Island Under Water
Galveston Island doesn’t need to be UNDERWATER after a rainstorm. The city also doesn’t need to mismanage tens of millions of dollars in federal grant money Galveston got after Hurricane Harvey. Nine years later, why is a neighborhood still suffering?
You remember when we were told we have to give public servants good pensions to make up for their crappy salaries? Well, those days are over.
In Galveston, Texas, a town of 50,000 people, the City Manager Brian Maxwell makes a salary of $337,000 a year.
And the Deputy City Manager Dan Buckley? He makes $229,000. The Assistant City Manager Brandon Cook, 186,000. You get to three quarters of a million dollars for just three city administrators.
And that’s why complaints of mismanagement on Galveston Island are even harder to swallow.
Why we are investigating an Island underwater.
This is why the Galveston city manager is playing defense these days.
A 40-minute thunderstorm making the streets in the South Shore neighborhood impassable.
South Shore resident Tasha Seeba took us for a drive in her Jeep.
Sure, it was a pretty heavy rainstorm, but the location and timing of this flood was uncanny.
It surrounded the blocks of the construction site of the long-delayed South Shore pumping project near 61st Street.
It even interrupted a meeting between angry residents and the General Land Office.
City officials showed up too because they’re finally paying attention.
“I still continue to think that the city is lying and gaslighting us. I don’t believe anything they say,” said Tasha Seeba.
City Councilman Alex Porretto says the city manager’s office has been falling down on the job.
“All my neighbors around here, felt like they weren’t being informed,” said Alex Porretto.
And the folks in Austin, they’re hearing about this bungled project too.
“So, we got a few phone calls about it,” said Heather Lagrone.
Heather Lagrone is the director of disaster recovery programs for the Texas General Land Office.
They’re the ones that doled out the money raised from the disastrous Hurricane Harvey.
But she’s dealing with another disaster. We’re not talking about the noise or the muddy yards. We’re talking a disaster of Galveston’s own making.
That disaster is the South Shore pumping project itself, and a gift of 55 million dollars that the City of Galveston was dangerously close to having to give back.
“I’m seriously worried. I can’t, I can lie to you and say that I’m not,” Porretto said. “It kind of does keep me up at night.
Hurricane Harvey, a little more than nine years ago. Nearly 100 people died. Some 800,000 Texans forced to evacuate their homes.
The storm surge, the heavy rain. Galveston was swamped for days.
And the storm led to federally funded public works projects like this one. The South Shore drainage project. Clearly, as you can see, not finished.
If you visit the island, you can see it from the 61st street bridge where that big crane is.
The Texas General Land Office approved the city of Galveston’s grant application for exactly the amount of money it said it needed to finish the project.
55 million dollars, 47 million just for the construction. And the city promised the GLO the construction would start by mid-2022.
Construction started 4 years late. Government math.
Approaching a deadline to use the money or potentially lose it. Only 16 million dollars has even been spent.
You can see why the big push is on, and the construction area pure mayhem.
The fire department wasn’t even told how to get into the neighborhood if people needed help until complaints lit up social media.
Most South Shore drive residents only can access their homes through an abandoned Hooters parking lot. But hey we love silver linings.
“It was a known homeless camp to our neighborhood. We had people in our yards,” Seeba said.
Residents are being rattled out of their homes. They didn’t know construction was really starting until they heard the noise of the cranes one morning.
“Things have fallen off shelves and off the wall. That’s how much it shakes,” said Carolyn Nelson-Becker.
And they had fears the new pump station is an environmental hazard killing fish and crabs.
“Why are these things dead in my cage? Well, the only thing that started happening was they’ve started pumping water right there with that pumping thing,” Seeba said.
The city says red tide is the real suspect for the fish kill, but it’s the tide of incompetence that’s been washing ashore.
“If you were going to give the city manager’s office a grade for the way they handle this grant,” said Wayne Dolcefino.
“This grant? D-minus,” Porretto said.
In Galveston we often see the red flags on the surf to warn us about the dangers out there. But there were red flags about this project from almost the very beginning. So why wasn’t the city manager’s office paying attention.
It was the outside engineers that told the city this construction shouldn’t cost more than 47 million dollars to begin in 2022. The GLO said great.
But Galveston city hall didn’t even request the bids for that construction project until 2024, already two years late.
And when the bids came in, there was only one.
Some suggest it’s a sign a lot of companies simply don’t want to do business with this island bunch.
Only one contractor, Houston-based mc2, even wanted a fifty-million-dollar contract.
But it gets worse. Their construction bid, it came in at 86 million dollars, not 47, 86. That’s not just COVID inflation. That’s literally 60 percent higher than the government grant that was supposed to pay for the entire project.
City Manager Brian Maxwell did not tell city council about that outrageous 86 million bid until three months later.
“There has to be something in that scope of work that frightened off everybody,” Maxwell said.
Instead of throwing out the one bid and starting over, the city and mc2 negotiated, doing something called value engineering, cutting bells and whistles without cutting essential functions.
The new number, the agreed upon number was 68 million, still twenty million higher than taxpayers were told the construction was going to cost.
“When did the bids come in?” Porretto asked.
“The bid came in on sept 24 of this year.”
“So, we could have, again, discussed it in October,” Porretto said.
The bidder, mc2, they had never even done a pump station. And it was the same contractor blamed for cost overruns and delays with island’s 45th street project.
“Choosing a company that has no experience in projects like this.”
“That’s my biggest gripe,” Porretto said.
“That has already caused so many problems and lawsuits to the city.”
Councilmembers wanted to re-bid the entire affair but were told it was too late.
Brian Maxwell had already gotten a one-time 2-year extension from the folks at GLO to spend the money, and council learned about only after he’d gotten the extension.
“On one hand, I don’t want our citizens to be affected by an ill designed firm or an ill contractor. Hopefully we’ve addressed that. But the biggest thing is funding. If we screw it up and we don’t get to follow through on our drainage projects and we…”
“Lose the public’s trust.”
“And we lose the GLO’s trust. And we lose FEMA’s trust.”
“And you have to pay your design money back.”
That night in December 2024, city council approved the contract, 6 votes in favor. Councilwoman Marie Robb abstained.
“It bothers me that we only have one bidder. Something’s not right there, I don’t know what it is,” Marie Robb said.
“Do you accept this is the way a government project should have been run?” Dolcefino asked.
“No. I sounded the alarm on the fact that the grant money was going back way ahead, you know, years ago,” Porretto said.
At city hall, the city manager met with us and told us something that government people always seem to say to me when there are allegations of mismanagement. There’s nothing to see here.
Just four months ago, the project’s engineer and the construction company can be seen in emails going toe to toe, blaming each other for project delays.
In June, Brian Maxwell went groveling back to the State of Texas to try and convince the GLO to give the city another extension. In July, the State said no way.
Maxwell had some explaining to do. He had been quoted in the local paper back in October 2025 that the project would be “very close to completion by the deadline” January 31st.
You know what they say. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
The GLO saw the article. The city knew the project even back then would not be complete by the deadline but didn’t bother to tell the GLO.
Lagrone reminded the city manager twice in the same letter that an unfinished project put the city at risk of having to pay the money back. Not just the unspent part. All of it.
“You say the project will be done by January 1st?” Dolcefino asked.
“The biggest part of it that the GLO is wanting done. Yes, sir,” Maxwell said.
The city has had to hire an outside project manager to help crack the whip. He’s getting paid too.
“I specialize in recovering projects. When I say recover, it’s not necessarily like it’s off the rails. It’s just not producing like it should,” Scott Fendrick said.
But sadly, this bungled pumping project is just one of a number of projects that are costing more than they were supposed to. And it’s adding fuel to the fire of angry taxpayers about the rising cost of local public officials’ paychecks.
Maxwell’s 337 thousand dollars a year, he makes more than twice as much as Governor Greg Abbott does. And he’s got a whole state to run.
Little Elm, Texas has about as many residents as Galveston does, but their city manager makes about eighty thousand dollars less than Maxwell. And doesn’t have all that extra bureaucracy either.
But Maxwell argued to us that comparing just population really isn’t fair.
“We have 8 million visitors a year here. So, it’s a big difference. We have housing stock that equates to over 100,000 people here. We run a complete utility system,” Maxwell said.
“I can’t even wrap my brain around three people being paid almost $700,000 a year. And then we had to go hire a consultant, Scott Fendrick, to come in and finish this project,” Seeba said.
“By the end of the year, the first part of the year, all the work will be confined to the property itself so it should not be impacting the residents’ ingress, egress, noise, all that kind of stuff,”
“When will residents be able to get back into their street normally?” Asked Andrea Palacio.
“That’s a hard one. The reality is, the project itself probably isn’t going to end until June of ‘28,” Fendrick said.
“Do you think they’re going to actually complete this project?” Palacio asked.
“No, I don’t think it’s going to happen. No, absolutely not,” Seeba said.
And the latest news is no relief. Folks may have to live like in the noise, the mud for another year or two. This is why people don’t trust their government.
“If we can’t deliver on our promises then we’re failing a city and we’re failing as representatives,” Porretto said.
“I think there should be some responsibility for this, and I think that the person who started this and then didn’t take care of it should probably be looking elsewhere,” Nelson-Becker said.
“This isn’t simply about traffic or construction delays. It’s about poor planning, poor communication, and lack of accountability. Quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. The City of Galveston is better than this, or I thought you guys were,” Seeba said at a council meeting.
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