has been shown.

Unknown Speaker 20:45
And then coastal

Unknown Speaker 20:47
Glo has, we have a lot of resources from the Glo in here, and there’s been a lot of good things going on the Texas coast, living shorelines, break waters, things like that. That kind of add to recreational commercial fisheries. Really kind of protect some existing flood infrastructure by using some nature and some restoration to do that sort of thing. Next slide, and then

Unknown Speaker 21:06
there’s a non structural I mentioned the property acquisition. That’s one of them, you know, regulating development in floodplains, right? What is that minimum standard of floodplain regulation so that we can develop safely and not add to future flood risk and not add to those issues.

Unknown Speaker 21:22
Even simple things like promoting native vegetation can go a long way towards reducing irrigation needs, towards reducing water needs, towards the resilience of the project you’re putting in place to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 21:35
Next slide, I’m

Unknown Speaker 21:39
gonna hand it off Allison,

Unknown Speaker 21:41
so we’ve been talking about this for a while. You’ll mention that earlier, the board has been doing a great job promoting this topic and the manual for a few years now. Spring 2026 is our goal for a draft for public comment, which will have 30 days for public comment, and then a final draft later this summer, I included the website here for reference. This is where it will be posted once it is ready, and obviously I will share that with you all specifically.

Unknown Speaker 22:12
And then this is what we’re calling our framework. This is a visual representation of everything that’s in the guidance manual. So we are structuring this based on the flow of project development, with the first section being, what do you need to know to get started? A lot of infrastructure projects end up with the same solutions that was in mind from the beginning. So this initiating section is really about wrapping your mind around what you need to get started in order for the solution to be different than the concrete line channel that was going to happen, because that’s the only thing you had in mind from the beginning. So we talked about guiding principles and just the thought process of how it’s recommended that practitioners approach flood infrastructure, and we talk about funding, obviously, that’s important to everybody. One of the largest selling points of nature based solutions is that it can unlock a lot more funding opportunities. The FIS is great, but what if we can pair that with EPA funding? There’s a lot of funding sources that they are trying to spend,

Unknown Speaker 23:26
and we just need to have the right project for all of these other organizations to get involved. So there’s a whole chapter dedicated to funding and how you can bring different funding sources together when you have all of these additional benefits. If you’re concrete lining the channel, seeing the boogeyman in the room, that’s that’s not something that all these other organizations want to to fund, and then ordinances, incentives, regulations from a local government perspective, how can you

Unknown Speaker 24:02
encourage or force land developers to make wise decisions, make the decisions you want them to, and implement some of these projects on private land beyond the county or the city, always having to be willing to fund them. And then we get into planning and selecting the right project on the right site, and understanding that gives a little bit more, little bit more engineering and implementing, we’re talking about permitting, design, construction and then maintenance. This is a question that we get a lot. How do we maintain these truthfully, many communities don’t have enough resources to maintain what they have, but ideally, with nature based solutions, they can start to maintain themselves. Wetlands don’t need to be actively mowed in the way that a con, you know, a grass line channel would need to be actively maintained. So those obviously aren’t one to one connections, but the hope is that nature can start to maintain itself.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Up, and this can be an easier,

Unknown Speaker 25:03
easier maintenance path for the lives of the project.

Unknown Speaker 25:07
Okay, so then, getting very specific to regional flood planning, I threw a lot of ideas out here. The two that I want to spend the most time focusing on are unfolded. And this is related to identifying SMEs, and then what we’ll talk about later is performing the SMEs and identifying the fnps. So when we’re talking with different communities on what is a possibility to solve your flood risk, you let us know that it’s flooding. When we’re sitting down to Newton County, how can we stop the flooding in your area? What are some options?

Unknown Speaker 25:44
Our hope is to have those conversations and start to educate and again, not lead them down the path of this is the only option. But what can we think about and what other benefits could you provide? Do you need a park in this area? Could we build a storm water park that floods when it floods, but the rest of the time, it’s a park for the community, and not just a big hole in the ground. And then while we’re doing engineering work that the state is paying for, let’s create some solutions that have multiple benefits.

Unknown Speaker 26:20
And then the bottom row ties to where in the guidance manual that these resources are found, which will be more valuable once you have the manual and credit

Unknown Speaker 26:32
again, okay. And then this is me talking to myself and Matt, given that we are technical people in the room. But the key criteria to capture MDS

Unknown Speaker 26:45
and capture whether or not a project does incorporate nature based solutions are these two fields, the percent by cost and then other or multiple benefits. Those are different buckets that give you points in the state flood claim rankings. So it’s important that any project that does incorporate nature based solutions is well documented, so that we can capture and make sure those points

Unknown Speaker 27:12
are obtained when it comes to the listing. So anything that’s already in our plan that as property acquisition that is considered 100% nature based solution that was already reflected. So it’ll be on Matt and I to make sure that all of the new fmps that we produce FOLLOW the guidance that we’re also writing. So this is how we can tell the board that we have nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 27:42
Side note on this,

Unknown Speaker 27:45
and going back to funding, with the at least the last round of FIS, the

Unknown Speaker 27:50
small and rural communities that incorporated nature based solutions were able to get 5% extra grant money compared to loan. So if they were only going to get, you know, 20% grant and 80% loan, if the project incorporated nature based solutions, five additional 5% of that total project cost could be grant. So that could be a big you know, that if it’s a multi million dollar project, that’s a lot of money, that grant, not alone. So the Water Development Board is definitely encouraging nature based solutions in the way that they are spending their money. So go to align our project to put them in the best position for funding.

Unknown Speaker 28:37
Okay? And then key takeaways, nature based solution for flood resilience. They have more benefits than mono functional blood infrastructure, and we need to start planning for them. A lot of times these

Unknown Speaker 28:51
things are just seen as, oh, we can add those on once we get to design, but we need to be considering them in planning so that we’re setting up and making the the

Unknown Speaker 29:01
right decisions to build the strategy of how this project will be funded, to start getting the right partners involved early.

Unknown Speaker 29:09
And then, like I said, they offer additional funding opportunities because of all of the CO benefits, Parks and Wildlife. They want to build new state parks. They want to build recreation opportunities. Can we partner with them in alignment with the flood

Unknown Speaker 29:25
mitigation projects that we’re already working on? So that’s the type of scale and partnerships that we want to encourage. The Nature Conservancy, duck gun, limited Parks and Wildlife, these are all different organizations that want to fund projects. So how can we align our efforts?

Unknown Speaker 29:45
And then that’s it. We’re here for questions. I got a question. So all this stuff I normally look at projects we talk about benefit, cost analysis based system. Do you all see that these nature based, nature based solutions, cost?

Unknown Speaker 30:00
More or less than other traditionals. And then when you factor in the nature based solutions, if they do cost more, do you have to factor in all of the long term costs associated with that project, or other things like that? I think all of us want to see stuff be put in, put back in nature as best it can. Reality it is.

Unknown Speaker 0:02
By

Unknown Speaker 0:05
dying.

Unknown Speaker 0:07
Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Sabine regional flood Planning Group. Today is February 23 2026

Unknown Speaker 0:17
we’ll go ahead and call the meeting to order. I have 134 apologize. I think I was a little bit hearty for getting here. So

Unknown Speaker 0:30
with that, we’ll move on to agenda item two. Roll Call Jeff

Unknown Speaker 0:35
bill, Bruce,

Unknown Speaker 0:39
Johnny Trahan here.

Unknown Speaker 0:42
Jim mullanes Here,

Unknown Speaker 0:46
dad McKee

Unknown Speaker 0:48
woman now.

Unknown Speaker 0:53
Doug Manning is here, Nikki Davis,

Unknown Speaker 1:02
Alvin Bradley,

Unknown Speaker 1:07
Michelle Falcon here, Travis Williams here, Jeff Rogers, rd Griffin here, Ross Gordon, I’m here. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 1:20
Hey. Present. Don voting members, Kathy Salceda,

Unknown Speaker 1:29
Daniel Martinez,

Unknown Speaker 1:34
Andrea Sanders,

Unknown Speaker 1:38
Bob Baker,

Unknown Speaker 1:42
Trey Walker, Watson and

Unknown Speaker 1:46
Katie cosler

Unknown Speaker 1:49
Here,

Unknown Speaker 1:52
Lone Ranger. All

Unknown Speaker 1:56
right, I’m just looking through the list for the people who are online as well. We’ve got a phone number, a, 903-844-9652,

Unknown Speaker 2:07
that ring a bell for anybody?

Unknown Speaker 2:21
Thank you. We’ll

Unknown Speaker 2:35
go ahead and move on to

Unknown Speaker 2:39
the next. Agenda item public comments. Agenda Item three, is there anybody online or in person today that would like to make any public comments

Unknown Speaker 2:48
that would be behind?

Unknown Speaker 2:54
Hearing none. We’ll move on. So discussion approval of minutes

Unknown Speaker 2:59
previously circulated, you should have the board members should receive the minutes for the December 15, 2025, meeting.

Unknown Speaker 3:08
They’re also included in your packet. Are there any comments or changes or anything on the minutes as presented?

Unknown Speaker 3:18
Hearing, none. I would entertain a motion to approve. The December 15, 2025, minutes

Unknown Speaker 3:27
second.

Unknown Speaker 3:29
Got a motion from Johnny a second from Michelle,

Unknown Speaker 3:35
all those in favor, say Aye.

Unknown Speaker 3:38
Any opposed? Say, nay.

Unknown Speaker 3:42
Motion passes, all right.

Unknown Speaker 3:46
Agenda Item five, update from the chair. I’ll have anything other than in your package. You should see

Unknown Speaker 3:54
kind of the invoices to date that we’ve asked that SRA has paid on behalf of the group for reimbursement. Matt, I think everything is in line right now. I don’t know that we’ve received any updated invoices from you guys, from freak Nichols, at this time again, just real quick. Initial balance was 2.1 5 million, and

Unknown Speaker 4:15
we’ve got a balance of 1,557,000

Unknown Speaker 4:18
left. So

Unknown Speaker 4:21
if y’all have any, get them or review them, get them passed through. But I think water zone board’s been much quicker, as well as our internal process of getting everything turned around and getting all things as soon as possible. So

Unknown Speaker 4:35
with that, I’ll move on to Agenda Item six update from the Texas Water Development Board, Amy. I’ll turn it over to you.

Unknown Speaker 4:46
Good morning, everybody. The

Unknown Speaker 4:49
technical memorandum was due to the board on January 7. We issued administrative completeness reviews, and staff have notified. It notified.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
With our disputes, deed to task five day, we will provide informal comments in summer 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:06
we posted an SME for small communities, frequently asked question document on the second cycle flood planning website. Topics include background information, timeline and general questions. The ordered list of SMEs for the Texas Water Development Board to perform. Perform under task IB is due on or before March 26 2026 prior to submission, regional flood planning groups should approve the FME list as well as the metric user determines following rural communities with limited resources were the FM ease before and by twdb, a reminder an email was sent on January 20 the

Unknown Speaker 5:41
scope of work and community affirmation forms for all FME s on the FMI list performed by the Texas Water Development Board is due on April 24 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:50
a reminder, the goal of task 4c performance of flood management evaluations is for regional flood planning groups to perform a subset of potential FM es included in task for a and in doing so, identify and evaluate additional fmps or FMS is that could be recommended under task five A, you have flexibility in showing which identified FME should be formed under task 4c and to prove that list at a regular regional flood planning group meeting, we contracted with the Texas A and M Agra Life Extension Service to create a model for calculating economic losses due to flooding events on agricultural lands. This project is now complete, and the tool and the guidance document have been published on our website,

Unknown Speaker 6:32
and that’s all I have. Let me know if you have any questions.

Unknown Speaker 6:38
All right, does anybody have any questions for Katie at this

Unknown Speaker 6:43
time. Katie the FIU piece for the FIS, 2627

Unknown Speaker 6:48
the webinar that was scheduled through Friday was canceled. Can you provide any update on when that FIA when we can expect the

Unknown Speaker 7:00
FIU P to be released.

Unknown Speaker 7:04
There isn’t like that email was the update? Like, we don’t have it ready yet, but hopefully soon, like, we’re scheduling these webinars for a reason, so hopefully it will be pretty soon that it will be posted for public comment.

Unknown Speaker 7:17
Thank you. Bye.

Unknown Speaker 7:24
Any other questions,

Unknown Speaker 7:27
not we’ll move on to Agenda Item seven for Doug Manning nature’s regional Flood Safety Group for tour. Sure attended the natures meeting last week. We went through and talked about all the projects that we were going to submit they were going to submit. They had quite a bit of a discussion on nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 7:52
We touched briefly on the separate pot of money that Matt and I were actually discussing before the meeting for the small rural communities. And that was explained to the board as well. And so

Unknown Speaker 8:06
about it, I feel like we, there are a meeting ahead of us. Mostly there they

Unknown Speaker 8:12
got a

Unknown Speaker 8:15
good definition of rural communities.

Unknown Speaker 8:18
They seem to, they seem to. That gave me a little concern, because something’s vague. It’s normally for a reason. It always gives me some concern.

Unknown Speaker 8:31
Okay, thank you, Doug. We’ll move on to Agenda Item eight,

Unknown Speaker 8:36
presentation of nature based solutions. Allison, I will turn it over to you. Okay, thank you, Travis, so you guys are all familiar with me, but I’m here with Justin comes back. He is the Nature Conservancy.

Unknown Speaker 8:50
We have been working principles in the Nature Conservancy have been working together to create a guidance manual on nature based solutions. Ultimate goal is to teach communities, non elected government officials, city engineers, county engineers, regional flood planning groups, what nature based solutions are and how they can be used for flood resilience. Our focus is much more flood resilience, flood mitigation, less so water quality. They absolutely have a water quality benefit, and a lot has been written with that angle, but the intention of our guidance is to provide more information on the flood mitigation benefits that each big solution can provide. So

Unknown Speaker 9:37
I

Unknown Speaker 9:39
am having trouble with my my zoom, so I won’t be able to share my screen. If you can follow along in your packet. We’ll walk through together and Allison, I’ll stop jumping. Just a note there. I remember there was a couple meetings back, maybe about eight to 10 months back, where Pat had actually asked about these. I know y’all been working on some updates. So.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Just kind of follow up yes to his

Unknown Speaker 10:03
request, I guess, at that point in time as well. And there was a conference we were going to try to end the scheduling didn’t work out.

Unknown Speaker 10:12
We’ve

Unknown Speaker 10:13
been talking about this for a while. We have

Unknown Speaker 10:17
it’s, I mean, ultimately, there is a ton that has been written. Thank you. There’s a ton that’s been written about this topic, and our goal has been to synthesize a lot of the research make it easier to understand in more of a flow of project development. So go ahead and get started.

Unknown Speaker 10:44
This

Unknown Speaker 10:46
is you? Okay, wonderful. Thank you. One time I can give it over,

Unknown Speaker 10:51
okay, oh, wonderful, I’ll have you Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:10
Have your mouth. You

Unknown Speaker 11:16
know,

Unknown Speaker 11:21
sorry about that. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:28
Okay, all right, thanks for the intro, Allison, nice to meet all of you happy to be here. Thank you for your time. I’m going to talk a little bit about the purpose of this. Allison touched on it briefly. Go into a little bit more detail, offer a very brief definition. Folks have been talking about this for a long time. We want to offer some clarity on what we’re talking about today and why this project is happening. I’ll hand it over to Alison and talk a little bit about the publishing schedule, what’s actually in this document, and how to promote it through your efforts here and local communities and through the regional flood planning and just a few key takeaways in there.

Unknown Speaker 12:07
So one of the purposes of this document stemmed from the realization that a lot of folks aren’t really familiar with what nature based approaches to flood mitigation are. The Texas Water Development Board looked at the state, the first day flood plan, they saw some

Unknown Speaker 12:23
uncertainties in what these are, and only saw eight nature based solutions project in the plan. Now that’s a little bit of misleading. Those are just eight projects that were in the plan that were identified as nature based solutions, but if you recall in those tables, there’s a column that says, percent nature based there were, I think, 212 or 202 and 12 or 202

Unknown Speaker 12:44
total projects that had a non zero number or percent nature, based by cost, right? So these are ideas that are out there that are in the plan. We’re trying to build this up, provide this manual for that purpose, to increase the number of these projects and future plans, future regional plans, and across the state. So

Unknown Speaker 13:03
what are the specific goals of this project? Nature based solutions aren’t new. They’ve been around for a long time. We’ve been using nature to solve problems for longer than anybody in this room has been around.

Unknown Speaker 13:15
There’s a lot written on nature based solutions. There’s a lot written on that topic, but there are less things focused specifically on using them to address flood risk.

Unknown Speaker 13:27
There’s also a lot, not as many, that are written specifically for the state of Texas. So the purpose of that is to take all of that research, pull it together, get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense for the Texas context, and also focus on that flood risk resilience aspect of it, right? The types of projects that are used in nature to solve the flood problem put those in that plan. The second goal was to provide some strategies and tools, right? These are hands on things. These are things that communities can look to use to

Unknown Speaker 13:55
kind of overcome some of the challenges or the barriers that are associated with a new approach or a new way of thinking about,

Unknown Speaker 14:02
you know, addressing our flood problems,

Unknown Speaker 14:05
those barriers and challenges weren’t just pulled from some academic article, from some textbook or, you know, just from our heads. We surveyed. We had a statewide survey that had close to 300 responses to it. We talked with folks who work at academic institutions, and public agencies and state city offices that have worked on these types of projects and have a lot of experience on the coast, inland, dry areas, wet areas of the state, you name it, across the state. We talked to those folks and as well as like looking at the research, right? What is the Army Corps of Engineers said about this? What have other groups said about these types of approaches, and we pulled that together to, you know, try and structure this document about addressing those barriers and challenges to these projects. And then three, we want to, we want this manual to support the implementation of these types of projects at the local level and through regional flood planning. So we’re actually talking to every regional flood planning group. And.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
About this manual, try to highlight it and then talk about some ways to move through that

Unknown Speaker 15:07
intended users. Allison covered this. You all local government officials, city engineers, floodplain managers, are a big one,

Unknown Speaker 15:15
practitioners and developers, right? We are targeting this at a local official, but this will also have importance for people who are actually out there, building and developing properties, putting projects on the ground, developing those types of things as a certified floodplain manager. I’m particularly interested in this because floodplain managers have been talking about maintaining the beneficial use of floodplains for a very long time, longer than the term nature based solutions has been around. So that is one of those key critical ways in which we can reduce flood risk now, as well as not add to flood risk in the future. And that’s also a nature based solution here. So that’s another audience for this manual.

Unknown Speaker 15:55
I’ve talked about this a lot.

Unknown Speaker 15:58
There are a lot of long definitions for nature based solutions, most of them, I fall asleep while trying to read them. I kind of lose interest. In short, you can just think about it as using nature to solve the problem, right? Using nature is some kind of natural process to solve an issue that we have. And again, we’re focused on flood risk here, but the added benefit of these types of projects that you get other co benefits, right? Our communities have flooding issues, but they’re not the only issues we’re dealing with. We deal with water quality issues. We deal with lack of access to green space and air quality issues. We deal with public health and community health issues. Water supply issues is a big one in the state. Drought hits us. Sometimes, flood hits us. Sometimes. These are the types of solutions, the types of projects that can help chip away at multiple problems while addressing that primary issue of flooding to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 16:48
Next slide, please.

Unknown Speaker 16:53
So when we talk about this, we’re very much aware we’re not starting with a blank slate. We have a lot of existing infrastructure. We also know that it’s not always going to be the right answer in the right place, but the important thing is to think about this in a planning stage, in the modeling stage, to see where are these opportunities, where it can be put in these types of projects. For example, I have noticed in your plan, you have a couple of sections on property acquisition and reclaiming that space for floodplain storage. That’s great, right? You need to avoid, you know, you have a large usable space. If you take a group of properties that are all voluntarily, you know, coming in to get themselves removed from that flood risk. And you can create an asset for a community with that. Or you can create a natural space, right? You can put, create a place to store water, slow it down, infiltrate it.

Unknown Speaker 17:40
You know, that’s not an entirely natural approach. That’s more of a hybrid approach, right? It takes some engineering to recreate and reconstruct that floodplain area, but in some areas, you’re not going to have that option. You’re constrained by space, you already have existing infrastructure, you have that levy that you have an entire city depending on, right? This isn’t going to be the right solution in all of those right places, but you have to think about this as that spectrum. Where do we capture the most value for a project, not necessarily looking at the cost right? We only have to get the 1.01 to be a benefit to be cost effective. Could we be more cost effective? Could we get more value out of that project, thinking about these types of projects, next slide please, just

Unknown Speaker 18:21
a couple of examples. And we use these because the two most common types of example, types of projects in the state plan is channel improvements. So largely, we kind of think about, you know, Grease lightning racing in the movie Greece, right? That trapezoidal channel that we’re so familiar with all over the place, and then the other is a detention pond, right? This is an example of what those might look like in a more nature based approach. Significant engineering and design needed for both of these still need to meet that same standard, you know, of performance, but you then wind up with more green space of getting more, you know, water quality, environmental benefits, recreational benefits, at the same time that you’re providing the flood mitigation benefits on those rare but sometimes increasingly frequent occasions when you do need that flood risk benefit, right? It’s not just sitting there not doing a whole lot for us unless there’s a flood. It’s kind of providing some more more value to us. I

Unknown Speaker 19:22
won’t go through this whole thing, but we kind of think about projects as structural and non structural. Anything that’s moving earth is kind of structural. We have at the watershed scale. These are the three types of NBS projects that are in the manual at the watershed scale. These are larger scale. They’re kind of collecting water from elsewhere, from upstream, almost think about it as riverine flooding. You have your stream restoration, floodplain restoration, levee setbacks, wetland restoration, fire Lake restoration, that one might not be too applicable to this area, but these are those large areas that are connected in a system that can.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Hold water, store it infiltrate it will slow it down. Really provide some downstream or sometimes depending on the hydrology, upstream flood relief your neighborhood. Nature

Unknown Speaker 20:11
based solutions is kind of an umbrella term. A lot of these are more what people think of as lid low impact development, green infrastructure, green storm water infrastructure, those types of approaches, you really try to manage the water that’s existing on that single site. You’re not really going to reduce flood risk from downstream or elsewhere. But if you implement those at scale, across a catchment, across a watershed, you can really take the peak off of a large flood event. We have some examples

Unknown Speaker 20:40
in the manual, where that has been modeled and that has been shown.

Unknown Speaker 20:45
And then coastal

Unknown Speaker 20:47
Glo has, we have a lot of resources from the Glo in here, and there’s been a lot of good things going on the Texas coast, living shorelines, break waters, things like that. That kind of add to recreational commercial fisheries. Really kind of protect some existing flood infrastructure by using some nature and some restoration to do that sort of thing. Next slide, and then

Unknown Speaker 21:06
there’s a non structural I mentioned the property acquisition. That’s one of them, you know, regulating development in floodplains, right? What is that minimum standard of floodplain regulation so that we can develop safely and not add to future flood risk and not add to those issues.

Unknown Speaker 21:22
Even simple things like promoting native vegetation can go a long way towards reducing irrigation needs, towards reducing water needs, towards the resilience of the project you’re putting in place to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 21:35
Next slide, I’m

Unknown Speaker 21:39
gonna hand it off Allison,

Unknown Speaker 21:41
so we’ve been talking about this for a while. You’ll mention that earlier, the board has been doing a great job promoting this topic and the manual for a few years now. Spring 2026 is our goal for a draft for public comment, which will have 30 days for public comment, and then a final draft later this summer, I included the website here for reference. This is where it will be posted once it is ready, and obviously I will share that with you all specifically.

Unknown Speaker 22:12
And then this is what we’re calling our framework. This is a visual representation of everything that’s in the guidance manual. So we are structuring this based on the flow of project development, with the first section being, what do you need to know to get started? A lot of infrastructure projects end up with the same solutions that was in mind from the beginning. So this initiating section is really about wrapping your mind around what you need to get started in order for the solution to be different than the concrete line channel that was going to happen, because that’s the only thing you had in mind from the beginning. So we talked about guiding principles and just the thought process of how it’s recommended that practitioners approach flood infrastructure, and we talk about funding, obviously, that’s important to everybody. One of the largest selling points of nature based solutions is that it can unlock a lot more funding opportunities. The FIS is great, but what if we can pair that with EPA funding? There’s a lot of funding sources that they are trying to spend,

Unknown Speaker 23:26
and we just need to have the right project for all of these other organizations to get involved. So there’s a whole chapter dedicated to funding and how you can bring different funding sources together when you have all of these additional benefits. If you’re concrete lining the channel, seeing the boogeyman in the room, that’s that’s not something that all these other organizations want to to fund, and then ordinances, incentives, regulations from a local government perspective, how can you

Unknown Speaker 24:02
encourage or force land developers to make wise decisions, make the decisions you want them to, and implement some of these projects on private land beyond the county or the city, always having to be willing to fund them. And then we get into planning and selecting the right project on the right site, and understanding that gives a little bit more, little bit more engineering and implementing, we’re talking about permitting, design, construction and then maintenance. This is a question that we get a lot. How do we maintain these truthfully, many communities don’t have enough resources to maintain what they have, but ideally, with nature based solutions, they can start to maintain themselves. Wetlands don’t need to be actively mowed in the way that a con, you know, a grass line channel would need to be actively maintained. So those obviously aren’t one to one connections, but the hope is that nature can start to maintain itself.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Up, and this can be an easier,

Unknown Speaker 25:03
easier maintenance path for the lives of the project.

Unknown Speaker 25:07
Okay, so then, getting very specific to regional flood planning, I threw a lot of ideas out here. The two that I want to spend the most time focusing on are unfolded. And this is related to identifying SMEs, and then what we’ll talk about later is performing the SMEs and identifying the fnps. So when we’re talking with different communities on what is a possibility to solve your flood risk, you let us know that it’s flooding. When we’re sitting down to Newton County, how can we stop the flooding in your area? What are some options?

Unknown Speaker 25:44
Our hope is to have those conversations and start to educate and again, not lead them down the path of this is the only option. But what can we think about and what other benefits could you provide? Do you need a park in this area? Could we build a storm water park that floods when it floods, but the rest of the time, it’s a park for the community, and not just a big hole in the ground. And then while we’re doing engineering work that the state is paying for, let’s create some solutions that have multiple benefits.

Unknown Speaker 26:20
And then the bottom row ties to where in the guidance manual that these resources are found, which will be more valuable once you have the manual and credit

Unknown Speaker 26:32
again, okay. And then this is me talking to myself and Matt, given that we are technical people in the room. But the key criteria to capture MDS

Unknown Speaker 26:45
and capture whether or not a project does incorporate nature based solutions are these two fields, the percent by cost and then other or multiple benefits. Those are different buckets that give you points in the state flood claim rankings. So it’s important that any project that does incorporate nature based solutions is well documented, so that we can capture and make sure those points

Unknown Speaker 27:12
are obtained when it comes to the listing. So anything that’s already in our plan that as property acquisition that is considered 100% nature based solution that was already reflected. So it’ll be on Matt and I to make sure that all of the new fmps that we produce FOLLOW the guidance that we’re also writing. So this is how we can tell the board that we have nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 27:42
Side note on this,

Unknown Speaker 27:45
and going back to funding, with the at least the last round of FIS, the

Unknown Speaker 27:50
small and rural communities that incorporated nature based solutions were able to get 5% extra grant money compared to loan. So if they were only going to get, you know, 20% grant and 80% loan, if the project incorporated nature based solutions, five additional 5% of that total project cost could be grant. So that could be a big you know, that if it’s a multi million dollar project, that’s a lot of money, that grant, not alone. So the Water Development Board is definitely encouraging nature based solutions in the way that they are spending their money. So go to align our project to put them in the best position for funding.

Unknown Speaker 28:37
Okay? And then key takeaways, nature based solution for flood resilience. They have more benefits than mono functional blood infrastructure, and we need to start planning for them. A lot of times these

Unknown Speaker 28:51
things are just seen as, oh, we can add those on once we get to design, but we need to be considering them in planning so that we’re setting up and making the the

Unknown Speaker 29:01
right decisions to build the strategy of how this project will be funded, to start getting the right partners involved early.

Unknown Speaker 29:09
And then, like I said, they offer additional funding opportunities because of all of the CO benefits, Parks and Wildlife. They want to build new state parks. They want to build recreation opportunities. Can we partner with them in alignment with the flood

Unknown Speaker 29:25
mitigation projects that we’re already working on? So that’s the type of scale and partnerships that we want to encourage. The Nature Conservancy, duck gun, limited Parks and Wildlife, these are all different organizations that want to fund projects. So how can we align our efforts?

Unknown Speaker 29:45
And then that’s it. We’re here for questions. I got a question. So all this stuff I normally look at projects we talk about benefit, cost analysis based system. Do you all see that these nature based, nature based solutions, cost?

Unknown Speaker 30:00
More or less than other traditionals. And then when you factor in the nature based solutions, if they do cost more, do you have to factor in all of the long term costs associated with that project, or other things like that? I think all of us want to see stuff be put in, put back in nature as best it can. Reality it is.

Unknown Speaker 0:02
By

Unknown Speaker 0:05
dying.

Unknown Speaker 0:07
Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Sabine regional flood Planning Group. Today is February 23 2026

Unknown Speaker 0:17
we’ll go ahead and call the meeting to order. I have 134 apologize. I think I was a little bit hearty for getting here. So

Unknown Speaker 0:30
with that, we’ll move on to agenda item two. Roll Call Jeff

Unknown Speaker 0:35
bill, Bruce,

Unknown Speaker 0:39
Johnny Trahan here.

Unknown Speaker 0:42
Jim mullanes Here,

Unknown Speaker 0:46
dad McKee

Unknown Speaker 0:48
woman now.

Unknown Speaker 0:53
Doug Manning is here, Nikki Davis,

Unknown Speaker 1:02
Alvin Bradley,

Unknown Speaker 1:07
Michelle Falcon here, Travis Williams here, Jeff Rogers, rd Griffin here, Ross Gordon, I’m here. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 1:20
Hey. Present. Don voting members, Kathy Salceda,

Unknown Speaker 1:29
Daniel Martinez,

Unknown Speaker 1:34
Andrea Sanders,

Unknown Speaker 1:38
Bob Baker,

Unknown Speaker 1:42
Trey Walker, Watson and

Unknown Speaker 1:46
Katie cosler

Unknown Speaker 1:49
Here,

Unknown Speaker 1:52
Lone Ranger. All

Unknown Speaker 1:56
right, I’m just looking through the list for the people who are online as well. We’ve got a phone number, a, 903-844-9652,

Unknown Speaker 2:07
that ring a bell for anybody?

Unknown Speaker 2:21
Thank you. We’ll

Unknown Speaker 2:35
go ahead and move on to

Unknown Speaker 2:39
the next. Agenda item public comments. Agenda Item three, is there anybody online or in person today that would like to make any public comments

Unknown Speaker 2:48
that would be behind?

Unknown Speaker 2:54
Hearing none. We’ll move on. So discussion approval of minutes

Unknown Speaker 2:59
previously circulated, you should have the board members should receive the minutes for the December 15, 2025, meeting.

Unknown Speaker 3:08
They’re also included in your packet. Are there any comments or changes or anything on the minutes as presented?

Unknown Speaker 3:18
Hearing, none. I would entertain a motion to approve. The December 15, 2025, minutes

Unknown Speaker 3:27
second.

Unknown Speaker 3:29
Got a motion from Johnny a second from Michelle,

Unknown Speaker 3:35
all those in favor, say Aye.

Unknown Speaker 3:38
Any opposed? Say, nay.

Unknown Speaker 3:42
Motion passes, all right.

Unknown Speaker 3:46
Agenda Item five, update from the chair. I’ll have anything other than in your package. You should see

Unknown Speaker 3:54
kind of the invoices to date that we’ve asked that SRA has paid on behalf of the group for reimbursement. Matt, I think everything is in line right now. I don’t know that we’ve received any updated invoices from you guys, from freak Nichols, at this time again, just real quick. Initial balance was 2.1 5 million, and

Unknown Speaker 4:15
we’ve got a balance of 1,557,000

Unknown Speaker 4:18
left. So

Unknown Speaker 4:21
if y’all have any, get them or review them, get them passed through. But I think water zone board’s been much quicker, as well as our internal process of getting everything turned around and getting all things as soon as possible. So

Unknown Speaker 4:35
with that, I’ll move on to Agenda Item six update from the Texas Water Development Board, Amy. I’ll turn it over to you.

Unknown Speaker 4:46
Good morning, everybody. The

Unknown Speaker 4:49
technical memorandum was due to the board on January 7. We issued administrative completeness reviews, and staff have notified. It notified.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
With our disputes, deed to task five day, we will provide informal comments in summer 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:06
we posted an SME for small communities, frequently asked question document on the second cycle flood planning website. Topics include background information, timeline and general questions. The ordered list of SMEs for the Texas Water Development Board to perform. Perform under task IB is due on or before March 26 2026 prior to submission, regional flood planning groups should approve the FME list as well as the metric user determines following rural communities with limited resources were the FM ease before and by twdb, a reminder an email was sent on January 20 the

Unknown Speaker 5:41
scope of work and community affirmation forms for all FME s on the FMI list performed by the Texas Water Development Board is due on April 24 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:50
a reminder, the goal of task 4c performance of flood management evaluations is for regional flood planning groups to perform a subset of potential FM es included in task for a and in doing so, identify and evaluate additional fmps or FMS is that could be recommended under task five A, you have flexibility in showing which identified FME should be formed under task 4c and to prove that list at a regular regional flood planning group meeting, we contracted with the Texas A and M Agra Life Extension Service to create a model for calculating economic losses due to flooding events on agricultural lands. This project is now complete, and the tool and the guidance document have been published on our website,

Unknown Speaker 6:32
and that’s all I have. Let me know if you have any questions.

Unknown Speaker 6:38
All right, does anybody have any questions for Katie at this

Unknown Speaker 6:43
time. Katie the FIU piece for the FIS, 2627

Unknown Speaker 6:48
the webinar that was scheduled through Friday was canceled. Can you provide any update on when that FIA when we can expect the

Unknown Speaker 7:00
FIU P to be released.

Unknown Speaker 7:04
There isn’t like that email was the update? Like, we don’t have it ready yet, but hopefully soon, like, we’re scheduling these webinars for a reason, so hopefully it will be pretty soon that it will be posted for public comment.

Unknown Speaker 7:17
Thank you. Bye.

Unknown Speaker 7:24
Any other questions,

Unknown Speaker 7:27
not we’ll move on to Agenda Item seven for Doug Manning nature’s regional Flood Safety Group for tour. Sure attended the natures meeting last week. We went through and talked about all the projects that we were going to submit they were going to submit. They had quite a bit of a discussion on nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 7:52
We touched briefly on the separate pot of money that Matt and I were actually discussing before the meeting for the small rural communities. And that was explained to the board as well. And so

Unknown Speaker 8:06
about it, I feel like we, there are a meeting ahead of us. Mostly there they

Unknown Speaker 8:12
got a

Unknown Speaker 8:15
good definition of rural communities.

Unknown Speaker 8:18
They seem to, they seem to. That gave me a little concern, because something’s vague. It’s normally for a reason. It always gives me some concern.

Unknown Speaker 8:31
Okay, thank you, Doug. We’ll move on to Agenda Item eight,

Unknown Speaker 8:36
presentation of nature based solutions. Allison, I will turn it over to you. Okay, thank you, Travis, so you guys are all familiar with me, but I’m here with Justin comes back. He is the Nature Conservancy.

Unknown Speaker 8:50
We have been working principles in the Nature Conservancy have been working together to create a guidance manual on nature based solutions. Ultimate goal is to teach communities, non elected government officials, city engineers, county engineers, regional flood planning groups, what nature based solutions are and how they can be used for flood resilience. Our focus is much more flood resilience, flood mitigation, less so water quality. They absolutely have a water quality benefit, and a lot has been written with that angle, but the intention of our guidance is to provide more information on the flood mitigation benefits that each big solution can provide. So

Unknown Speaker 9:37
I

Unknown Speaker 9:39
am having trouble with my my zoom, so I won’t be able to share my screen. If you can follow along in your packet. We’ll walk through together and Allison, I’ll stop jumping. Just a note there. I remember there was a couple meetings back, maybe about eight to 10 months back, where Pat had actually asked about these. I know y’all been working on some updates. So.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Just kind of follow up yes to his

Unknown Speaker 10:03
request, I guess, at that point in time as well. And there was a conference we were going to try to end the scheduling didn’t work out.

Unknown Speaker 10:12
We’ve

Unknown Speaker 10:13
been talking about this for a while. We have

Unknown Speaker 10:17
it’s, I mean, ultimately, there is a ton that has been written. Thank you. There’s a ton that’s been written about this topic, and our goal has been to synthesize a lot of the research make it easier to understand in more of a flow of project development. So go ahead and get started.

Unknown Speaker 10:44
This

Unknown Speaker 10:46
is you? Okay, wonderful. Thank you. One time I can give it over,

Unknown Speaker 10:51
okay, oh, wonderful, I’ll have you Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:10
Have your mouth. You

Unknown Speaker 11:16
know,

Unknown Speaker 11:21
sorry about that. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:28
Okay, all right, thanks for the intro, Allison, nice to meet all of you happy to be here. Thank you for your time. I’m going to talk a little bit about the purpose of this. Allison touched on it briefly. Go into a little bit more detail, offer a very brief definition. Folks have been talking about this for a long time. We want to offer some clarity on what we’re talking about today and why this project is happening. I’ll hand it over to Alison and talk a little bit about the publishing schedule, what’s actually in this document, and how to promote it through your efforts here and local communities and through the regional flood planning and just a few key takeaways in there.

Unknown Speaker 12:07
So one of the purposes of this document stemmed from the realization that a lot of folks aren’t really familiar with what nature based approaches to flood mitigation are. The Texas Water Development Board looked at the state, the first day flood plan, they saw some

Unknown Speaker 12:23
uncertainties in what these are, and only saw eight nature based solutions project in the plan. Now that’s a little bit of misleading. Those are just eight projects that were in the plan that were identified as nature based solutions, but if you recall in those tables, there’s a column that says, percent nature based there were, I think, 212 or 202 and 12 or 202

Unknown Speaker 12:44
total projects that had a non zero number or percent nature, based by cost, right? So these are ideas that are out there that are in the plan. We’re trying to build this up, provide this manual for that purpose, to increase the number of these projects and future plans, future regional plans, and across the state. So

Unknown Speaker 13:03
what are the specific goals of this project? Nature based solutions aren’t new. They’ve been around for a long time. We’ve been using nature to solve problems for longer than anybody in this room has been around.

Unknown Speaker 13:15
There’s a lot written on nature based solutions. There’s a lot written on that topic, but there are less things focused specifically on using them to address flood risk.

Unknown Speaker 13:27
There’s also a lot, not as many, that are written specifically for the state of Texas. So the purpose of that is to take all of that research, pull it together, get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense for the Texas context, and also focus on that flood risk resilience aspect of it, right? The types of projects that are used in nature to solve the flood problem put those in that plan. The second goal was to provide some strategies and tools, right? These are hands on things. These are things that communities can look to use to

Unknown Speaker 13:55
kind of overcome some of the challenges or the barriers that are associated with a new approach or a new way of thinking about,

Unknown Speaker 14:02
you know, addressing our flood problems,

Unknown Speaker 14:05
those barriers and challenges weren’t just pulled from some academic article, from some textbook or, you know, just from our heads. We surveyed. We had a statewide survey that had close to 300 responses to it. We talked with folks who work at academic institutions, and public agencies and state city offices that have worked on these types of projects and have a lot of experience on the coast, inland, dry areas, wet areas of the state, you name it, across the state. We talked to those folks and as well as like looking at the research, right? What is the Army Corps of Engineers said about this? What have other groups said about these types of approaches, and we pulled that together to, you know, try and structure this document about addressing those barriers and challenges to these projects. And then three, we want to, we want this manual to support the implementation of these types of projects at the local level and through regional flood planning. So we’re actually talking to every regional flood planning group. And.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
About this manual, try to highlight it and then talk about some ways to move through that

Unknown Speaker 15:07
intended users. Allison covered this. You all local government officials, city engineers, floodplain managers, are a big one,

Unknown Speaker 15:15
practitioners and developers, right? We are targeting this at a local official, but this will also have importance for people who are actually out there, building and developing properties, putting projects on the ground, developing those types of things as a certified floodplain manager. I’m particularly interested in this because floodplain managers have been talking about maintaining the beneficial use of floodplains for a very long time, longer than the term nature based solutions has been around. So that is one of those key critical ways in which we can reduce flood risk now, as well as not add to flood risk in the future. And that’s also a nature based solution here. So that’s another audience for this manual.

Unknown Speaker 15:55
I’ve talked about this a lot.

Unknown Speaker 15:58
There are a lot of long definitions for nature based solutions, most of them, I fall asleep while trying to read them. I kind of lose interest. In short, you can just think about it as using nature to solve the problem, right? Using nature is some kind of natural process to solve an issue that we have. And again, we’re focused on flood risk here, but the added benefit of these types of projects that you get other co benefits, right? Our communities have flooding issues, but they’re not the only issues we’re dealing with. We deal with water quality issues. We deal with lack of access to green space and air quality issues. We deal with public health and community health issues. Water supply issues is a big one in the state. Drought hits us. Sometimes, flood hits us. Sometimes. These are the types of solutions, the types of projects that can help chip away at multiple problems while addressing that primary issue of flooding to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 16:48
Next slide, please.

Unknown Speaker 16:53
So when we talk about this, we’re very much aware we’re not starting with a blank slate. We have a lot of existing infrastructure. We also know that it’s not always going to be the right answer in the right place, but the important thing is to think about this in a planning stage, in the modeling stage, to see where are these opportunities, where it can be put in these types of projects. For example, I have noticed in your plan, you have a couple of sections on property acquisition and reclaiming that space for floodplain storage. That’s great, right? You need to avoid, you know, you have a large usable space. If you take a group of properties that are all voluntarily, you know, coming in to get themselves removed from that flood risk. And you can create an asset for a community with that. Or you can create a natural space, right? You can put, create a place to store water, slow it down, infiltrate it.

Unknown Speaker 17:40
You know, that’s not an entirely natural approach. That’s more of a hybrid approach, right? It takes some engineering to recreate and reconstruct that floodplain area, but in some areas, you’re not going to have that option. You’re constrained by space, you already have existing infrastructure, you have that levy that you have an entire city depending on, right? This isn’t going to be the right solution in all of those right places, but you have to think about this as that spectrum. Where do we capture the most value for a project, not necessarily looking at the cost right? We only have to get the 1.01 to be a benefit to be cost effective. Could we be more cost effective? Could we get more value out of that project, thinking about these types of projects, next slide please, just

Unknown Speaker 18:21
a couple of examples. And we use these because the two most common types of example, types of projects in the state plan is channel improvements. So largely, we kind of think about, you know, Grease lightning racing in the movie Greece, right? That trapezoidal channel that we’re so familiar with all over the place, and then the other is a detention pond, right? This is an example of what those might look like in a more nature based approach. Significant engineering and design needed for both of these still need to meet that same standard, you know, of performance, but you then wind up with more green space of getting more, you know, water quality, environmental benefits, recreational benefits, at the same time that you’re providing the flood mitigation benefits on those rare but sometimes increasingly frequent occasions when you do need that flood risk benefit, right? It’s not just sitting there not doing a whole lot for us unless there’s a flood. It’s kind of providing some more more value to us. I

Unknown Speaker 19:22
won’t go through this whole thing, but we kind of think about projects as structural and non structural. Anything that’s moving earth is kind of structural. We have at the watershed scale. These are the three types of NBS projects that are in the manual at the watershed scale. These are larger scale. They’re kind of collecting water from elsewhere, from upstream, almost think about it as riverine flooding. You have your stream restoration, floodplain restoration, levee setbacks, wetland restoration, fire Lake restoration, that one might not be too applicable to this area, but these are those large areas that are connected in a system that can.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Hold water, store it infiltrate it will slow it down. Really provide some downstream or sometimes depending on the hydrology, upstream flood relief your neighborhood. Nature

Unknown Speaker 20:11
based solutions is kind of an umbrella term. A lot of these are more what people think of as lid low impact development, green infrastructure, green storm water infrastructure, those types of approaches, you really try to manage the water that’s existing on that single site. You’re not really going to reduce flood risk from downstream or elsewhere. But if you implement those at scale, across a catchment, across a watershed, you can really take the peak off of a large flood event. We have some examples

Unknown Speaker 20:40
in the manual, where that has been modeled and that has been shown.

Unknown Speaker 20:45
And then coastal

Unknown Speaker 20:47
Glo has, we have a lot of resources from the Glo in here, and there’s been a lot of good things going on the Texas coast, living shorelines, break waters, things like that. That kind of add to recreational commercial fisheries. Really kind of protect some existing flood infrastructure by using some nature and some restoration to do that sort of thing. Next slide, and then

Unknown Speaker 21:06
there’s a non structural I mentioned the property acquisition. That’s one of them, you know, regulating development in floodplains, right? What is that minimum standard of floodplain regulation so that we can develop safely and not add to future flood risk and not add to those issues.

Unknown Speaker 21:22
Even simple things like promoting native vegetation can go a long way towards reducing irrigation needs, towards reducing water needs, towards the resilience of the project you’re putting in place to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 21:35
Next slide, I’m

Unknown Speaker 21:39
gonna hand it off Allison,

Unknown Speaker 21:41
so we’ve been talking about this for a while. You’ll mention that earlier, the board has been doing a great job promoting this topic and the manual for a few years now. Spring 2026 is our goal for a draft for public comment, which will have 30 days for public comment, and then a final draft later this summer, I included the website here for reference. This is where it will be posted once it is ready, and obviously I will share that with you all specifically.

Unknown Speaker 22:12
And then this is what we’re calling our framework. This is a visual representation of everything that’s in the guidance manual. So we are structuring this based on the flow of project development, with the first section being, what do you need to know to get started? A lot of infrastructure projects end up with the same solutions that was in mind from the beginning. So this initiating section is really about wrapping your mind around what you need to get started in order for the solution to be different than the concrete line channel that was going to happen, because that’s the only thing you had in mind from the beginning. So we talked about guiding principles and just the thought process of how it’s recommended that practitioners approach flood infrastructure, and we talk about funding, obviously, that’s important to everybody. One of the largest selling points of nature based solutions is that it can unlock a lot more funding opportunities. The FIS is great, but what if we can pair that with EPA funding? There’s a lot of funding sources that they are trying to spend,

Unknown Speaker 23:26
and we just need to have the right project for all of these other organizations to get involved. So there’s a whole chapter dedicated to funding and how you can bring different funding sources together when you have all of these additional benefits. If you’re concrete lining the channel, seeing the boogeyman in the room, that’s that’s not something that all these other organizations want to to fund, and then ordinances, incentives, regulations from a local government perspective, how can you

Unknown Speaker 24:02
encourage or force land developers to make wise decisions, make the decisions you want them to, and implement some of these projects on private land beyond the county or the city, always having to be willing to fund them. And then we get into planning and selecting the right project on the right site, and understanding that gives a little bit more, little bit more engineering and implementing, we’re talking about permitting, design, construction and then maintenance. This is a question that we get a lot. How do we maintain these truthfully, many communities don’t have enough resources to maintain what they have, but ideally, with nature based solutions, they can start to maintain themselves. Wetlands don’t need to be actively mowed in the way that a con, you know, a grass line channel would need to be actively maintained. So those obviously aren’t one to one connections, but the hope is that nature can start to maintain itself.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Up, and this can be an easier,

Unknown Speaker 25:03
easier maintenance path for the lives of the project.

Unknown Speaker 25:07
Okay, so then, getting very specific to regional flood planning, I threw a lot of ideas out here. The two that I want to spend the most time focusing on are unfolded. And this is related to identifying SMEs, and then what we’ll talk about later is performing the SMEs and identifying the fnps. So when we’re talking with different communities on what is a possibility to solve your flood risk, you let us know that it’s flooding. When we’re sitting down to Newton County, how can we stop the flooding in your area? What are some options?

Unknown Speaker 25:44
Our hope is to have those conversations and start to educate and again, not lead them down the path of this is the only option. But what can we think about and what other benefits could you provide? Do you need a park in this area? Could we build a storm water park that floods when it floods, but the rest of the time, it’s a park for the community, and not just a big hole in the ground. And then while we’re doing engineering work that the state is paying for, let’s create some solutions that have multiple benefits.

Unknown Speaker 26:20
And then the bottom row ties to where in the guidance manual that these resources are found, which will be more valuable once you have the manual and credit

Unknown Speaker 26:32
again, okay. And then this is me talking to myself and Matt, given that we are technical people in the room. But the key criteria to capture MDS

Unknown Speaker 26:45
and capture whether or not a project does incorporate nature based solutions are these two fields, the percent by cost and then other or multiple benefits. Those are different buckets that give you points in the state flood claim rankings. So it’s important that any project that does incorporate nature based solutions is well documented, so that we can capture and make sure those points

Unknown Speaker 27:12
are obtained when it comes to the listing. So anything that’s already in our plan that as property acquisition that is considered 100% nature based solution that was already reflected. So it’ll be on Matt and I to make sure that all of the new fmps that we produce FOLLOW the guidance that we’re also writing. So this is how we can tell the board that we have nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 27:42
Side note on this,

Unknown Speaker 27:45
and going back to funding, with the at least the last round of FIS, the

Unknown Speaker 27:50
small and rural communities that incorporated nature based solutions were able to get 5% extra grant money compared to loan. So if they were only going to get, you know, 20% grant and 80% loan, if the project incorporated nature based solutions, five additional 5% of that total project cost could be grant. So that could be a big you know, that if it’s a multi million dollar project, that’s a lot of money, that grant, not alone. So the Water Development Board is definitely encouraging nature based solutions in the way that they are spending their money. So go to align our project to put them in the best position for funding.

Unknown Speaker 28:37
Okay? And then key takeaways, nature based solution for flood resilience. They have more benefits than mono functional blood infrastructure, and we need to start planning for them. A lot of times these

Unknown Speaker 28:51
things are just seen as, oh, we can add those on once we get to design, but we need to be considering them in planning so that we’re setting up and making the the

Unknown Speaker 29:01
right decisions to build the strategy of how this project will be funded, to start getting the right partners involved early.

Unknown Speaker 29:09
And then, like I said, they offer additional funding opportunities because of all of the CO benefits, Parks and Wildlife. They want to build new state parks. They want to build recreation opportunities. Can we partner with them in alignment with the flood

Unknown Speaker 29:25
mitigation projects that we’re already working on? So that’s the type of scale and partnerships that we want to encourage. The Nature Conservancy, duck gun, limited Parks and Wildlife, these are all different organizations that want to fund projects. So how can we align our efforts?

Unknown Speaker 29:45
And then that’s it. We’re here for questions. I got a question. So all this stuff I normally look at projects we talk about benefit, cost analysis based system. Do you all see that these nature based, nature based solutions, cost?

Unknown Speaker 30:00
More or less than other traditionals. And then when you factor in the nature based solutions, if they do cost more, do you have to factor in all of the long term costs associated with that project, or other things like that? I think all of us want to see stuff be put in, put back in nature as best it can. Reality it is.

Unknown Speaker 0:02
By

Unknown Speaker 0:05
dying.

Unknown Speaker 0:07
Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Sabine regional flood Planning Group. Today is February 23 2026

Unknown Speaker 0:17
we’ll go ahead and call the meeting to order. I have 134 apologize. I think I was a little bit hearty for getting here. So

Unknown Speaker 0:30
with that, we’ll move on to agenda item two. Roll Call Jeff

Unknown Speaker 0:35
bill, Bruce,

Unknown Speaker 0:39
Johnny Trahan here.

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Jim mullanes Here,

Unknown Speaker 0:46
dad McKee

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woman now.

Unknown Speaker 0:53
Doug Manning is here, Nikki Davis,

Unknown Speaker 1:02
Alvin Bradley,

Unknown Speaker 1:07
Michelle Falcon here, Travis Williams here, Jeff Rogers, rd Griffin here, Ross Gordon, I’m here. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 1:20
Hey. Present. Don voting members, Kathy Salceda,

Unknown Speaker 1:29
Daniel Martinez,

Unknown Speaker 1:34
Andrea Sanders,

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Bob Baker,

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Trey Walker, Watson and

Unknown Speaker 1:46
Katie cosler

Unknown Speaker 1:49
Here,

Unknown Speaker 1:52
Lone Ranger. All

Unknown Speaker 1:56
right, I’m just looking through the list for the people who are online as well. We’ve got a phone number, a, 903-844-9652,

Unknown Speaker 2:07
that ring a bell for anybody?

Unknown Speaker 2:21
Thank you. We’ll

Unknown Speaker 2:35
go ahead and move on to

Unknown Speaker 2:39
the next. Agenda item public comments. Agenda Item three, is there anybody online or in person today that would like to make any public comments

Unknown Speaker 2:48
that would be behind?

Unknown Speaker 2:54
Hearing none. We’ll move on. So discussion approval of minutes

Unknown Speaker 2:59
previously circulated, you should have the board members should receive the minutes for the December 15, 2025, meeting.

Unknown Speaker 3:08
They’re also included in your packet. Are there any comments or changes or anything on the minutes as presented?

Unknown Speaker 3:18
Hearing, none. I would entertain a motion to approve. The December 15, 2025, minutes

Unknown Speaker 3:27
second.

Unknown Speaker 3:29
Got a motion from Johnny a second from Michelle,

Unknown Speaker 3:35
all those in favor, say Aye.

Unknown Speaker 3:38
Any opposed? Say, nay.

Unknown Speaker 3:42
Motion passes, all right.

Unknown Speaker 3:46
Agenda Item five, update from the chair. I’ll have anything other than in your package. You should see

Unknown Speaker 3:54
kind of the invoices to date that we’ve asked that SRA has paid on behalf of the group for reimbursement. Matt, I think everything is in line right now. I don’t know that we’ve received any updated invoices from you guys, from freak Nichols, at this time again, just real quick. Initial balance was 2.1 5 million, and

Unknown Speaker 4:15
we’ve got a balance of 1,557,000

Unknown Speaker 4:18
left. So

Unknown Speaker 4:21
if y’all have any, get them or review them, get them passed through. But I think water zone board’s been much quicker, as well as our internal process of getting everything turned around and getting all things as soon as possible. So

Unknown Speaker 4:35
with that, I’ll move on to Agenda Item six update from the Texas Water Development Board, Amy. I’ll turn it over to you.

Unknown Speaker 4:46
Good morning, everybody. The

Unknown Speaker 4:49
technical memorandum was due to the board on January 7. We issued administrative completeness reviews, and staff have notified. It notified.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
With our disputes, deed to task five day, we will provide informal comments in summer 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:06
we posted an SME for small communities, frequently asked question document on the second cycle flood planning website. Topics include background information, timeline and general questions. The ordered list of SMEs for the Texas Water Development Board to perform. Perform under task IB is due on or before March 26 2026 prior to submission, regional flood planning groups should approve the FME list as well as the metric user determines following rural communities with limited resources were the FM ease before and by twdb, a reminder an email was sent on January 20 the

Unknown Speaker 5:41
scope of work and community affirmation forms for all FME s on the FMI list performed by the Texas Water Development Board is due on April 24 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:50
a reminder, the goal of task 4c performance of flood management evaluations is for regional flood planning groups to perform a subset of potential FM es included in task for a and in doing so, identify and evaluate additional fmps or FMS is that could be recommended under task five A, you have flexibility in showing which identified FME should be formed under task 4c and to prove that list at a regular regional flood planning group meeting, we contracted with the Texas A and M Agra Life Extension Service to create a model for calculating economic losses due to flooding events on agricultural lands. This project is now complete, and the tool and the guidance document have been published on our website,

Unknown Speaker 6:32
and that’s all I have. Let me know if you have any questions.

Unknown Speaker 6:38
All right, does anybody have any questions for Katie at this

Unknown Speaker 6:43
time. Katie the FIU piece for the FIS, 2627

Unknown Speaker 6:48
the webinar that was scheduled through Friday was canceled. Can you provide any update on when that FIA when we can expect the

Unknown Speaker 7:00
FIU P to be released.

Unknown Speaker 7:04
There isn’t like that email was the update? Like, we don’t have it ready yet, but hopefully soon, like, we’re scheduling these webinars for a reason, so hopefully it will be pretty soon that it will be posted for public comment.

Unknown Speaker 7:17
Thank you. Bye.

Unknown Speaker 7:24
Any other questions,

Unknown Speaker 7:27
not we’ll move on to Agenda Item seven for Doug Manning nature’s regional Flood Safety Group for tour. Sure attended the natures meeting last week. We went through and talked about all the projects that we were going to submit they were going to submit. They had quite a bit of a discussion on nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 7:52
We touched briefly on the separate pot of money that Matt and I were actually discussing before the meeting for the small rural communities. And that was explained to the board as well. And so

Unknown Speaker 8:06
about it, I feel like we, there are a meeting ahead of us. Mostly there they

Unknown Speaker 8:12
got a

Unknown Speaker 8:15
good definition of rural communities.

Unknown Speaker 8:18
They seem to, they seem to. That gave me a little concern, because something’s vague. It’s normally for a reason. It always gives me some concern.

Unknown Speaker 8:31
Okay, thank you, Doug. We’ll move on to Agenda Item eight,

Unknown Speaker 8:36
presentation of nature based solutions. Allison, I will turn it over to you. Okay, thank you, Travis, so you guys are all familiar with me, but I’m here with Justin comes back. He is the Nature Conservancy.

Unknown Speaker 8:50
We have been working principles in the Nature Conservancy have been working together to create a guidance manual on nature based solutions. Ultimate goal is to teach communities, non elected government officials, city engineers, county engineers, regional flood planning groups, what nature based solutions are and how they can be used for flood resilience. Our focus is much more flood resilience, flood mitigation, less so water quality. They absolutely have a water quality benefit, and a lot has been written with that angle, but the intention of our guidance is to provide more information on the flood mitigation benefits that each big solution can provide. So

Unknown Speaker 9:37
I

Unknown Speaker 9:39
am having trouble with my my zoom, so I won’t be able to share my screen. If you can follow along in your packet. We’ll walk through together and Allison, I’ll stop jumping. Just a note there. I remember there was a couple meetings back, maybe about eight to 10 months back, where Pat had actually asked about these. I know y’all been working on some updates. So.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Just kind of follow up yes to his

Unknown Speaker 10:03
request, I guess, at that point in time as well. And there was a conference we were going to try to end the scheduling didn’t work out.

Unknown Speaker 10:12
We’ve

Unknown Speaker 10:13
been talking about this for a while. We have

Unknown Speaker 10:17
it’s, I mean, ultimately, there is a ton that has been written. Thank you. There’s a ton that’s been written about this topic, and our goal has been to synthesize a lot of the research make it easier to understand in more of a flow of project development. So go ahead and get started.

Unknown Speaker 10:44
This

Unknown Speaker 10:46
is you? Okay, wonderful. Thank you. One time I can give it over,

Unknown Speaker 10:51
okay, oh, wonderful, I’ll have you Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:10
Have your mouth. You

Unknown Speaker 11:16
know,

Unknown Speaker 11:21
sorry about that. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:28
Okay, all right, thanks for the intro, Allison, nice to meet all of you happy to be here. Thank you for your time. I’m going to talk a little bit about the purpose of this. Allison touched on it briefly. Go into a little bit more detail, offer a very brief definition. Folks have been talking about this for a long time. We want to offer some clarity on what we’re talking about today and why this project is happening. I’ll hand it over to Alison and talk a little bit about the publishing schedule, what’s actually in this document, and how to promote it through your efforts here and local communities and through the regional flood planning and just a few key takeaways in there.

Unknown Speaker 12:07
So one of the purposes of this document stemmed from the realization that a lot of folks aren’t really familiar with what nature based approaches to flood mitigation are. The Texas Water Development Board looked at the state, the first day flood plan, they saw some

Unknown Speaker 12:23
uncertainties in what these are, and only saw eight nature based solutions project in the plan. Now that’s a little bit of misleading. Those are just eight projects that were in the plan that were identified as nature based solutions, but if you recall in those tables, there’s a column that says, percent nature based there were, I think, 212 or 202 and 12 or 202

Unknown Speaker 12:44
total projects that had a non zero number or percent nature, based by cost, right? So these are ideas that are out there that are in the plan. We’re trying to build this up, provide this manual for that purpose, to increase the number of these projects and future plans, future regional plans, and across the state. So

Unknown Speaker 13:03
what are the specific goals of this project? Nature based solutions aren’t new. They’ve been around for a long time. We’ve been using nature to solve problems for longer than anybody in this room has been around.

Unknown Speaker 13:15
There’s a lot written on nature based solutions. There’s a lot written on that topic, but there are less things focused specifically on using them to address flood risk.

Unknown Speaker 13:27
There’s also a lot, not as many, that are written specifically for the state of Texas. So the purpose of that is to take all of that research, pull it together, get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense for the Texas context, and also focus on that flood risk resilience aspect of it, right? The types of projects that are used in nature to solve the flood problem put those in that plan. The second goal was to provide some strategies and tools, right? These are hands on things. These are things that communities can look to use to

Unknown Speaker 13:55
kind of overcome some of the challenges or the barriers that are associated with a new approach or a new way of thinking about,

Unknown Speaker 14:02
you know, addressing our flood problems,

Unknown Speaker 14:05
those barriers and challenges weren’t just pulled from some academic article, from some textbook or, you know, just from our heads. We surveyed. We had a statewide survey that had close to 300 responses to it. We talked with folks who work at academic institutions, and public agencies and state city offices that have worked on these types of projects and have a lot of experience on the coast, inland, dry areas, wet areas of the state, you name it, across the state. We talked to those folks and as well as like looking at the research, right? What is the Army Corps of Engineers said about this? What have other groups said about these types of approaches, and we pulled that together to, you know, try and structure this document about addressing those barriers and challenges to these projects. And then three, we want to, we want this manual to support the implementation of these types of projects at the local level and through regional flood planning. So we’re actually talking to every regional flood planning group. And.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
About this manual, try to highlight it and then talk about some ways to move through that

Unknown Speaker 15:07
intended users. Allison covered this. You all local government officials, city engineers, floodplain managers, are a big one,

Unknown Speaker 15:15
practitioners and developers, right? We are targeting this at a local official, but this will also have importance for people who are actually out there, building and developing properties, putting projects on the ground, developing those types of things as a certified floodplain manager. I’m particularly interested in this because floodplain managers have been talking about maintaining the beneficial use of floodplains for a very long time, longer than the term nature based solutions has been around. So that is one of those key critical ways in which we can reduce flood risk now, as well as not add to flood risk in the future. And that’s also a nature based solution here. So that’s another audience for this manual.

Unknown Speaker 15:55
I’ve talked about this a lot.

Unknown Speaker 15:58
There are a lot of long definitions for nature based solutions, most of them, I fall asleep while trying to read them. I kind of lose interest. In short, you can just think about it as using nature to solve the problem, right? Using nature is some kind of natural process to solve an issue that we have. And again, we’re focused on flood risk here, but the added benefit of these types of projects that you get other co benefits, right? Our communities have flooding issues, but they’re not the only issues we’re dealing with. We deal with water quality issues. We deal with lack of access to green space and air quality issues. We deal with public health and community health issues. Water supply issues is a big one in the state. Drought hits us. Sometimes, flood hits us. Sometimes. These are the types of solutions, the types of projects that can help chip away at multiple problems while addressing that primary issue of flooding to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 16:48
Next slide, please.

Unknown Speaker 16:53
So when we talk about this, we’re very much aware we’re not starting with a blank slate. We have a lot of existing infrastructure. We also know that it’s not always going to be the right answer in the right place, but the important thing is to think about this in a planning stage, in the modeling stage, to see where are these opportunities, where it can be put in these types of projects. For example, I have noticed in your plan, you have a couple of sections on property acquisition and reclaiming that space for floodplain storage. That’s great, right? You need to avoid, you know, you have a large usable space. If you take a group of properties that are all voluntarily, you know, coming in to get themselves removed from that flood risk. And you can create an asset for a community with that. Or you can create a natural space, right? You can put, create a place to store water, slow it down, infiltrate it.

Unknown Speaker 17:40
You know, that’s not an entirely natural approach. That’s more of a hybrid approach, right? It takes some engineering to recreate and reconstruct that floodplain area, but in some areas, you’re not going to have that option. You’re constrained by space, you already have existing infrastructure, you have that levy that you have an entire city depending on, right? This isn’t going to be the right solution in all of those right places, but you have to think about this as that spectrum. Where do we capture the most value for a project, not necessarily looking at the cost right? We only have to get the 1.01 to be a benefit to be cost effective. Could we be more cost effective? Could we get more value out of that project, thinking about these types of projects, next slide please, just

Unknown Speaker 18:21
a couple of examples. And we use these because the two most common types of example, types of projects in the state plan is channel improvements. So largely, we kind of think about, you know, Grease lightning racing in the movie Greece, right? That trapezoidal channel that we’re so familiar with all over the place, and then the other is a detention pond, right? This is an example of what those might look like in a more nature based approach. Significant engineering and design needed for both of these still need to meet that same standard, you know, of performance, but you then wind up with more green space of getting more, you know, water quality, environmental benefits, recreational benefits, at the same time that you’re providing the flood mitigation benefits on those rare but sometimes increasingly frequent occasions when you do need that flood risk benefit, right? It’s not just sitting there not doing a whole lot for us unless there’s a flood. It’s kind of providing some more more value to us. I

Unknown Speaker 19:22
won’t go through this whole thing, but we kind of think about projects as structural and non structural. Anything that’s moving earth is kind of structural. We have at the watershed scale. These are the three types of NBS projects that are in the manual at the watershed scale. These are larger scale. They’re kind of collecting water from elsewhere, from upstream, almost think about it as riverine flooding. You have your stream restoration, floodplain restoration, levee setbacks, wetland restoration, fire Lake restoration, that one might not be too applicable to this area, but these are those large areas that are connected in a system that can.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Hold water, store it infiltrate it will slow it down. Really provide some downstream or sometimes depending on the hydrology, upstream flood relief your neighborhood. Nature

Unknown Speaker 20:11
based solutions is kind of an umbrella term. A lot of these are more what people think of as lid low impact development, green infrastructure, green storm water infrastructure, those types of approaches, you really try to manage the water that’s existing on that single site. You’re not really going to reduce flood risk from downstream or elsewhere. But if you implement those at scale, across a catchment, across a watershed, you can really take the peak off of a large flood event. We have some examples

Unknown Speaker 20:40
in the manual, where that has been modeled and that has been shown.

Unknown Speaker 20:45
And then coastal

Unknown Speaker 20:47
Glo has, we have a lot of resources from the Glo in here, and there’s been a lot of good things going on the Texas coast, living shorelines, break waters, things like that. That kind of add to recreational commercial fisheries. Really kind of protect some existing flood infrastructure by using some nature and some restoration to do that sort of thing. Next slide, and then

Unknown Speaker 21:06
there’s a non structural I mentioned the property acquisition. That’s one of them, you know, regulating development in floodplains, right? What is that minimum standard of floodplain regulation so that we can develop safely and not add to future flood risk and not add to those issues.

Unknown Speaker 21:22
Even simple things like promoting native vegetation can go a long way towards reducing irrigation needs, towards reducing water needs, towards the resilience of the project you’re putting in place to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 21:35
Next slide, I’m

Unknown Speaker 21:39
gonna hand it off Allison,

Unknown Speaker 21:41
so we’ve been talking about this for a while. You’ll mention that earlier, the board has been doing a great job promoting this topic and the manual for a few years now. Spring 2026 is our goal for a draft for public comment, which will have 30 days for public comment, and then a final draft later this summer, I included the website here for reference. This is where it will be posted once it is ready, and obviously I will share that with you all specifically.

Unknown Speaker 22:12
And then this is what we’re calling our framework. This is a visual representation of everything that’s in the guidance manual. So we are structuring this based on the flow of project development, with the first section being, what do you need to know to get started? A lot of infrastructure projects end up with the same solutions that was in mind from the beginning. So this initiating section is really about wrapping your mind around what you need to get started in order for the solution to be different than the concrete line channel that was going to happen, because that’s the only thing you had in mind from the beginning. So we talked about guiding principles and just the thought process of how it’s recommended that practitioners approach flood infrastructure, and we talk about funding, obviously, that’s important to everybody. One of the largest selling points of nature based solutions is that it can unlock a lot more funding opportunities. The FIS is great, but what if we can pair that with EPA funding? There’s a lot of funding sources that they are trying to spend,

Unknown Speaker 23:26
and we just need to have the right project for all of these other organizations to get involved. So there’s a whole chapter dedicated to funding and how you can bring different funding sources together when you have all of these additional benefits. If you’re concrete lining the channel, seeing the boogeyman in the room, that’s that’s not something that all these other organizations want to to fund, and then ordinances, incentives, regulations from a local government perspective, how can you

Unknown Speaker 24:02
encourage or force land developers to make wise decisions, make the decisions you want them to, and implement some of these projects on private land beyond the county or the city, always having to be willing to fund them. And then we get into planning and selecting the right project on the right site, and understanding that gives a little bit more, little bit more engineering and implementing, we’re talking about permitting, design, construction and then maintenance. This is a question that we get a lot. How do we maintain these truthfully, many communities don’t have enough resources to maintain what they have, but ideally, with nature based solutions, they can start to maintain themselves. Wetlands don’t need to be actively mowed in the way that a con, you know, a grass line channel would need to be actively maintained. So those obviously aren’t one to one connections, but the hope is that nature can start to maintain itself.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Up, and this can be an easier,

Unknown Speaker 25:03
easier maintenance path for the lives of the project.

Unknown Speaker 25:07
Okay, so then, getting very specific to regional flood planning, I threw a lot of ideas out here. The two that I want to spend the most time focusing on are unfolded. And this is related to identifying SMEs, and then what we’ll talk about later is performing the SMEs and identifying the fnps. So when we’re talking with different communities on what is a possibility to solve your flood risk, you let us know that it’s flooding. When we’re sitting down to Newton County, how can we stop the flooding in your area? What are some options?

Unknown Speaker 25:44
Our hope is to have those conversations and start to educate and again, not lead them down the path of this is the only option. But what can we think about and what other benefits could you provide? Do you need a park in this area? Could we build a storm water park that floods when it floods, but the rest of the time, it’s a park for the community, and not just a big hole in the ground. And then while we’re doing engineering work that the state is paying for, let’s create some solutions that have multiple benefits.

Unknown Speaker 26:20
And then the bottom row ties to where in the guidance manual that these resources are found, which will be more valuable once you have the manual and credit

Unknown Speaker 26:32
again, okay. And then this is me talking to myself and Matt, given that we are technical people in the room. But the key criteria to capture MDS

Unknown Speaker 26:45
and capture whether or not a project does incorporate nature based solutions are these two fields, the percent by cost and then other or multiple benefits. Those are different buckets that give you points in the state flood claim rankings. So it’s important that any project that does incorporate nature based solutions is well documented, so that we can capture and make sure those points

Unknown Speaker 27:12
are obtained when it comes to the listing. So anything that’s already in our plan that as property acquisition that is considered 100% nature based solution that was already reflected. So it’ll be on Matt and I to make sure that all of the new fmps that we produce FOLLOW the guidance that we’re also writing. So this is how we can tell the board that we have nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 27:42
Side note on this,

Unknown Speaker 27:45
and going back to funding, with the at least the last round of FIS, the

Unknown Speaker 27:50
small and rural communities that incorporated nature based solutions were able to get 5% extra grant money compared to loan. So if they were only going to get, you know, 20% grant and 80% loan, if the project incorporated nature based solutions, five additional 5% of that total project cost could be grant. So that could be a big you know, that if it’s a multi million dollar project, that’s a lot of money, that grant, not alone. So the Water Development Board is definitely encouraging nature based solutions in the way that they are spending their money. So go to align our project to put them in the best position for funding.

Unknown Speaker 28:37
Okay? And then key takeaways, nature based solution for flood resilience. They have more benefits than mono functional blood infrastructure, and we need to start planning for them. A lot of times these

Unknown Speaker 28:51
things are just seen as, oh, we can add those on once we get to design, but we need to be considering them in planning so that we’re setting up and making the the

Unknown Speaker 29:01
right decisions to build the strategy of how this project will be funded, to start getting the right partners involved early.

Unknown Speaker 29:09
And then, like I said, they offer additional funding opportunities because of all of the CO benefits, Parks and Wildlife. They want to build new state parks. They want to build recreation opportunities. Can we partner with them in alignment with the flood

Unknown Speaker 29:25
mitigation projects that we’re already working on? So that’s the type of scale and partnerships that we want to encourage. The Nature Conservancy, duck gun, limited Parks and Wildlife, these are all different organizations that want to fund projects. So how can we align our efforts?

Unknown Speaker 29:45
And then that’s it. We’re here for questions. I got a question. So all this stuff I normally look at projects we talk about benefit, cost analysis based system. Do you all see that these nature based, nature based solutions, cost?

Unknown Speaker 30:00
More or less than other traditionals. And then when you factor in the nature based solutions, if they do cost more, do you have to factor in all of the long term costs associated with that project, or other things like that? I think all of us want to see stuff be put in, put back in nature as best it can. Reality it is.

Unknown Speaker 0:02
By

Unknown Speaker 0:05
dying.

Unknown Speaker 0:07
Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Sabine regional flood Planning Group. Today is February 23 2026

Unknown Speaker 0:17
we’ll go ahead and call the meeting to order. I have 134 apologize. I think I was a little bit hearty for getting here. So

Unknown Speaker 0:30
with that, we’ll move on to agenda item two. Roll Call Jeff

Unknown Speaker 0:35
bill, Bruce,

Unknown Speaker 0:39
Johnny Trahan here.

Unknown Speaker 0:42
Jim mullanes Here,

Unknown Speaker 0:46
dad McKee

Unknown Speaker 0:48
woman now.

Unknown Speaker 0:53
Doug Manning is here, Nikki Davis,

Unknown Speaker 1:02
Alvin Bradley,

Unknown Speaker 1:07
Michelle Falcon here, Travis Williams here, Jeff Rogers, rd Griffin here, Ross Gordon, I’m here. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 1:20
Hey. Present. Don voting members, Kathy Salceda,

Unknown Speaker 1:29
Daniel Martinez,

Unknown Speaker 1:34
Andrea Sanders,

Unknown Speaker 1:38
Bob Baker,

Unknown Speaker 1:42
Trey Walker, Watson and

Unknown Speaker 1:46
Katie cosler

Unknown Speaker 1:49
Here,

Unknown Speaker 1:52
Lone Ranger. All

Unknown Speaker 1:56
right, I’m just looking through the list for the people who are online as well. We’ve got a phone number, a, 903-844-9652,

Unknown Speaker 2:07
that ring a bell for anybody?

Unknown Speaker 2:21
Thank you. We’ll

Unknown Speaker 2:35
go ahead and move on to

Unknown Speaker 2:39
the next. Agenda item public comments. Agenda Item three, is there anybody online or in person today that would like to make any public comments

Unknown Speaker 2:48
that would be behind?

Unknown Speaker 2:54
Hearing none. We’ll move on. So discussion approval of minutes

Unknown Speaker 2:59
previously circulated, you should have the board members should receive the minutes for the December 15, 2025, meeting.

Unknown Speaker 3:08
They’re also included in your packet. Are there any comments or changes or anything on the minutes as presented?

Unknown Speaker 3:18
Hearing, none. I would entertain a motion to approve. The December 15, 2025, minutes

Unknown Speaker 3:27
second.

Unknown Speaker 3:29
Got a motion from Johnny a second from Michelle,

Unknown Speaker 3:35
all those in favor, say Aye.

Unknown Speaker 3:38
Any opposed? Say, nay.

Unknown Speaker 3:42
Motion passes, all right.

Unknown Speaker 3:46
Agenda Item five, update from the chair. I’ll have anything other than in your package. You should see

Unknown Speaker 3:54
kind of the invoices to date that we’ve asked that SRA has paid on behalf of the group for reimbursement. Matt, I think everything is in line right now. I don’t know that we’ve received any updated invoices from you guys, from freak Nichols, at this time again, just real quick. Initial balance was 2.1 5 million, and

Unknown Speaker 4:15
we’ve got a balance of 1,557,000

Unknown Speaker 4:18
left. So

Unknown Speaker 4:21
if y’all have any, get them or review them, get them passed through. But I think water zone board’s been much quicker, as well as our internal process of getting everything turned around and getting all things as soon as possible. So

Unknown Speaker 4:35
with that, I’ll move on to Agenda Item six update from the Texas Water Development Board, Amy. I’ll turn it over to you.

Unknown Speaker 4:46
Good morning, everybody. The

Unknown Speaker 4:49
technical memorandum was due to the board on January 7. We issued administrative completeness reviews, and staff have notified. It notified.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
With our disputes, deed to task five day, we will provide informal comments in summer 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:06
we posted an SME for small communities, frequently asked question document on the second cycle flood planning website. Topics include background information, timeline and general questions. The ordered list of SMEs for the Texas Water Development Board to perform. Perform under task IB is due on or before March 26 2026 prior to submission, regional flood planning groups should approve the FME list as well as the metric user determines following rural communities with limited resources were the FM ease before and by twdb, a reminder an email was sent on January 20 the

Unknown Speaker 5:41
scope of work and community affirmation forms for all FME s on the FMI list performed by the Texas Water Development Board is due on April 24 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:50
a reminder, the goal of task 4c performance of flood management evaluations is for regional flood planning groups to perform a subset of potential FM es included in task for a and in doing so, identify and evaluate additional fmps or FMS is that could be recommended under task five A, you have flexibility in showing which identified FME should be formed under task 4c and to prove that list at a regular regional flood planning group meeting, we contracted with the Texas A and M Agra Life Extension Service to create a model for calculating economic losses due to flooding events on agricultural lands. This project is now complete, and the tool and the guidance document have been published on our website,

Unknown Speaker 6:32
and that’s all I have. Let me know if you have any questions.

Unknown Speaker 6:38
All right, does anybody have any questions for Katie at this

Unknown Speaker 6:43
time. Katie the FIU piece for the FIS, 2627

Unknown Speaker 6:48
the webinar that was scheduled through Friday was canceled. Can you provide any update on when that FIA when we can expect the

Unknown Speaker 7:00
FIU P to be released.

Unknown Speaker 7:04
There isn’t like that email was the update? Like, we don’t have it ready yet, but hopefully soon, like, we’re scheduling these webinars for a reason, so hopefully it will be pretty soon that it will be posted for public comment.

Unknown Speaker 7:17
Thank you. Bye.

Unknown Speaker 7:24
Any other questions,

Unknown Speaker 7:27
not we’ll move on to Agenda Item seven for Doug Manning nature’s regional Flood Safety Group for tour. Sure attended the natures meeting last week. We went through and talked about all the projects that we were going to submit they were going to submit. They had quite a bit of a discussion on nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 7:52
We touched briefly on the separate pot of money that Matt and I were actually discussing before the meeting for the small rural communities. And that was explained to the board as well. And so

Unknown Speaker 8:06
about it, I feel like we, there are a meeting ahead of us. Mostly there they

Unknown Speaker 8:12
got a

Unknown Speaker 8:15
good definition of rural communities.

Unknown Speaker 8:18
They seem to, they seem to. That gave me a little concern, because something’s vague. It’s normally for a reason. It always gives me some concern.

Unknown Speaker 8:31
Okay, thank you, Doug. We’ll move on to Agenda Item eight,

Unknown Speaker 8:36
presentation of nature based solutions. Allison, I will turn it over to you. Okay, thank you, Travis, so you guys are all familiar with me, but I’m here with Justin comes back. He is the Nature Conservancy.

Unknown Speaker 8:50
We have been working principles in the Nature Conservancy have been working together to create a guidance manual on nature based solutions. Ultimate goal is to teach communities, non elected government officials, city engineers, county engineers, regional flood planning groups, what nature based solutions are and how they can be used for flood resilience. Our focus is much more flood resilience, flood mitigation, less so water quality. They absolutely have a water quality benefit, and a lot has been written with that angle, but the intention of our guidance is to provide more information on the flood mitigation benefits that each big solution can provide. So

Unknown Speaker 9:37
I

Unknown Speaker 9:39
am having trouble with my my zoom, so I won’t be able to share my screen. If you can follow along in your packet. We’ll walk through together and Allison, I’ll stop jumping. Just a note there. I remember there was a couple meetings back, maybe about eight to 10 months back, where Pat had actually asked about these. I know y’all been working on some updates. So.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Just kind of follow up yes to his

Unknown Speaker 10:03
request, I guess, at that point in time as well. And there was a conference we were going to try to end the scheduling didn’t work out.

Unknown Speaker 10:12
We’ve

Unknown Speaker 10:13
been talking about this for a while. We have

Unknown Speaker 10:17
it’s, I mean, ultimately, there is a ton that has been written. Thank you. There’s a ton that’s been written about this topic, and our goal has been to synthesize a lot of the research make it easier to understand in more of a flow of project development. So go ahead and get started.

Unknown Speaker 10:44
This

Unknown Speaker 10:46
is you? Okay, wonderful. Thank you. One time I can give it over,

Unknown Speaker 10:51
okay, oh, wonderful, I’ll have you Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:10
Have your mouth. You

Unknown Speaker 11:16
know,

Unknown Speaker 11:21
sorry about that. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:28
Okay, all right, thanks for the intro, Allison, nice to meet all of you happy to be here. Thank you for your time. I’m going to talk a little bit about the purpose of this. Allison touched on it briefly. Go into a little bit more detail, offer a very brief definition. Folks have been talking about this for a long time. We want to offer some clarity on what we’re talking about today and why this project is happening. I’ll hand it over to Alison and talk a little bit about the publishing schedule, what’s actually in this document, and how to promote it through your efforts here and local communities and through the regional flood planning and just a few key takeaways in there.

Unknown Speaker 12:07
So one of the purposes of this document stemmed from the realization that a lot of folks aren’t really familiar with what nature based approaches to flood mitigation are. The Texas Water Development Board looked at the state, the first day flood plan, they saw some

Unknown Speaker 12:23
uncertainties in what these are, and only saw eight nature based solutions project in the plan. Now that’s a little bit of misleading. Those are just eight projects that were in the plan that were identified as nature based solutions, but if you recall in those tables, there’s a column that says, percent nature based there were, I think, 212 or 202 and 12 or 202

Unknown Speaker 12:44
total projects that had a non zero number or percent nature, based by cost, right? So these are ideas that are out there that are in the plan. We’re trying to build this up, provide this manual for that purpose, to increase the number of these projects and future plans, future regional plans, and across the state. So

Unknown Speaker 13:03
what are the specific goals of this project? Nature based solutions aren’t new. They’ve been around for a long time. We’ve been using nature to solve problems for longer than anybody in this room has been around.

Unknown Speaker 13:15
There’s a lot written on nature based solutions. There’s a lot written on that topic, but there are less things focused specifically on using them to address flood risk.

Unknown Speaker 13:27
There’s also a lot, not as many, that are written specifically for the state of Texas. So the purpose of that is to take all of that research, pull it together, get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense for the Texas context, and also focus on that flood risk resilience aspect of it, right? The types of projects that are used in nature to solve the flood problem put those in that plan. The second goal was to provide some strategies and tools, right? These are hands on things. These are things that communities can look to use to

Unknown Speaker 13:55
kind of overcome some of the challenges or the barriers that are associated with a new approach or a new way of thinking about,

Unknown Speaker 14:02
you know, addressing our flood problems,

Unknown Speaker 14:05
those barriers and challenges weren’t just pulled from some academic article, from some textbook or, you know, just from our heads. We surveyed. We had a statewide survey that had close to 300 responses to it. We talked with folks who work at academic institutions, and public agencies and state city offices that have worked on these types of projects and have a lot of experience on the coast, inland, dry areas, wet areas of the state, you name it, across the state. We talked to those folks and as well as like looking at the research, right? What is the Army Corps of Engineers said about this? What have other groups said about these types of approaches, and we pulled that together to, you know, try and structure this document about addressing those barriers and challenges to these projects. And then three, we want to, we want this manual to support the implementation of these types of projects at the local level and through regional flood planning. So we’re actually talking to every regional flood planning group. And.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
About this manual, try to highlight it and then talk about some ways to move through that

Unknown Speaker 15:07
intended users. Allison covered this. You all local government officials, city engineers, floodplain managers, are a big one,

Unknown Speaker 15:15
practitioners and developers, right? We are targeting this at a local official, but this will also have importance for people who are actually out there, building and developing properties, putting projects on the ground, developing those types of things as a certified floodplain manager. I’m particularly interested in this because floodplain managers have been talking about maintaining the beneficial use of floodplains for a very long time, longer than the term nature based solutions has been around. So that is one of those key critical ways in which we can reduce flood risk now, as well as not add to flood risk in the future. And that’s also a nature based solution here. So that’s another audience for this manual.

Unknown Speaker 15:55
I’ve talked about this a lot.

Unknown Speaker 15:58
There are a lot of long definitions for nature based solutions, most of them, I fall asleep while trying to read them. I kind of lose interest. In short, you can just think about it as using nature to solve the problem, right? Using nature is some kind of natural process to solve an issue that we have. And again, we’re focused on flood risk here, but the added benefit of these types of projects that you get other co benefits, right? Our communities have flooding issues, but they’re not the only issues we’re dealing with. We deal with water quality issues. We deal with lack of access to green space and air quality issues. We deal with public health and community health issues. Water supply issues is a big one in the state. Drought hits us. Sometimes, flood hits us. Sometimes. These are the types of solutions, the types of projects that can help chip away at multiple problems while addressing that primary issue of flooding to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 16:48
Next slide, please.

Unknown Speaker 16:53
So when we talk about this, we’re very much aware we’re not starting with a blank slate. We have a lot of existing infrastructure. We also know that it’s not always going to be the right answer in the right place, but the important thing is to think about this in a planning stage, in the modeling stage, to see where are these opportunities, where it can be put in these types of projects. For example, I have noticed in your plan, you have a couple of sections on property acquisition and reclaiming that space for floodplain storage. That’s great, right? You need to avoid, you know, you have a large usable space. If you take a group of properties that are all voluntarily, you know, coming in to get themselves removed from that flood risk. And you can create an asset for a community with that. Or you can create a natural space, right? You can put, create a place to store water, slow it down, infiltrate it.

Unknown Speaker 17:40
You know, that’s not an entirely natural approach. That’s more of a hybrid approach, right? It takes some engineering to recreate and reconstruct that floodplain area, but in some areas, you’re not going to have that option. You’re constrained by space, you already have existing infrastructure, you have that levy that you have an entire city depending on, right? This isn’t going to be the right solution in all of those right places, but you have to think about this as that spectrum. Where do we capture the most value for a project, not necessarily looking at the cost right? We only have to get the 1.01 to be a benefit to be cost effective. Could we be more cost effective? Could we get more value out of that project, thinking about these types of projects, next slide please, just

Unknown Speaker 18:21
a couple of examples. And we use these because the two most common types of example, types of projects in the state plan is channel improvements. So largely, we kind of think about, you know, Grease lightning racing in the movie Greece, right? That trapezoidal channel that we’re so familiar with all over the place, and then the other is a detention pond, right? This is an example of what those might look like in a more nature based approach. Significant engineering and design needed for both of these still need to meet that same standard, you know, of performance, but you then wind up with more green space of getting more, you know, water quality, environmental benefits, recreational benefits, at the same time that you’re providing the flood mitigation benefits on those rare but sometimes increasingly frequent occasions when you do need that flood risk benefit, right? It’s not just sitting there not doing a whole lot for us unless there’s a flood. It’s kind of providing some more more value to us. I

Unknown Speaker 19:22
won’t go through this whole thing, but we kind of think about projects as structural and non structural. Anything that’s moving earth is kind of structural. We have at the watershed scale. These are the three types of NBS projects that are in the manual at the watershed scale. These are larger scale. They’re kind of collecting water from elsewhere, from upstream, almost think about it as riverine flooding. You have your stream restoration, floodplain restoration, levee setbacks, wetland restoration, fire Lake restoration, that one might not be too applicable to this area, but these are those large areas that are connected in a system that can.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Hold water, store it infiltrate it will slow it down. Really provide some downstream or sometimes depending on the hydrology, upstream flood relief your neighborhood. Nature

Unknown Speaker 20:11
based solutions is kind of an umbrella term. A lot of these are more what people think of as lid low impact development, green infrastructure, green storm water infrastructure, those types of approaches, you really try to manage the water that’s existing on that single site. You’re not really going to reduce flood risk from downstream or elsewhere. But if you implement those at scale, across a catchment, across a watershed, you can really take the peak off of a large flood event. We have some examples

Unknown Speaker 20:40
in the manual, where that has been modeled and that has been shown.

Unknown Speaker 20:45
And then coastal

Unknown Speaker 20:47
Glo has, we have a lot of resources from the Glo in here, and there’s been a lot of good things going on the Texas coast, living shorelines, break waters, things like that. That kind of add to recreational commercial fisheries. Really kind of protect some existing flood infrastructure by using some nature and some restoration to do that sort of thing. Next slide, and then

Unknown Speaker 21:06
there’s a non structural I mentioned the property acquisition. That’s one of them, you know, regulating development in floodplains, right? What is that minimum standard of floodplain regulation so that we can develop safely and not add to future flood risk and not add to those issues.

Unknown Speaker 21:22
Even simple things like promoting native vegetation can go a long way towards reducing irrigation needs, towards reducing water needs, towards the resilience of the project you’re putting in place to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 21:35
Next slide, I’m

Unknown Speaker 21:39
gonna hand it off Allison,

Unknown Speaker 21:41
so we’ve been talking about this for a while. You’ll mention that earlier, the board has been doing a great job promoting this topic and the manual for a few years now. Spring 2026 is our goal for a draft for public comment, which will have 30 days for public comment, and then a final draft later this summer, I included the website here for reference. This is where it will be posted once it is ready, and obviously I will share that with you all specifically.

Unknown Speaker 22:12
And then this is what we’re calling our framework. This is a visual representation of everything that’s in the guidance manual. So we are structuring this based on the flow of project development, with the first section being, what do you need to know to get started? A lot of infrastructure projects end up with the same solutions that was in mind from the beginning. So this initiating section is really about wrapping your mind around what you need to get started in order for the solution to be different than the concrete line channel that was going to happen, because that’s the only thing you had in mind from the beginning. So we talked about guiding principles and just the thought process of how it’s recommended that practitioners approach flood infrastructure, and we talk about funding, obviously, that’s important to everybody. One of the largest selling points of nature based solutions is that it can unlock a lot more funding opportunities. The FIS is great, but what if we can pair that with EPA funding? There’s a lot of funding sources that they are trying to spend,

Unknown Speaker 23:26
and we just need to have the right project for all of these other organizations to get involved. So there’s a whole chapter dedicated to funding and how you can bring different funding sources together when you have all of these additional benefits. If you’re concrete lining the channel, seeing the boogeyman in the room, that’s that’s not something that all these other organizations want to to fund, and then ordinances, incentives, regulations from a local government perspective, how can you

Unknown Speaker 24:02
encourage or force land developers to make wise decisions, make the decisions you want them to, and implement some of these projects on private land beyond the county or the city, always having to be willing to fund them. And then we get into planning and selecting the right project on the right site, and understanding that gives a little bit more, little bit more engineering and implementing, we’re talking about permitting, design, construction and then maintenance. This is a question that we get a lot. How do we maintain these truthfully, many communities don’t have enough resources to maintain what they have, but ideally, with nature based solutions, they can start to maintain themselves. Wetlands don’t need to be actively mowed in the way that a con, you know, a grass line channel would need to be actively maintained. So those obviously aren’t one to one connections, but the hope is that nature can start to maintain itself.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Up, and this can be an easier,

Unknown Speaker 25:03
easier maintenance path for the lives of the project.

Unknown Speaker 25:07
Okay, so then, getting very specific to regional flood planning, I threw a lot of ideas out here. The two that I want to spend the most time focusing on are unfolded. And this is related to identifying SMEs, and then what we’ll talk about later is performing the SMEs and identifying the fnps. So when we’re talking with different communities on what is a possibility to solve your flood risk, you let us know that it’s flooding. When we’re sitting down to Newton County, how can we stop the flooding in your area? What are some options?

Unknown Speaker 25:44
Our hope is to have those conversations and start to educate and again, not lead them down the path of this is the only option. But what can we think about and what other benefits could you provide? Do you need a park in this area? Could we build a storm water park that floods when it floods, but the rest of the time, it’s a park for the community, and not just a big hole in the ground. And then while we’re doing engineering work that the state is paying for, let’s create some solutions that have multiple benefits.

Unknown Speaker 26:20
And then the bottom row ties to where in the guidance manual that these resources are found, which will be more valuable once you have the manual and credit

Unknown Speaker 26:32
again, okay. And then this is me talking to myself and Matt, given that we are technical people in the room. But the key criteria to capture MDS

Unknown Speaker 26:45
and capture whether or not a project does incorporate nature based solutions are these two fields, the percent by cost and then other or multiple benefits. Those are different buckets that give you points in the state flood claim rankings. So it’s important that any project that does incorporate nature based solutions is well documented, so that we can capture and make sure those points

Unknown Speaker 27:12
are obtained when it comes to the listing. So anything that’s already in our plan that as property acquisition that is considered 100% nature based solution that was already reflected. So it’ll be on Matt and I to make sure that all of the new fmps that we produce FOLLOW the guidance that we’re also writing. So this is how we can tell the board that we have nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 27:42
Side note on this,

Unknown Speaker 27:45
and going back to funding, with the at least the last round of FIS, the

Unknown Speaker 27:50
small and rural communities that incorporated nature based solutions were able to get 5% extra grant money compared to loan. So if they were only going to get, you know, 20% grant and 80% loan, if the project incorporated nature based solutions, five additional 5% of that total project cost could be grant. So that could be a big you know, that if it’s a multi million dollar project, that’s a lot of money, that grant, not alone. So the Water Development Board is definitely encouraging nature based solutions in the way that they are spending their money. So go to align our project to put them in the best position for funding.

Unknown Speaker 28:37
Okay? And then key takeaways, nature based solution for flood resilience. They have more benefits than mono functional blood infrastructure, and we need to start planning for them. A lot of times these

Unknown Speaker 28:51
things are just seen as, oh, we can add those on once we get to design, but we need to be considering them in planning so that we’re setting up and making the the

Unknown Speaker 29:01
right decisions to build the strategy of how this project will be funded, to start getting the right partners involved early.

Unknown Speaker 29:09
And then, like I said, they offer additional funding opportunities because of all of the CO benefits, Parks and Wildlife. They want to build new state parks. They want to build recreation opportunities. Can we partner with them in alignment with the flood

Unknown Speaker 29:25
mitigation projects that we’re already working on? So that’s the type of scale and partnerships that we want to encourage. The Nature Conservancy, duck gun, limited Parks and Wildlife, these are all different organizations that want to fund projects. So how can we align our efforts?

Unknown Speaker 29:45
And then that’s it. We’re here for questions. I got a question. So all this stuff I normally look at projects we talk about benefit, cost analysis based system. Do you all see that these nature based, nature based solutions, cost?

Unknown Speaker 30:00
More or less than other traditionals. And then when you factor in the nature based solutions, if they do cost more, do you have to factor in all of the long term costs associated with that project, or other things like that? I think all of us want to see stuff be put in, put back in nature as best it can. Reality it is.

Unknown Speaker 0:02
By

Unknown Speaker 0:05
dying.

Unknown Speaker 0:07
Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Sabine regional flood Planning Group. Today is February 23 2026

Unknown Speaker 0:17
we’ll go ahead and call the meeting to order. I have 134 apologize. I think I was a little bit hearty for getting here. So

Unknown Speaker 0:30
with that, we’ll move on to agenda item two. Roll Call Jeff

Unknown Speaker 0:35
bill, Bruce,

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Johnny Trahan here.

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Jim mullanes Here,

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dad McKee

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woman now.

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Doug Manning is here, Nikki Davis,

Unknown Speaker 1:02
Alvin Bradley,

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Michelle Falcon here, Travis Williams here, Jeff Rogers, rd Griffin here, Ross Gordon, I’m here. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 1:20
Hey. Present. Don voting members, Kathy Salceda,

Unknown Speaker 1:29
Daniel Martinez,

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Andrea Sanders,

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Bob Baker,

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Trey Walker, Watson and

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Katie cosler

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Here,

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Lone Ranger. All

Unknown Speaker 1:56
right, I’m just looking through the list for the people who are online as well. We’ve got a phone number, a, 903-844-9652,

Unknown Speaker 2:07
that ring a bell for anybody?

Unknown Speaker 2:21
Thank you. We’ll

Unknown Speaker 2:35
go ahead and move on to

Unknown Speaker 2:39
the next. Agenda item public comments. Agenda Item three, is there anybody online or in person today that would like to make any public comments

Unknown Speaker 2:48
that would be behind?

Unknown Speaker 2:54
Hearing none. We’ll move on. So discussion approval of minutes

Unknown Speaker 2:59
previously circulated, you should have the board members should receive the minutes for the December 15, 2025, meeting.

Unknown Speaker 3:08
They’re also included in your packet. Are there any comments or changes or anything on the minutes as presented?

Unknown Speaker 3:18
Hearing, none. I would entertain a motion to approve. The December 15, 2025, minutes

Unknown Speaker 3:27
second.

Unknown Speaker 3:29
Got a motion from Johnny a second from Michelle,

Unknown Speaker 3:35
all those in favor, say Aye.

Unknown Speaker 3:38
Any opposed? Say, nay.

Unknown Speaker 3:42
Motion passes, all right.

Unknown Speaker 3:46
Agenda Item five, update from the chair. I’ll have anything other than in your package. You should see

Unknown Speaker 3:54
kind of the invoices to date that we’ve asked that SRA has paid on behalf of the group for reimbursement. Matt, I think everything is in line right now. I don’t know that we’ve received any updated invoices from you guys, from freak Nichols, at this time again, just real quick. Initial balance was 2.1 5 million, and

Unknown Speaker 4:15
we’ve got a balance of 1,557,000

Unknown Speaker 4:18
left. So

Unknown Speaker 4:21
if y’all have any, get them or review them, get them passed through. But I think water zone board’s been much quicker, as well as our internal process of getting everything turned around and getting all things as soon as possible. So

Unknown Speaker 4:35
with that, I’ll move on to Agenda Item six update from the Texas Water Development Board, Amy. I’ll turn it over to you.

Unknown Speaker 4:46
Good morning, everybody. The

Unknown Speaker 4:49
technical memorandum was due to the board on January 7. We issued administrative completeness reviews, and staff have notified. It notified.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
With our disputes, deed to task five day, we will provide informal comments in summer 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:06
we posted an SME for small communities, frequently asked question document on the second cycle flood planning website. Topics include background information, timeline and general questions. The ordered list of SMEs for the Texas Water Development Board to perform. Perform under task IB is due on or before March 26 2026 prior to submission, regional flood planning groups should approve the FME list as well as the metric user determines following rural communities with limited resources were the FM ease before and by twdb, a reminder an email was sent on January 20 the

Unknown Speaker 5:41
scope of work and community affirmation forms for all FME s on the FMI list performed by the Texas Water Development Board is due on April 24 2026

Unknown Speaker 5:50
a reminder, the goal of task 4c performance of flood management evaluations is for regional flood planning groups to perform a subset of potential FM es included in task for a and in doing so, identify and evaluate additional fmps or FMS is that could be recommended under task five A, you have flexibility in showing which identified FME should be formed under task 4c and to prove that list at a regular regional flood planning group meeting, we contracted with the Texas A and M Agra Life Extension Service to create a model for calculating economic losses due to flooding events on agricultural lands. This project is now complete, and the tool and the guidance document have been published on our website,

Unknown Speaker 6:32
and that’s all I have. Let me know if you have any questions.

Unknown Speaker 6:38
All right, does anybody have any questions for Katie at this

Unknown Speaker 6:43
time. Katie the FIU piece for the FIS, 2627

Unknown Speaker 6:48
the webinar that was scheduled through Friday was canceled. Can you provide any update on when that FIA when we can expect the

Unknown Speaker 7:00
FIU P to be released.

Unknown Speaker 7:04
There isn’t like that email was the update? Like, we don’t have it ready yet, but hopefully soon, like, we’re scheduling these webinars for a reason, so hopefully it will be pretty soon that it will be posted for public comment.

Unknown Speaker 7:17
Thank you. Bye.

Unknown Speaker 7:24
Any other questions,

Unknown Speaker 7:27
not we’ll move on to Agenda Item seven for Doug Manning nature’s regional Flood Safety Group for tour. Sure attended the natures meeting last week. We went through and talked about all the projects that we were going to submit they were going to submit. They had quite a bit of a discussion on nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 7:52
We touched briefly on the separate pot of money that Matt and I were actually discussing before the meeting for the small rural communities. And that was explained to the board as well. And so

Unknown Speaker 8:06
about it, I feel like we, there are a meeting ahead of us. Mostly there they

Unknown Speaker 8:12
got a

Unknown Speaker 8:15
good definition of rural communities.

Unknown Speaker 8:18
They seem to, they seem to. That gave me a little concern, because something’s vague. It’s normally for a reason. It always gives me some concern.

Unknown Speaker 8:31
Okay, thank you, Doug. We’ll move on to Agenda Item eight,

Unknown Speaker 8:36
presentation of nature based solutions. Allison, I will turn it over to you. Okay, thank you, Travis, so you guys are all familiar with me, but I’m here with Justin comes back. He is the Nature Conservancy.

Unknown Speaker 8:50
We have been working principles in the Nature Conservancy have been working together to create a guidance manual on nature based solutions. Ultimate goal is to teach communities, non elected government officials, city engineers, county engineers, regional flood planning groups, what nature based solutions are and how they can be used for flood resilience. Our focus is much more flood resilience, flood mitigation, less so water quality. They absolutely have a water quality benefit, and a lot has been written with that angle, but the intention of our guidance is to provide more information on the flood mitigation benefits that each big solution can provide. So

Unknown Speaker 9:37
I

Unknown Speaker 9:39
am having trouble with my my zoom, so I won’t be able to share my screen. If you can follow along in your packet. We’ll walk through together and Allison, I’ll stop jumping. Just a note there. I remember there was a couple meetings back, maybe about eight to 10 months back, where Pat had actually asked about these. I know y’all been working on some updates. So.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Just kind of follow up yes to his

Unknown Speaker 10:03
request, I guess, at that point in time as well. And there was a conference we were going to try to end the scheduling didn’t work out.

Unknown Speaker 10:12
We’ve

Unknown Speaker 10:13
been talking about this for a while. We have

Unknown Speaker 10:17
it’s, I mean, ultimately, there is a ton that has been written. Thank you. There’s a ton that’s been written about this topic, and our goal has been to synthesize a lot of the research make it easier to understand in more of a flow of project development. So go ahead and get started.

Unknown Speaker 10:44
This

Unknown Speaker 10:46
is you? Okay, wonderful. Thank you. One time I can give it over,

Unknown Speaker 10:51
okay, oh, wonderful, I’ll have you Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:10
Have your mouth. You

Unknown Speaker 11:16
know,

Unknown Speaker 11:21
sorry about that. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 11:28
Okay, all right, thanks for the intro, Allison, nice to meet all of you happy to be here. Thank you for your time. I’m going to talk a little bit about the purpose of this. Allison touched on it briefly. Go into a little bit more detail, offer a very brief definition. Folks have been talking about this for a long time. We want to offer some clarity on what we’re talking about today and why this project is happening. I’ll hand it over to Alison and talk a little bit about the publishing schedule, what’s actually in this document, and how to promote it through your efforts here and local communities and through the regional flood planning and just a few key takeaways in there.

Unknown Speaker 12:07
So one of the purposes of this document stemmed from the realization that a lot of folks aren’t really familiar with what nature based approaches to flood mitigation are. The Texas Water Development Board looked at the state, the first day flood plan, they saw some

Unknown Speaker 12:23
uncertainties in what these are, and only saw eight nature based solutions project in the plan. Now that’s a little bit of misleading. Those are just eight projects that were in the plan that were identified as nature based solutions, but if you recall in those tables, there’s a column that says, percent nature based there were, I think, 212 or 202 and 12 or 202

Unknown Speaker 12:44
total projects that had a non zero number or percent nature, based by cost, right? So these are ideas that are out there that are in the plan. We’re trying to build this up, provide this manual for that purpose, to increase the number of these projects and future plans, future regional plans, and across the state. So

Unknown Speaker 13:03
what are the specific goals of this project? Nature based solutions aren’t new. They’ve been around for a long time. We’ve been using nature to solve problems for longer than anybody in this room has been around.

Unknown Speaker 13:15
There’s a lot written on nature based solutions. There’s a lot written on that topic, but there are less things focused specifically on using them to address flood risk.

Unknown Speaker 13:27
There’s also a lot, not as many, that are written specifically for the state of Texas. So the purpose of that is to take all of that research, pull it together, get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense for the Texas context, and also focus on that flood risk resilience aspect of it, right? The types of projects that are used in nature to solve the flood problem put those in that plan. The second goal was to provide some strategies and tools, right? These are hands on things. These are things that communities can look to use to

Unknown Speaker 13:55
kind of overcome some of the challenges or the barriers that are associated with a new approach or a new way of thinking about,

Unknown Speaker 14:02
you know, addressing our flood problems,

Unknown Speaker 14:05
those barriers and challenges weren’t just pulled from some academic article, from some textbook or, you know, just from our heads. We surveyed. We had a statewide survey that had close to 300 responses to it. We talked with folks who work at academic institutions, and public agencies and state city offices that have worked on these types of projects and have a lot of experience on the coast, inland, dry areas, wet areas of the state, you name it, across the state. We talked to those folks and as well as like looking at the research, right? What is the Army Corps of Engineers said about this? What have other groups said about these types of approaches, and we pulled that together to, you know, try and structure this document about addressing those barriers and challenges to these projects. And then three, we want to, we want this manual to support the implementation of these types of projects at the local level and through regional flood planning. So we’re actually talking to every regional flood planning group. And.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
About this manual, try to highlight it and then talk about some ways to move through that

Unknown Speaker 15:07
intended users. Allison covered this. You all local government officials, city engineers, floodplain managers, are a big one,

Unknown Speaker 15:15
practitioners and developers, right? We are targeting this at a local official, but this will also have importance for people who are actually out there, building and developing properties, putting projects on the ground, developing those types of things as a certified floodplain manager. I’m particularly interested in this because floodplain managers have been talking about maintaining the beneficial use of floodplains for a very long time, longer than the term nature based solutions has been around. So that is one of those key critical ways in which we can reduce flood risk now, as well as not add to flood risk in the future. And that’s also a nature based solution here. So that’s another audience for this manual.

Unknown Speaker 15:55
I’ve talked about this a lot.

Unknown Speaker 15:58
There are a lot of long definitions for nature based solutions, most of them, I fall asleep while trying to read them. I kind of lose interest. In short, you can just think about it as using nature to solve the problem, right? Using nature is some kind of natural process to solve an issue that we have. And again, we’re focused on flood risk here, but the added benefit of these types of projects that you get other co benefits, right? Our communities have flooding issues, but they’re not the only issues we’re dealing with. We deal with water quality issues. We deal with lack of access to green space and air quality issues. We deal with public health and community health issues. Water supply issues is a big one in the state. Drought hits us. Sometimes, flood hits us. Sometimes. These are the types of solutions, the types of projects that can help chip away at multiple problems while addressing that primary issue of flooding to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 16:48
Next slide, please.

Unknown Speaker 16:53
So when we talk about this, we’re very much aware we’re not starting with a blank slate. We have a lot of existing infrastructure. We also know that it’s not always going to be the right answer in the right place, but the important thing is to think about this in a planning stage, in the modeling stage, to see where are these opportunities, where it can be put in these types of projects. For example, I have noticed in your plan, you have a couple of sections on property acquisition and reclaiming that space for floodplain storage. That’s great, right? You need to avoid, you know, you have a large usable space. If you take a group of properties that are all voluntarily, you know, coming in to get themselves removed from that flood risk. And you can create an asset for a community with that. Or you can create a natural space, right? You can put, create a place to store water, slow it down, infiltrate it.

Unknown Speaker 17:40
You know, that’s not an entirely natural approach. That’s more of a hybrid approach, right? It takes some engineering to recreate and reconstruct that floodplain area, but in some areas, you’re not going to have that option. You’re constrained by space, you already have existing infrastructure, you have that levy that you have an entire city depending on, right? This isn’t going to be the right solution in all of those right places, but you have to think about this as that spectrum. Where do we capture the most value for a project, not necessarily looking at the cost right? We only have to get the 1.01 to be a benefit to be cost effective. Could we be more cost effective? Could we get more value out of that project, thinking about these types of projects, next slide please, just

Unknown Speaker 18:21
a couple of examples. And we use these because the two most common types of example, types of projects in the state plan is channel improvements. So largely, we kind of think about, you know, Grease lightning racing in the movie Greece, right? That trapezoidal channel that we’re so familiar with all over the place, and then the other is a detention pond, right? This is an example of what those might look like in a more nature based approach. Significant engineering and design needed for both of these still need to meet that same standard, you know, of performance, but you then wind up with more green space of getting more, you know, water quality, environmental benefits, recreational benefits, at the same time that you’re providing the flood mitigation benefits on those rare but sometimes increasingly frequent occasions when you do need that flood risk benefit, right? It’s not just sitting there not doing a whole lot for us unless there’s a flood. It’s kind of providing some more more value to us. I

Unknown Speaker 19:22
won’t go through this whole thing, but we kind of think about projects as structural and non structural. Anything that’s moving earth is kind of structural. We have at the watershed scale. These are the three types of NBS projects that are in the manual at the watershed scale. These are larger scale. They’re kind of collecting water from elsewhere, from upstream, almost think about it as riverine flooding. You have your stream restoration, floodplain restoration, levee setbacks, wetland restoration, fire Lake restoration, that one might not be too applicable to this area, but these are those large areas that are connected in a system that can.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Hold water, store it infiltrate it will slow it down. Really provide some downstream or sometimes depending on the hydrology, upstream flood relief your neighborhood. Nature

Unknown Speaker 20:11
based solutions is kind of an umbrella term. A lot of these are more what people think of as lid low impact development, green infrastructure, green storm water infrastructure, those types of approaches, you really try to manage the water that’s existing on that single site. You’re not really going to reduce flood risk from downstream or elsewhere. But if you implement those at scale, across a catchment, across a watershed, you can really take the peak off of a large flood event. We have some examples

Unknown Speaker 20:40
in the manual, where that has been modeled and that has been shown.

Unknown Speaker 20:45
And then coastal

Unknown Speaker 20:47
Glo has, we have a lot of resources from the Glo in here, and there’s been a lot of good things going on the Texas coast, living shorelines, break waters, things like that. That kind of add to recreational commercial fisheries. Really kind of protect some existing flood infrastructure by using some nature and some restoration to do that sort of thing. Next slide, and then

Unknown Speaker 21:06
there’s a non structural I mentioned the property acquisition. That’s one of them, you know, regulating development in floodplains, right? What is that minimum standard of floodplain regulation so that we can develop safely and not add to future flood risk and not add to those issues.

Unknown Speaker 21:22
Even simple things like promoting native vegetation can go a long way towards reducing irrigation needs, towards reducing water needs, towards the resilience of the project you’re putting in place to begin with.

Unknown Speaker 21:35
Next slide, I’m

Unknown Speaker 21:39
gonna hand it off Allison,

Unknown Speaker 21:41
so we’ve been talking about this for a while. You’ll mention that earlier, the board has been doing a great job promoting this topic and the manual for a few years now. Spring 2026 is our goal for a draft for public comment, which will have 30 days for public comment, and then a final draft later this summer, I included the website here for reference. This is where it will be posted once it is ready, and obviously I will share that with you all specifically.

Unknown Speaker 22:12
And then this is what we’re calling our framework. This is a visual representation of everything that’s in the guidance manual. So we are structuring this based on the flow of project development, with the first section being, what do you need to know to get started? A lot of infrastructure projects end up with the same solutions that was in mind from the beginning. So this initiating section is really about wrapping your mind around what you need to get started in order for the solution to be different than the concrete line channel that was going to happen, because that’s the only thing you had in mind from the beginning. So we talked about guiding principles and just the thought process of how it’s recommended that practitioners approach flood infrastructure, and we talk about funding, obviously, that’s important to everybody. One of the largest selling points of nature based solutions is that it can unlock a lot more funding opportunities. The FIS is great, but what if we can pair that with EPA funding? There’s a lot of funding sources that they are trying to spend,

Unknown Speaker 23:26
and we just need to have the right project for all of these other organizations to get involved. So there’s a whole chapter dedicated to funding and how you can bring different funding sources together when you have all of these additional benefits. If you’re concrete lining the channel, seeing the boogeyman in the room, that’s that’s not something that all these other organizations want to to fund, and then ordinances, incentives, regulations from a local government perspective, how can you

Unknown Speaker 24:02
encourage or force land developers to make wise decisions, make the decisions you want them to, and implement some of these projects on private land beyond the county or the city, always having to be willing to fund them. And then we get into planning and selecting the right project on the right site, and understanding that gives a little bit more, little bit more engineering and implementing, we’re talking about permitting, design, construction and then maintenance. This is a question that we get a lot. How do we maintain these truthfully, many communities don’t have enough resources to maintain what they have, but ideally, with nature based solutions, they can start to maintain themselves. Wetlands don’t need to be actively mowed in the way that a con, you know, a grass line channel would need to be actively maintained. So those obviously aren’t one to one connections, but the hope is that nature can start to maintain itself.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Up, and this can be an easier,

Unknown Speaker 25:03
easier maintenance path for the lives of the project.

Unknown Speaker 25:07
Okay, so then, getting very specific to regional flood planning, I threw a lot of ideas out here. The two that I want to spend the most time focusing on are unfolded. And this is related to identifying SMEs, and then what we’ll talk about later is performing the SMEs and identifying the fnps. So when we’re talking with different communities on what is a possibility to solve your flood risk, you let us know that it’s flooding. When we’re sitting down to Newton County, how can we stop the flooding in your area? What are some options?

Unknown Speaker 25:44
Our hope is to have those conversations and start to educate and again, not lead them down the path of this is the only option. But what can we think about and what other benefits could you provide? Do you need a park in this area? Could we build a storm water park that floods when it floods, but the rest of the time, it’s a park for the community, and not just a big hole in the ground. And then while we’re doing engineering work that the state is paying for, let’s create some solutions that have multiple benefits.

Unknown Speaker 26:20
And then the bottom row ties to where in the guidance manual that these resources are found, which will be more valuable once you have the manual and credit

Unknown Speaker 26:32
again, okay. And then this is me talking to myself and Matt, given that we are technical people in the room. But the key criteria to capture MDS

Unknown Speaker 26:45
and capture whether or not a project does incorporate nature based solutions are these two fields, the percent by cost and then other or multiple benefits. Those are different buckets that give you points in the state flood claim rankings. So it’s important that any project that does incorporate nature based solutions is well documented, so that we can capture and make sure those points

Unknown Speaker 27:12
are obtained when it comes to the listing. So anything that’s already in our plan that as property acquisition that is considered 100% nature based solution that was already reflected. So it’ll be on Matt and I to make sure that all of the new fmps that we produce FOLLOW the guidance that we’re also writing. So this is how we can tell the board that we have nature based solutions.

Unknown Speaker 27:42
Side note on this,

Unknown Speaker 27:45
and going back to funding, with the at least the last round of FIS, the

Unknown Speaker 27:50
small and rural communities that incorporated nature based solutions were able to get 5% extra grant money compared to loan. So if they were only going to get, you know, 20% grant and 80% loan, if the project incorporated nature based solutions, five additional 5% of that total project cost could be grant. So that could be a big you know, that if it’s a multi million dollar project, that’s a lot of money, that grant, not alone. So the Water Development Board is definitely encouraging nature based solutions in the way that they are spending their money. So go to align our project to put them in the best position for funding.

Unknown Speaker 28:37
Okay? And then key takeaways, nature based solution for flood resilience. They have more benefits than mono functional blood infrastructure, and we need to start planning for them. A lot of times these

Unknown Speaker 28:51
things are just seen as, oh, we can add those on once we get to design, but we need to be considering them in planning so that we’re setting up and making the the

Unknown Speaker 29:01
right decisions to build the strategy of how this project will be funded, to start getting the right partners involved early.

Unknown Speaker 29:09
And then, like I said, they offer additional funding opportunities because of all of the CO benefits, Parks and Wildlife. They want to build new state parks. They want to build recreation opportunities. Can we partner with them in alignment with the flood

Unknown Speaker 29:25
mitigation projects that we’re already working on? So that’s the type of scale and partnerships that we want to encourage. The Nature Conservancy, duck gun, limited Parks and Wildlife, these are all different organizations that want to fund projects. So how can we align our efforts?

Unknown Speaker 29:45
And then that’s it. We’re here for questions. I got a question. So all this stuff I normally look at projects we talk about benefit, cost analysis based system. Do you all see that these nature based, nature based solutions, cost?

Unknown Speaker 30:00
More or less than other traditionals. And then when you factor in the nature based solutions, if they do cost more, do you have to factor in all of the long term costs associated with that project, or other things like that? I think all of us want to see stuff be put in, put back in nature as best it can. Reality it is.