HOUSTON — Former Congressman Beto O’Rourke was in Houston Tuesday for the final stop of his 12-day, statewide “Keeping the Lights On” tour exactly one year after the electric grid failed during a historic winter storm.
The deadly winter freeze is one of the hot button topics in the race for Texas governor ahead of the March primary.
A new University of Texas poll shows Greg Abbott leading O’Rourke by 10 percentage points among verified primary voters in the race for Texas governor.
Both the incumbent Republican governor and the Democratic candidate are fighting for their parties’ nominations in the March primary.
That UT poll shows only three percent of Texans call the power grid the most important problem facing the state. However, the same poll shows only 33 percent of Texans approve of Governor Abbott’s handling of the grid, the lowest rate of any issue polled.
Millions of Texans went without lights, heat, and water for several days in February 2021.
The Texas Department of State Health Services put the official death toll from the winter storm at 246 people.
Governor Abbott signed new reform bills passed by the Texas Legislature into law in June 2021, including those requiring weatherization and inspection of power plants.
“I signed 14 laws over the last session,” Abbott said during a February 10 campaign event in San Antonio. “By the way, 14 laws that were supported overwhelmingly in a bipartisan way. Both Democrats and Republicans agreed were these 14 laws that reformed the power grid."
On Tuesday afternoon, O’Rourke told Houston City Council there’s still work to be done.
“The grid that knocked so many offline and took the lives of so many is still not fixed,” O’Rourke said. “We have yet to weatherize the gas supply, to connect ERCOT to the nation’s grid so we can draw down power when we need it, and to make the changes that help instead of hurt ratepayers in this great state.”
Governor Abbott did not address the freeze during a roundtable on fentanyl in Fort Worth on Tuesday afternoon.
He plans to hold a get-out-the-vote event in Wichita Falls on Wednesday.