The Texas Water Development Board will provide a $47 million no-interest loan to the city of Houston that will be used to speed long-awaited flood control improvements on Brays Bayou.

Under a plan announced this year, the city will give the money to Harris County Flood Control District to replace eight bridges that block the flow of stormwater during heavy downpours, a key part of long-delayed Project Brays.

Work on the bridge replacements is expected to begin by March. City Council cleared the way for officials to apply for the money in January, citing damage to the Meyerland area during the Memorial Day and Tax Day floods in 2015 and 2016.

Thousands of the roughly 700,000 people living in the Brays Bayou watershed flooded again during Hurricane Harvey.

"When you have people that flooded, they want everybody at the table helping to solve these problems," said city "flood czar" Steve Costello. "This is the first time we're going to be able to say every sector of government is at the table helping resolve the flooding problems along Brays Bayou."

The plan is for the Army Corps of Engineers to reimburse the county after the work is complete, at which point the county would send the city the dollars needed to pay off the loan.

Water Development Board Chairman Bech Bruun said the agency was pleased to support the local effort.

"Projects that reduce future flooding impacts are not only important but imperative as the state looks at ways to mitigate flooding," he said. "This piece of the Brays Bayou project is a significant step in the right direction."

'Terrifying prospect'

Houston's first payment on the loan, an estimated $740,000, will be due in November 2018. It is unclear when federal reimbursement will arrive, but Costello said city officials do not anticipate the arrangement creating a cash crunch.

"There's a risk there, we understood that," he said, "but we also have the ability to pre-pay off once we get the payments from the Corps."

The delay between the idea's announcement last January and the board's vote Tuesday - six months of which was due to Environmental Protection Agency questions about the project's water quality benefits, according to Costello - has not slowed the project, he said, because engineers still are designing the new bridges.

Matt Zeve, director of operations for the Flood Control District, confirmed that, and said one batch of the bridges in question should be ready for construction next month.

Sluggish federal reimbursement has been a key factor in dragging Project Brays out for two decades. Work originally was slated to finish in 2014 and now is scheduled to be completed in 2021. But it could take decades more, county documents state, without sufficient funding.

Either scenario is a "terrifying prospect" to Art Pronin, a civic leader who lives in Westbury, adjacent to Meyerland.

Pronin's home flooded for the first time during Harvey, but many of his neighbors have flooded three years in a row.

"We talk about Project Brays every day in this neighborhood," he said. "Everywhere you go it's, 'What about the bayou? Is it going to be enough?' It feels like we're trapped: Waiting on the next extension of money for Project Brays. Waiting for the next flood. We need more commitments like we heard today."

The county and the Corps split the Project Brays costs 50-50, though the county typically pays up front and awaits reimbursement. The county originally expected to get $25 million in annual federal reimbursements for the roughly $550 million project, but actual funding has averaged less than half that.

Basin work completed

The county has rebuilt 14 of the 32 bridges included in the project, and the state loan will help fund another eight.

Work has finished on four upstream detention basins capable of holding 3.5 billion gallons of stormwater, and work to widen most of the bayou - which starts west of Texas 6 and ends 31 miles to the east, where it flows into Buffalo Bayou - is more than 80 percent finished.

Project Brays is expected to remove 15,000 homes and businesses from the 100-year flood plain, including 3,500 homes at a high risk of flooding. County officials estimate the work already done on the project prevented thousands of homes from flooding during recent storms, though Hurricane Harvey pushed Brays well out of its banks yet again.

City officials hope to repeat this financing model to spur improvements along two other bayous - White Oak and Hunting, likely in that order - ultimately forwarding the county about $130 million, Costello said.