Floodplain Work May Need a County Permit

With rivers, creeks, and low-water crossings threaded all through the county, Guadalupe treats any work in the regulatory floodplain as a permit matter. A county Floodplain Administrator watches development inside that floodplain under the county's flood damage prevention order, and the main lever is the floodplain development permit.

Development here means far more than putting up a house. It covers grading, paving, excavation, drilling, and even storing equipment or materials on the land — a lot of ordinary site work that people don't think of as 'building.'

So before you haul in fill, pour a slab, or reshape ground anywhere on a mapped flood area, take it to Environmental Health first. They keep the floodplain maps and the forms, and a question answered there is cheaper than a project undone after an inspector flags it.