The Texas Water Development Board is scheduled to vote at 9:30 a.m. Central on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026, on whether to authorize its executive administrator to execute two contracts totaling not more than $1,125,000 for new lidar elevation data in Northeast Texas. The meeting is set for Room 170 of the Stephen F. Austin Building, 1700 Congress Avenue in Austin, and by video conference.
A staff memo from Richard A. Wade, deputy executive administrator of the Texas Geographic Information Office, or TxGIO, asks the board to approve the contracts for lidar data acquisition and quality assurance and control in the Big Cypress-Sulphur Basin and surrounding area. Executive Administrator Bryan McMath recommends approval.
Lidar, the memo says, "is a remote sensing technology that uses aircraft to collect three-dimensional data of the earth's surface."
The collection would cover more than 9,500 square miles of watersheds across Northeast Texas, including portions of 19 counties, the Big Cypress-Sulphur basin and surrounding areas, and a two-mile buffer from the Texas state line. The staff memo does not name the 19 counties. It also says the project would complete full coverage of the Big Cypress-Sulphur Basin and portions within Texas of the Little-Red Basin, continuing a strategy of collecting lidar by six-digit hydrologic unit code, or HUC-6, watersheds.
The majority of existing lidar datasets in the area are eight to nine years old and do not meet U.S. Geological Survey 3D Elevation Program quality specifications, the memo says. The region is now split across three older lidar collections that have different specifications and dates of acquisition. Collecting the data by HUC-6 watershed, rather than by political boundaries, is meant to remove discrepancies when the datasets are used to model watersheds, "especially flood and base level engineering."
If approved, the work would be paid from the fiscal 2027 Texas Infrastructure Resiliency Fund appropriation, in an amount not to exceed $1,125,000. The fund was created in 2019 by the same legislation that created the Flood Infrastructure Fund. The 86th Texas Legislature appropriated money to the Floodplain Management Account within the resiliency fund to support development of the first state flood plan and the water board's flood science and mapping activities.
In 2019, the Legislature also passed Senate Bill 8, directing the first state flood plan. The 2024 State Flood Plan compiles findings from 15 river-basin-based regional flood planning groups. The Sulphur River and Cypress Creek basins in Texas lie entirely within Region 2, the Lower Red-Sulphur-Cypress Flood Planning Region, which also includes the lower Red River. The lidar memo does not state that the collection area is the same as that planning region, and it does not name a regional flood planning group.
TxGIO would procure the data through the Texas Strategic Mapping Program and associated geographic information systems vendor contracts at the Texas Department of Information Resources. After DIR review, TxGIO and the water board solicited and evaluated proposals. The memo recommends Fugro to acquire and deliver the new lidar dataset at a cost of $910,194.47, and AECOM to provide quality assurance and control, including reports and checkpoint surveys, at a cost of $197,249.58.
TxGIO is awaiting final decisions from additional state and local partners on whether they will share the cost. The memo does not name those partners. It estimates the total project cost, pending that participation, at not more than $1,125,000. The U.S. Geological Survey's 3D Elevation Program is cited as the quality standard that existing data do not meet; the memo does not list the Survey as a partner on this purchase.
Processed lidar from the project would be used to support floodplain management and planning, as well as feature extraction, water quality modeling, stream restoration analysis, change detection, Next Generation 9-1-1, wildfire mitigation, vegetation and forest analysis, hurricane recovery and planning, habitat identification and modeling for endangered species, statewide buildings data, and elevation-derived hydrography. The final data would be publicly available and free to download through the TxGIO DataHub.
The memo does not give a start date, flight window, or delivery date for the collection. If the board approves the item, the executive administrator would be authorized to execute the two contracts under the $1,125,000 cap.