Tag Archives: Texas Governor Greg Abbott

Biden to route U.S. border wall funds to military and construction site clean up

By Ted Hesson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden’s administration will return more than $2 billion in funds allotted under his predecessor Donald Trump to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border to the military and devote other remaining money to construction site clean up, the White House budget office said on Friday.

The move will return funds to 66 military projects spanning 11 states, three U.S. territories and 16 countries, the White House said in a related fact sheet. The projects include $79 million to renovate a U.S. military school in Germany and $9 million for a firing range in Indiana.

Trump, a Republican, made the wall a signature part of his presidency, saying it was needed to stop illegal immigration and drug smuggling. During his four years in office, Trump secured about $15 billion for the project, including $10 billion in redirected U.S. military funds.

Biden, a Democrat, issued an executive order on Jan. 20 – his first day in office – that paused wall construction, saying “a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.”

The Biden administration said on Friday that it would use its legal authority to stop any new border wall construction while calling on Congress to redirect existing resources to technology-based border security.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said on Thursday that his state would build its own border wall, but whether he has the resources and legal authority to do that remains unclear. Abbott and other Republicans have criticized Biden in recent months for rolling back Trump restrictions as the number of migrants arriving at the border has reached the highest monthly levels in two decades.

After Congress declined to provide money that Trump had requested for wall construction, his administration redirected funds appropriated by lawmakers for other purposes in order to pay for the project. Democrats accused Trump at the time of exceeding his power as president.

(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)

Texas utility regulator ousted after comments to investors disclosed

By Kanishka Singh and Gary McWilliams

(Reuters) – The third and last remaining commissioner of the Texas utilities regulator resigned under pressure on Tuesday after the release of comments to investors vowing to protect utility profits and dismissing financial hits from a cold snap on municipal power companies.

The resignation came soon after the disclosure of inflammatory comments by the Public Utility Commission Chair Arthur D’Andrea in a March 9 call with Bank of America utilities’ analysts. The call took place two days before he was to consider rescinding billions of dollars in payment to utilities.

His stance against repricing helped sink a proposal this week to cut $4.1 billion from charges in the final hours of a deadly February blackout. The regulator and state grid operator raised power prices to about 400 times the normal rate over five days. But they left the pricing in place for 32 hours after the emergency passed, spurring state officials to call for a partial repricing.

On the March 9 call, D’Andrea told investors and analysts he had “tipped the scale as hard as I could” to prevent repricing and would keep “the weight of the commission” against it, according to a recording of the call published Tuesday by Texas Monthly magazine on its website.

DISMISSES HIT TO CITY-RUN POWER

Municipal power companies that could benefit from repricing proposals would get through the financial hit, he advised the investors. Several have had their credit ratings downgraded, raising future borrowing costs.

Referring to San Antonio’s city-run CPS Energy that has contested $200 million in power charges, D’Andrea dismissed the impact in remarks to Bank of America analysts: “They’ve got a lot of money. They’re fine.”

High costs from the storm have led four Texas power companies to seek protection from creditors in bankruptcy court. Electricity firms have failed to pay $3 billion in storm-related charges, amounts that eventually would be passed to all Texas utilities and their customers.

“Tonight, I asked for and accepted the resignation of PUC Commissioner Arthur D’Andrea,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement released late Tuesday. He plans to name a replacement in the coming days.

PUC spokesman Andrew Barlow did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

JOB PROTECTION

In his call with Bank of America, D’Andrea also claimed he had job protection after two of the three PUC commissioners resigned. Lawmakers could “secure promises from me” that they could not get if there were other commissioners, he said.

“I expect it to be this way for a while, at least a year, with just me,” he said of the commission’s makeup.

Earlier in March, Shelly Botkin resigned from her post at the PUC, a week after former Chairman DeAnn Walker resigned.

The Bank of America recording threw new light on the commission’s much-criticized handling of a deadly February blackout that killed more than 56 people in the state and could saddle power companies with bills for decades.

The state’s independent market monitor testified power grid operator ERCOT, which is overseen by the PUC, made a $16 billion pricing error by keeping prices high for 32 hours after widespread outages ended Feb. 17.

Electricity retailer Brilliant Energy LLC on Tuesday became the fourth company to file for bankruptcy protection since the storm. Its bankruptcy court filing came a day after Griddy Energy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $29 million in charges for power.

(Reporting by Gary McWilliams in Houston, Kanishka Singh and Derek Francis in Bengaluru; editing by Richard Pullin and Marguerita Choy)

More than 1.3 million Texans still grappling with water supply disruptions

By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) – More than 1.3 million people across over 200 counties in Texas still had issues with their water supply by Wednesday, but that was down sharply from recent days, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) said.

That figure compared with Tuesday’s 3.4 million, Monday’s 8 million and Sunday’s 9 million, or about a third of the state’s population.

A deadly winter storm caused widespread blackouts last week across Texas, a state unaccustomed to extreme cold, killing at least two dozen people and knocking out power to more than 4 million at its peak.

As of Wednesday evening, “33 Public Water Systems are non-operational, affecting 20,689 Texans,” the spokesman told Reuters in an emailed statement, adding that 204 counties were reporting issues with their public water systems (PWS).

He said around 853 PWSs were on a boil water notice, meaning people were being advised to boil water before consuming it, affecting 1,333,134 Texans. Some 1,176 previously issued boil water notices had been rescinded, he added.

Once the current crisis is over, TCEQ plans to examine the ongoing experience to prevent such a disruption from taking place in the future, TCEQ Executive Director Toby Baker told Reuters on Wednesday.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott pledged on Wednesday to overhaul the state’s electric grid operator after a massive blackout left residents without heat, power or water for days.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the flow of power to about 90% of state residents, has faced sharp criticism over its failure to prepare for severe cold. Outages caused billions of dollars of damages to homes and businesses.

Six ERCOT directors have resigned and a board nominee declined a seat in the wake of sharp criticism of the group’s performance.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Tom Hogue and Ana Nicolaci da Costa)