SB1789

Pole standards: the Public Utility Commission must adopt structural-integrity standards addressing inspection, maintenance, repair and replacement, records, geography and weather, national guidelines, serviceability and differences among utility systems. The law does not itself set a single inspection interval or order every old pole replaced immediately. For electric utilities’ poles installed before the rules take effect, the commission must approve a reasonable completion timeline that allows high-risk poles to take priority. Final law, sections 3 and 6(b).

Municipal utilities and cooperatives: their governing bodies must adopt the commission’s standards. Existing operators have 120 days after the commission adopts the initial standards; revised standards must be adopted within 120 days after their effective date. All covered operators report pole-maintenance implementation, inspection counts and repair or replacement actions by May 1 each year. A municipal utility or cooperative’s first report after adopting initial or revised standards must include an attestation from its highest-ranking representative with binding authority. The commission may impose administrative penalties for violations of this section or its rules. The referenced penalty statute generally allows up to $25,000 per violation, with each day a separate violation, and requires consideration of seriousness and other factors; amounts above $5,000 require the highest violation class. These are possible penalties, not automatic fines for every outage. Final law, section 3; Referenced penalty framework.

Poorly performing feeder lines: for a feeder serving ten or more customers, the threshold for possible enforcement changes from an outage-duration or outage-frequency average more than 300% greater than the system average to more than 200% greater, measured during any two-year period. In ordinary arithmetic, that is more than three times the system average rather than more than four times—not simply twice the average. The commission must also consider each interruption’s duration along with causes, maintenance history, corrective actions, remediation costs and benefits, and other relevant factors. The new rule applies only to enforcement actions initiated on or after September 1, 2025. Final law, sections 2 and 6(a); Prior reliability law.

Storm-damage investment returns: if an electric utility fails to comply with the new pole standards and its system is damaged by weather or a natural disaster, the commission may reduce its allowed return on equity at the next rate proceeding for infrastructure used or installed to repair or replace the damaged part. This is discretionary and targeted; it is not a ban on all recovery of repair costs, an automatic customer refund or a finding that noncompliance caused a particular outage. The general infrastructure report retains storm-hardening and vegetation-management topics; distribution-pole inspection reporting moves to the new pole framework. Final law, sections 1, 4–5; Restoration-cost framework; Prior infrastructure report.

Amendments and rejected approaches: the introduced bill would have barred a return on equity for damaged infrastructure the commission determined a utility should reasonably have anticipated could be damaged. The Senate substitute replaced that with the narrower discretionary reduction tied to pole-standard noncompliance and storm damage, and detailed maintenance, records and reporting requirements. Schwertner’s adopted April 23 amendment added an optional compliance-program provision and a cooperative-jurisdiction limitation; the House committee removed the latter. McQueeney’s adopted May 19 amendment replaced the optional-program language with municipal/cooperative adoption, attestation and penalty requirements, and added the initial 120-day adoption deadline. It also confined the old-pole reasonable-timeline provision to electric utilities. Senate concurrence May 26 preserved these changes. Introduced; Senate substitute; Senate-passed; House committee; Schwertner amendment; McQueeney amendment; Version index; Amendment index; Final law.

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

Customers may benefit from more systematic pole maintenance and earlier scrutiny of unreliable lines. Utilities face inspection, recordkeeping and repair obligations; municipal utilities and cooperatives also face explicit standards-adoption and penalty provisions. The act does not guarantee uninterrupted power or a lower electricity bill. Benefits and compliance costs depend on the rules and work actually performed. Final law.

The May 20 post-House fiscal note, also linked from enrollment, estimates $1,815,310 in state general-revenue costs for 2026–2027: $907,655 each year and 4.5 additional full-time-equivalent positions. The estimate includes $250,000 annually for a contractor to review roughly 165 reports and identifies $12,150 in annual information-technology spending. It anticipates no significant local-government fiscal implication, but does not quantify every utility’s pole-replacement costs, customer-rate effects or outage savings. The bill makes no appropriation. Post-House fiscal note; Enrolled-linked fiscal note.

The introduced, Senate committee, Senate-passed and House committee fiscal notes carry the same two-year state-cost estimate, despite changes in legal scope. Those estimates should not be mistaken for proof that compliance costs are identical across utilities. Introduced fiscal note; Senate committee fiscal note; Senate-passed fiscal note; House committee fiscal note.