Dallas official says Texas governor hasn’t even called him amid the crisis — but the White House has

Judge Clay Jenkins, the chief executive of Dallas County, revealed to MSNBC that none of the state's Republican officials have contacted him about the crisis, but that the White House has been offering any help he needs.

Speaking to MSNBC host Hallie Jackson Thursday, Judge Jenkins said that the CEO of ERCOT said that everyone should have powered restored by Friday. While outage maps show that under 500,000 people are without power, Judge Jenkins said that in his area there are about 70,000 people in north Texas without power because transformers have frozen and are offline. He said that technicians are out attempting to fix the transformers.

As for water, he said that facilities without power are the ones that have been unable to properly treat the water and that is the area that is under a boil order. In Dallas, things are a lot better than in most places.

"Did you ever think it would get this bad in Texas?" asked Jackson.

"Yes," Judge Jenkins said simply. "We've been warning the governor about this since 2011 when it was nearly this bad around the Super Bowl. You may remember the ice storm. There was a federal report that said if you don't winterize it will happen again. There was a state report saying the same thing. The governor made a conscious choice not to do that. When you're in a regulated market and you tell companies to do something it's the same as telling them not to because they only get their energy bought if they're at the lowest cost. It was completely predictable. And now it's time for the governor to apologize along with the people that regulate the pipelines, which are three elected officials called the Railroad Commission, here."

He noted it's also time for things to be winterized and that if they don't do it then the legislature needs to make them do it.

When Judge Jenkins was asked about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) reportedly going to Mexico, he said that it was his understanding that Cruz was on vacation.

"I haven't heard from the governor. I haven't heard from any of the state leaders. We've been doing the best we can. We have heard from the white house and we're very thankful," he explained. "The reason that our water is in good shape is because the Biden administration and FEMA sent us generators. We hooked those up to our water treatment plants, and we were able to save most of our water treatment plants with that help. But, you know, for those of us in public service when people are hurting and you're in a crisis, we all need to do as much as we can. We can't do everything but everyone in public service can do like the people of Texas are doing now, helping each other. We can't do everything, but we can do as much as we can do."

See the video below:

dallas' judge jenkinswww.youtube.com