Fifty-two percent of the vegetation in the Guadalupe River floodway in Kerr County was stripped on July 4. Where bald cypress and sycamore once held the banks, there are gravel bars and bare soil. Jonathan Letz, who served nearly three decades as a Kerr County commissioner and now leads the ecological restoration effort, called it "almost a different environment."
The loss goes to function. Riparian vegetation slows floodwater, stabilizes soil, filters runoff, reduces peak flows downstream. Without it, the next flood hits a landscape with less capacity to absorb it. On April 27, the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country announced $14,070,420 in grants to restore the river corridor. "The July 4 flood disrupted an entire system — ecological, economic and social," said CEO Austin Dickson. The investment is designed to rebuild all three at once.
| Grant recipient | Allocation | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| San Antonio Botanical Garden (TREES Initiative) | $3M over multiple years | 50,000 native trees along the river over four years |
| Hill Country Alliance | $1.51M | Basin-wide restoration strategy |
| Louise Hays Park reconstruction | $8.4M | Park rebuild prioritizing "resilience over simple restoration" |
The TREES Initiative is the centerpiece. Trained staff hand-collect seeds from naturally occurring bald cypress, sycamore, chinquapin oak, willow, and pecan within the Guadalupe watershed, keeping the genetics local. Since August 2025, the team has gathered more than 850,000 seeds. Twenty-five thousand seedlings are growing now. First plantings are expected late 2026 or spring 2027.
The Hill Country Alliance, led by executive director Katherine Romans, will work with partners to define what restoration success looks like in ten years. The alliance has already distributed more than 6,000 pounds of native seed and over 1,000 plants to private landowners along the river, with 15,000 more planned for this summer and fall. The seed mix is heavy in soil-stabilizing species: switchgrass, side-oats grama, Maximilian sunflower.
The largest single allocation, $8.4 million, goes to reconstructing Louise Hays Park, which was completely destroyed. Kerrville parks director Jay Brimhall said the rebuild will prioritize "resilience over simple restoration." What that means in engineering terms is not yet public. No design timeline or completion date has been announced. The park sits beside the same river, in the same floodway.
All of this is being planted, poured, and designed in Flash Flood Alley. The Guadalupe has flooded catastrophically more than a dozen times in the past century. In 1987, ten teenagers drowned when a camp bus stalled in rising water near Comfort. On July 4, 2025, the river at Hunt rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, cresting at 37.52 feet, exceeding the estimated 100-year return level by more than three feet.
"Floodplain maps are based on historical data. They don't reflect the current, or future, risk."
— Water policy expert Todd Votteler
The FEMA flood maps for Kerr County were last revised in 2011. No update has been announced.
So Kerr County is hand-collecting seeds from a watershed that just tried to kill it, growing them in nurseries, planting them along banks that were scoured to gravel nine months ago. Pouring concrete for a park beside a river that destroyed the last one. Stabilizing soil with switchgrass and sunflower while the maps that define the flood risk remain fourteen years out of date, while the trees that might slow the next surge are seedlings in a San Antonio greenhouse, while the 100-year return level has already been exceeded by three feet.
"The seeds and grasses and plants will take time to grow. This is how we move from recovery to resilience."
— Jonathan Letz
That word carries considerable weight in Kerr County right now. It means building something that can survive the next time. Whether the next time waits long enough is not a question the community gets to answer.