Eight Days After Second Catastrophic Flood, Kerrville Weighs the Disaster Tax Rate Again

KERRVILLE, Texas — Eight days after a second round of catastrophic fluvial karst flooding tore through the Guadalupe River basin, Mayor Joe Herring Jr. has signaled that the City of Kerrville may again need to weigh a disaster property-tax rate in the coming budget year — reopening a fight that split the community less than a year ago.

The prospect lands on a city still tallying the damage from the July 16 flood, and on taxpayers who were assured the last disaster rate would be temporary. It also revives a question many residents believed was settled in the fall: how much of the cost of rebuilding a repeatedly flooded city should fall on the people who live in it.

What a "disaster tax rate" is

Under Texas law, a city struck by a declared disaster may adopt a temporary "disaster" property-tax rate that rises above the normal voter-approval threshold without triggering an automatic election. The elevated rate can stay in place for up to three years, or until the community's total taxable value recovers to its pre-disaster level — whichever comes first. It is designed as a bridge: a way to fund emergency response and rebuilding at the very moment a disaster both drives up costs and knocks down the tax base that would otherwise pay for them.

Kerrville used precisely that mechanism after the July 4, 2025 flood — the disaster that killed more than 100 people countywide, including the children and counselors lost at Camp Mystic, and drew national attention to the Hill Country. On September 23, 2025, the City Council voted 4-1 — with Councilman Jeff Harris dissenting — to adopt a disaster tax rate of $0.5711 per $100 of valuation for fiscal year 2026, set at the maximum the state's disaster provision allows: 8 percent above the no-new-revenue rate. Finance Director Julie Behrens estimated the change would cost the owner of a median-valued home, worth about $336,000, roughly $211 more a year.

A fight residents remember

The 2025 vote did not pass quietly. Residents filled the council chamber to object, arguing that a "temporary" increase still landed on households that were themselves underwater.

"Regardless if this is a temporary tax increase or not, it's unsustainable for the working class," resident McKenna Baxley told the council, saying she felt ignored. Another resident, Jacqueline Murkey, warned that damage exemptions available for the current year offered little comfort to owners who "are not going to bounce back that quickly."

City officials countered that the full cost of the disaster — and the hit to the city's tax base as damaged properties lost value — remained unknown, and that even the higher rate would not close the gap. The disaster rate was projected to raise only about $336,000 in additional revenue, and the city said it would still face a budget shortfall and would amend its plan once damage assessments were complete. Property owners were given until that fall to file for disaster-related damage exemptions through the Kerr County Appraisal District.

The contrast with the county sharpened the politics. While the city raised its rate, Kerr County adopted a no-new-revenue rate — the level that collects the same amount of money as the prior year on the same properties — leaving city taxpayers to absorb an increase their county neighbors did not.

Then it happened again

Any argument that the 2025 disaster was a once-in-a-generation event collapsed on July 16, 2026, when the Hill Country flooded again. More than 19 inches of rain fell on Kerrville over four days, part of a slow, multi-day siege of storms rather than the sudden cloudburst of the year before. More than 230 people were pulled from the water. One person died in Kerr County: John Mark Steward, swept away in the area of Goat Creek Road in the western part of the county, whose body was later recovered some 20 miles southeast, along Center Point River Road. Bridges washed out across the county, Interstate 10 closed west of Kerrville, and residents along Quinlan Creek were ordered to evacuate.

Mayor Herring declared a local state of disaster, calling the damage "of such severity and magnitude that an effective response is beyond the City's capabilities to recover without supplementary state and/or federal assistance."

By July 22, Gov. Greg Abbott had put numbers to it: 135 homes destroyed or heavily damaged, roughly 490 more homes damaged, and about 100 businesses hit in Kerr County — more than 600 homes in all. Abbott noted that in Kerrville, "last week's floods were worse than the July 2025 floods," and stressed that most of the affected properties were owner-occupied single-family homes, "indicating a substantial need for long-term housing, recovery, repair and rebuilding assistance."

On July 23, the council voted to extend its disaster declaration indefinitely — Herring noting the initial declaration "can only last for six, seven days" — and pointed residents to "Kerr Together," a long-term recovery group staffed with caseworkers to help navigate aid.

A pattern, not an accident

What makes the second flood so confounding is that, by the usual logic, it should have been worse than the first. The 2026 storm dropped more total rain on the same basin, onto ground already saturated. Yet the river did not peak as high upstream, where the worst damage occurred in 2025, and the death toll was a fraction of the year before. If rainfall alone drove these disasters, the numbers should run the other way.

That inversion is the thread my forensic investigation at the Floodgate Report has followed since 2025. By that accounting, the 2026 event produced barely 60 percent of the 2025 flood despite the heavier rain — a result that points past the storm and toward the ground beneath it. The Hill Country sits on fractured limestone, a fluvial karst landscape where water moves not only across the surface but through the rock itself, in conduits and springs and pressurized aquifers beneath the riverbed. The question the two floods force open is whether groundwater pressure — not merely the rain falling in any given hour — helps determine where, and how catastrophically, these rivers rise.

The 2026 flood offered something close to a controlled test. Water rose over Goat Creek Road at 10:52 p.m. on July 15, when only 0.04 inches of rain had fallen in the preceding hours — water arriving faster, and from somewhere other than the storm directly overhead.

That signal is what I now track in real time at the Floodgate Report's South Fork pressure watch — an experimental, independent indicator that complements, but never replaces, official warnings from the National Weather Service and local emergency management, which residents should always follow first.

The reason this matters for a tax debate is direct. A disaster tax rate is built for a shock — a rare, discrete event a community absorbs once and recovers from over three years. But if Kerrville is not being struck by freak storms so much as by a recurring hydrological hazard written into the ground beneath it, then a "temporary" emergency rate is being asked to do the work of permanent policy. Two catastrophic floods in twelve months is the kind of evidence that forces that distinction into the open.

The bill comes due — again

That is the backdrop against which the disaster tax rate has resurfaced. A second flood in barely more than a year means a second wave of emergency spending, a second hit to the taxable base as damaged properties are reassessed, and a second round of exemptions that shrink collections precisely when the city needs revenue most.

For homeowners, the arithmetic is unforgiving. Many are still repairing — or still paying down — losses from 2025, and now face damage from 2026, with the possibility of a renewed tax increase layered on top. The exemptions that cushion a damaged property's tax bill also reduce the revenue the city can raise, which is part of what pushes officials toward the disaster rate in the first place.

And if the force driving these floods is as much groundwater and geology as it is weather, the emergency framing strains further still. Residents who fought the 2025 increase warned that "temporary" rarely stays temporary. A 2026 disaster rate, arriving on the heels of the 2025 one — and against mounting evidence that the hazard is chronic rather than exceptional — would test that warning directly.

The politics inside City Hall may already be shifting. Councilman Jeff Harris — the lone vote against the disaster rate in 2025 — said Friday that he would support one this year, a reversal that measures how much the second flood has changed the ground beneath the debate.

Herring's signal is, for now, only that: an acknowledgment that the option is on the table as the city assembles its next budget. Whether the council ultimately adopts a second disaster tax rate, and how a twice-flooded community answers if it does, will be among the defining local questions of the year.

Kerrville Breaking News will update this story as damage assessments are finalized and the City of Kerrville's fiscal year 2027 budget process begins.