By MATTHEW WILSON and BERENICE GARCIA
DONNA AND McALLEN — Beto O’Rourke brought his whirlwind 12-day, 2,100-mile campaign tour aimed at criticizing Gov. Greg Abbott over the state’s power grid failures during the 2021 winter storm to the Rio Grande Valley on Friday.
The gubernatorial candidate’s “Keeping the Lights On” tour ran into a slightly more rudimentary problem in the Valley than the complicated array of industrial and political situations that precipitated last year’s snowpocalypse.
There were no streetlights to be kept on lining the pockmarked streets of the north Donna colonia where O’Rourke met residents Friday to talk about the storm.
Sure, those residents told O’Rourke, things were tough during the winter storm. But life is always tough in their community.
Their streets are rutted and ragged. It seems like there’s more potholes than asphalt in many places, and residents told O’Rourke that driving on them bruises backsides and tends to wear out vehicles quickly.
You can’t walk on those streets at night, residents said. They’re dark and there’s no sidewalks and people don’t feel safe.
Those streets, they said, flood anytime there’s a decent rain storm, making them impassable, and stirring up vermin and snakes.
There’s other basic infrastructure lacking in that community as well. Reliable internet has only been around for a year or so, the product of a significant Donna ISD Wi-Fi tower project. When O’Rourke asked if anyone in the group has health insurance they laughed.
O’Rourke described the conditions as “punishing.” He said the state needs to do something about them.
“We have got to partner with county leadership and city leadership to make sure that we get state resources to communities like these,” he said.
“This isn’t right. One woman said ‘no es justo,’ this isn’t just, this isn’t right. And I agree, and we’ve got to change it. And then also — I thought this was real important — everyone reminded me, ‘Look, we pay taxes, and so we pay into this government, but what comes back to us?’ And I think there’s a basic issue of justice here.”
The storm seemed like just one more crisis for a community used to dealing with crises.
Most people in the community use propane heaters or their stove to warm their homes. Power was out for days last year, and people built a fire to stay warm around.
Marylou Belmares, one of the residents O’Rourke spoke with, runs a store on the corner that sells propane.
“People were in need of propane, but we didn’t have any electricity to provide the propane,” she said. “You feel like your hands are tied, because you want to provide service, and we couldn’t provide anything.”
People lined up at Belmares’ store again last week when people learned cold weather was on the way. The store sold out of propane in two days.
The grid held up during that cold snap. O’Rourke said that shouldn’t take attention away from last year’s disaster and that conditions between the two fronts differed greatly.
“Look at how cold it got a year ago and then look at how cold it got last week. There’s no comparison,” he said. “Look how long it stayed cold last year and how briefly it was cold last week. No comparison.”
Belmares and her neighbors were on O’Rourke’s mind while he spoke to a modest crowd at McAllen’s Firemen’s Park on Friday evening.
“Those are the costs and consequences of a governor who does not understand or care about this community,” O’Rourke said, “who would rather use you as a photo opportunity to scare the rest of the states from the people on the border.”
Though the event was part of O’Rourke’s “Keeping the Lights On” tour of campaign stops across the state, he touched on an array of issues he supported from higher wages for teachers, Medicaid expansion, and the legalization of marijuana.
When he did talk about the 2021 winter storm and subsequent blackout that left Texans without power for multiple days and led to the deaths of an estimated 700 Texans, O’Rourke was clear that he placed blame with his opponent.
Julio Montalvo | Special to The Monitor
“Just so we’re all clear about why this happened, it was not an act of God, it was not through the force of Mother Nature — it was the person in the highest position of public trust in the land,” O’Rourke said of Abbott. “The person who literally has the most power in Texas could not be trusted to deliver the power to the people when they needed it at their most.”
As governor, he pledged to winterize the gas supply and to connect the state’s power grid to the national power grid to relieve energy shortages in the face of high demand like the state saw during the blackout.
In response to the blackout, state legislators passed legislation to bail out energy companies that will likely lead to higher utility bills for residents.
O’Rourke referred to those higher bills as the “Abbott Tax” and pledged that, if elected, he would instead send money back to Texans by prosecuting energy providers that charged “exorbitant rates” during the storm.
“Right now, in this state, four out of 10 of our fellow Texans, including — I guarantee you — every single person in that colonia in Donna, have to choose between their electricity bill, filling a prescription, or putting food on the table,” O’Rourke said, “and far too often we know the people in our lives who instead of eating three meals a day, eat two or even one meal a day to stretch that dollar a little bit further.”
But in order to accomplish those goals, O’Rourke reminded the crowd that they had to show up to the polls like they did in 2018 when he ran for the Senate against Ted Cruz.
“We talked to more Texas voters than any campaign in Texas history and we turned out more Texas voters than any campaign in Texas history going all the way back to 1970,” O’Rourke said of his unsuccessful but competitive Senate bid. “Now it is time for us to build upon that and make sure that we win, not just those races at the state house and the congressional and the judicial level, but we win it at the top of the ticket.”
