Hundreds of people are dying in floods every year because of a weird legal loophole written in the 1800s.
Rural counties often have the money for flood protection but lack the 'legal permission' from the state to spend it. This 19th-century doctrine prevents local governments from acting, leaving them helpless during modern disasters.
What Counties Cannot Build: State Enabling Law, Capacity Traps, and the Urban-Rural Flood Resilience Divide
SSRN · 6550935
The July 4, 2025 Kerr County, Texas flash flood killed 115 people, including 37 children at summer camps. This article argues the disaster was institutionally preventable — the product of thirty-eight years of governance deficits rooted in Texas's restrictive application of Dillon's Rule. Using a comparative case study pairing Austin's post-1981 flood governance trajectory against Kerr County's constrained path, and a retrospective counterfactual analysis, the article examine