Community Foundation has deployed $80 million in flood relief. The question that won’t go away: why not just give it to the city and county?

The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country has now deployed just over $80 million in flood relief grants since the July 4, 2025 disaster, according to a full accounting of the organization’s published grantee data — a figure that lines up closely with the $82 million CEO Austin Dickson cited to Kerrville City Council on June 23. The money has gone to 102 different organizations across 161 individual grants, funding everything from home rebuilds to mental health counseling to a $10,000 grant that outfitted Kerrville police officers with dress uniforms.

But the single most persistent question directed at the Foundation hasn’t changed: if there’s this much money, why isn’t more of it simply handed to the City of Kerrville and Kerr County to cover the recovery costs now driving a likely new disaster tax rate?

Where the $80 million actually went

The Foundation’s grantee data breaks down into four categories:

• Housing: $34.7 million
• Community & Culture: $25.1 million
• Emergency Response: $14.6 million
• Mental Health: $5.6 million

The single largest recipient is LiftFund, a nonprofit small-business lender, which received a combined $12.05 million across housing and business-recovery grants to help locally owned businesses recover from the flood. The City of Kerrville itself is the second-largest recipient on the list, having received $8.4 million directly — specifically to rebuild Louise Hays Park. Rounding out the top of the list: Connective ($6 million, unmet needs and complex home repair), the Texas State Affordable Housing Council ($5.51 million, down payment assistance), Hunt Preservation Society ($5.39 million, spread across housing, staging and rental assistance), and Episcopal Relief & Development ($4.46 million, RV and manufactured home housing programs).

Other notable, more specific grants: $3 million to Habitat for Humanity Kerr County and another $3.66 million to Habitat for Humanity generally for home construction and repair; $2 million to the San Antonio Botanical Gardens for a native tree restoration initiative along the Guadalupe River; and a cluster of smaller but locally recognizable grants — $198,975 to Kerr Creates for a permanent flood memorial planning grant, $10,200 to the same organization to repair the Louise Hays Park murals, $40,000 to Kerrville Christmas Lighting Corp. to rebuild Tranquility Island’s electrical infrastructure, and $10,000 to the Kerrville Police Department Foundation Fund.

Does this settle the transparency question?

Largely, yes, on the narrowest version of the complaint. Readers who have argued in comments on The Lead’s coverage that the Foundation “hasn’t shown where the money went” now have a fuller answer: it’s published, itemized by recipient, purpose and dollar amount, at rebuildkerr.org/grantee-info, and the total is closely consistent with what Dickson told council directly in a public meeting. That’s a meaningfully different picture than “millions unaccounted for.”

Two individual items from Dickson’s June presentation don’t have a clean match in the public data: a $375,000 grant Dickson attributed to a “Guadalupe Park” rebuild, and a mobile mental health app specifically for Kerrville police officers and their families. Neither appears as its own line item. It’s possible both are folded into larger grants to other organizations — the Guadalupe Park funding may have gone through a different lead nonprofit rather than the city directly, and the KPD mental health app is plausibly part of Hill Country MHDD’s broader $649,455 in combined grants rather than a standalone line. The Lead was not able to independently confirm either explanation and will continue seeking clarity from the Foundation.

The question that remains: why not fund the government directly?

Here the data doesn’t fully resolve the debate — because the answer isn’t really about whether the Foundation is being transparent. It’s a structural one.

Of the $80 million, exactly one grant went directly to a unit of government: the $8.4 million to the City of Kerrville for Louise Hays Park. Every other dollar went to nonprofits, churches, school districts, chambers of commerce, or private companies acting as intermediaries — even when the underlying work benefits public infrastructure. Kerr County government does not appear as a grant recipient at all in the published data The Lead reviewed.

The Foundation has said repeatedly, including in response to questions raised on The Lead’s coverage, that it cannot fund general city or county government operational expenses. That’s consistent with how the philanthropic sector broadly operates: a 501(c)(3) foundation’s board directs charitable dollars according to donor intent and the foundation’s own mission, not according to a municipal or county budget process, and grants are typically restricted to specific charitable purposes rather than handed over as unrestricted government revenue. The Louise Hays Park grant is the exception that illustrates the rule — it was possible because it funded a specific, charitable, public-benefit project (a park rebuild), not the city’s general fund, payroll, or debt service.

That distinction is exactly what separates this money from the disaster tax rate now before City Council. The tax rate would fund general recovery costs — road repairs, water and sewer line replacement, debris removal, staff overtime — the ordinary operating expenses of running a city and county during a disaster. Nothing in the Foundation’s $80 million is structured to cover that kind of spending, and nothing in how community foundations are legally organized would allow it to.

Critics may still reasonably ask whether that structural separation should exist at all, or whether the Foundation, the city and the county could jointly design a mechanism to direct more philanthropic capital toward core recovery infrastructure rather than routing it through dozens of intermediary nonprofits. That’s a legitimate policy question for local leaders and the Foundation’s board to answer. But it is a different question from whether the Foundation has been forthcoming about what it has funded — and on that narrower question, the newly reviewed data suggests it largely has been.