HOUSTON – On Monday, for the second time in a week, CenterPoint put up its Vice President of Regulatory Policy, Brad Tutunjian, for interviews.
The biggest revelation statement made by CenterPoint during Monday’s interview focused on their operations.
“We will focus on everything we can to restore the power, when we get that information we’ll share it, but I want to convey our system did not fail,” said Tutunjian.
This comes after two news conference by Governor Greg Abbott in the last 24 hours in Houston where he unloaded on CenterPoint with heavy criticism including questioning as to who they were really looking out for during this storm and its aftermath.
“We must know was CenterPoint protecting Texans or was it protecting its own pocketbook,” said Governor Abbott.
During our interview, Tutunjian did not specifically address whether the company would meet the demands placed by Governor Greg Abbott on CenterPoint only 24 hours earlier.
“So what I can tell you right now is that we are committed to doing everything we can but our focus is the restoration point to make sure we get our customers on,” said Tutunjian.
CenterPoint also revealed the company is doing permanent and temporary repairs which they are logging and will attempt to fix after all the power is back on.
“We do come back immediately after our storm response and try to address those issues,” said Tutunjian.
As to who will pay for all these repairs?
“So traditionally when you, you can look at our storm response, we work with our state/local officials to recover those costs. There is different vehicles to be able to do that, sometimes there are ways the state allows us to seek security bonds to be able to recover those costs,” said Tutunjian.
When asked directly whether customers are going to be paying for all these repairs, Tutunjian did not answer directly simply stating, “To be honest our focus is to get the lights back on.”
CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells has yet to make himself available to KPRC 2 Investigates for a sit-down interview. Tutunjian said he will check for Wells’ availability and get back to us.