Another Texas police skipped the city while the state was paralyzed by severe winter weather, it turned out this week.
Republican State Representative Gary Gates is under fire after he flew his private jet to Orlando, Florida on Wednesday, while his Fort Bend County constituents struggled without water and power, the Houston Chronicle reported.
“It would have been really nice to have a state representative helping on the ground, working in a keep-warm center, packing food, etc., rather than immediately (flying) a private plane when the going got tough,” he said. Brian Walz says of Gates’ voters, told the paper. “My neighbors didn’t do that when her pipe burst.”
Gates claimed that the pipes in his home had also burst and that 30 percent of his home was flooded, insisting that the trip was necessary because of his sick wife and special needs daughter.
“My wife is still recovering from an illness she has had for two weeks, and my adult daughter, who is mentally retarded and still lives with us, is flooding,” Gates told the newspaper.
But Fort Bend Star reporter Stefan Modrich said on Twitter that Gates’s chief of staff told him that the sales representative was on a business trip to Florida to meet with a “big salesman.”
Gates, who owns several apartment buildings in Houston, told the Chronicle that he had met a salesman in Florida, but that was only because he was already there.
He insisted that he could monitor the power outage crisis in Lonestar state from Florida.
The criticism follows the revelation that Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancun, Mexico with his family while leaving much of the state without power and increasing water problems.
He returned the next day after being punished for skipping the city while the state was in crisis, later admitting the trip was a mistake.