Officials join for flood assessment
Agencies have not responded to formal inquiries
The Presidio Municipal Development District (PMDD), in partnership with the City of Presidio, is moving forward with an independent flood risk and geomorphology assessment of the Presidio corridor.
“We’re taking direct action to protect the public safety of a community of approximately 4,000 people in the absence of any visible engineering or regulatory review by the federal agencies whose duty it is to perform that work, said PMDD Executive Director John Kennedy.
Customs and Border Patrol and the International Boundary Water Commission did not immediately return requests for comment.
Kennedy is accepting bids and considering a few different approaches for proposals. He hopes to work with an organization that can have preliminary results to share with the city and the public within the next few weeks.
A more formal study would be expected later this year. The project is scoped to include hydraulic models of the Rio Grande and surrounding creeks at levels that mirror historical events like the 2008 flood. Kennedy hopes to use satellite imagery and other data to look at erosion over time and explore how the sediment shift would impact infrastructure.
“The City of Presidio is partnering with PMDD on this study because protecting the people who live here, on both sides of the river, is our job, and right now no one else is doing it,” said Presidio Mayor John Ferguson. “We have asked the federal agencies responsible for this levee for straight answers about what is being proposed, and we have not gotten them. After what this community lived through in 2008, we are not going to sit through another flood season waiting on engineering that should already be on the table.”
The Presidio Valley Flood Control Project—a 15.2-mile federally authorized civil works levee system owned and maintained by the U.S. Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission—is the sole flood protection for the City of Presidio and roughly 52 square miles of urban and agricultural land at the confluence of the Rio Grande, the Rio Conchos, Cibolo Creek, and Alamito Creek. The system was overtopped in September 2008 at flows that exceeded its design capacity by approximately 26%. Reconstruction completed in 2014 restored structural integrity but did not increase the system’s design conveyance.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has now contracted Fisher Sand & Gravel for construction of a reinforced concrete border-barrier wall, with 30-foot steel bollards on top, on and adjacent to that levee. Kennedy said that to date, no federal agency has produced any publicly available hydrologic, hydraulic, geomorphic or engineering analysis demonstrating that the proposed construction is safe, consistent with applicable federal civil-works requirements or compliant with the bilateral treaty framework that governs the Rio Grande.
“The federal government is required to study and certify projects in this floodplain, and to review modifications to the Presidio Flood Control Project, before any such modifications proceed,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said the independent assessment will analyze the hydrology, geomorphology, and engineering implications of the proposed border-wall construction for the Presidio corridor. The work is modeled on an assessment framework developed for the downstream Webb–Zapata corridor by Dr. Mark R. Tompkins, Ph.D., P.E. (FlowWest), released in March 2026. The Presidio assessment is being scoped in coordination with the Rio Grande International Study Center. A preliminary technical memorandum is targeted for release in the coming weeks, with a more detailed hydraulic and hydrologic study to follow.
Disclaimer: Kate Bubacz’s partner, a hydrologist by training, has been consulted by Kennedy on possible approaches for the study.