2025 Texas sessionsRegular and both called sessions have ended. This index covers House and Senate bills, not resolutions. Statuses come from official reports.

2025 · Regular session · House bill

HB144

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Official caption: Relating to plans for the management and inspection of distribution poles.

Signed by governorSource-checked explanation published

Official report lists House author(s): King. This does not identify sponsors or amendment drafters.

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Bill explanation published · Version and amendment review scope is stated below · Individual amendment records may not be separately annotated.

Bill highlights

Selected points from the published explanation. Follow each point to its source-linked context; conditions and limits may matter.

HB144 requires electric utilities, electric cooperatives and municipally owned utilities distributing electricity to the public to submit plans to the Public Utility Commission for managing and inspecting the distribution poles they own in their systems.
What a plan must cover: public-safety objectives for pole management, inspection, maintenance and repair; responsible staff; training and certification of inspectors, including outside vendors; estimated inspection and repair timelines; handling of landowner reports and complaints; and methods for monitoring compliance.
Updates and review: by May 1 each year, covered entities must report progress toward their objectives, costs to date, inspection results, the number of poles inspected, and remedial or replacement actions.
The law took effect June 20, 2025.

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What does it do?

HB144 requires electric utilities, electric cooperatives and municipally owned utilities distributing electricity to the public to submit plans to the Public Utility Commission for managing and inspecting the distribution poles they own in their systems. It is a planning, reporting and compliance-review law—not an order to replace every pole, a uniform inspection interval, or a guarantee that no pole will fail. Final law.

What a plan must cover: public-safety objectives for pole management, inspection, maintenance and repair; responsible staff; training and certification of inspectors, including outside vendors; estimated inspection and repair timelines; handling of landowner reports and complaints; and methods for monitoring compliance. An electric utility’s initial plan must also estimate implementation costs. The statute does not impose that same initial cost-estimate item on cooperatives and municipal utilities, although all covered entities must report costs incurred in annual updates. Final law, Section 38.103(a)–(c).

Updates and review: by May 1 each year, covered entities must report progress toward their objectives, costs to date, inspection results, the number of poles inspected, and remedial or replacement actions. Electric utilities may incorporate the update in their existing infrastructure report. The commission must review each plan and update and notify the entity whether it is complying with the plan’s public-safety objectives. It may accept substantially similar information already required under other law. Final law; existing infrastructure-report provision.

The law took effect June 20, 2025. Its initial-plan provision says plans are due by January 1, 2027, while authorizing the commission to establish different submission dates for different classes of entities. That flexibility should not be mistaken for a universal January 2026 deadline, which appeared earlier in the legislative process. Official history; final transition provision.

What changed along the way?

A House committee substitute would have expanded the bill from distribution poles to transmission poles as well. On April 23, the speaker sustained a procedural objection because that expansion added a distinct subject outside the original bill. The history then records that the original bill was ordered printed, and the engrossed text covers distribution poles only. House journal explaining the ruling; version index.

King’s adopted House amendment added landowner-complaint procedures, pole-specific inspection/remediation information and monthly updates, with a possible switch to annual updates after 24 compliant monthly filings. It added a cooperative-jurisdiction clause and moved initial submission from 2026 to 2027, allowing different dates by entity class. The final law retains the complaint process and later initial-submission provision, but not that monthly-reporting scheme or the added jurisdiction clause. House amendment; House adoption record.

Schwertner’s adopted Senate amendment limited plans to poles the entity owns, rewrote plan contents, established annual May 1 updates for all covered entities, and allowed equivalent information from other reporting duties. It replaced the proposed 180-day approve/modify/reject process with review and notification of compliance with plan objectives. It also replaced pole-specific deadlines and the monthly reporting language with the final estimated-timeline and annual-results requirements. The House concurred; all five Senate amendment instructions are reflected in the final law. Senate amendment; amendment index.

For the full amendment record, open the official amendment index.

Official bill versions

Compare the published text versions in the official text index. A change is not attributed to a specific amendment here without a verified record.

Who could benefit—and who could bear the costs?

Potential benefits: customers and landowners gain a clearer accountability process for pole condition and complaints. Inspection and repair planning could improve reliability and safety; accepting equivalent reports can reduce duplicate paperwork. The law does not promise a particular outage reduction or require a specific complaint outcome.

Burdens: utilities and cooperatives must prepare plans, track inspections and repairs, train personnel and report costs and results. Local costs cannot be reliably totaled from the fiscal record. The bill does not set a customer surcharge, fix electricity rates or automatically approve recovery of every expense.

Fiscal estimate: the latest May 28 note estimates about $2.72 million in state general-revenue-related costs over fiscal 2026–27, about $1.36 million a year, with nine additional commission positions. It identifies possible but unquantified local-government costs. HB144 makes no appropriation. Earlier estimates concerned different requirements and staffing levels. Latest fiscal note.

Source caution: even the latest fiscal note repeats some superseded details, including January 2026 initial submission, a three-year update cycle and pole-specific reporting language. Those descriptions do not override the final January 2027/class-specific submission provision, annual May 1 updates and revised plan requirements described above. The dollars remain the published fiscal estimate, not verified spending or a corrected forecast.

Review boundary: checked history, all five text versions, both complete floor amendments and their dispositions, the Senate packet, relevant House journal entries, all five listed fiscal-note versions and the existing infrastructure-report rule. Current commission schedules, filed plans and individual pole conditions were not audited.

Official sources

Catalog report retrieved 2026-10-25. Check the official record for corrections or later changes.