CANADIAN — Salem Abraham may not have memorized every utility pole in the Texas Panhandle, but he knows precisely which ones shouldn’t be there.
He’s mapped them across more than 300 miles in this region of treeless grassland, plateaus and canyons.
These structures have been marked as defective or dangerous by their owner, Xcel Energy, the Minnesota-based electric utility that powers much of the Panhandle. They are evidence, Abraham said, of Xcel’s failure to upkeep its infrastructure. And as long as they remain that way, tagged and unreplaced, each one of them is another wildfire waiting to happen, Abraham said.
“I think there are more fires in our future,” said Abraham, a business mogul who has taken a sharp interest in Xcel’s inspection operations. “And we’re going to keep having fires until we get the poles fixed.”
Nearly two years ago, a damaged utility pole owned by Xcel sparked the state’s largest wildfire in history, killing two people, scores of livestock and charred more than a million acres.
Abraham said the ranchland is just as vulnerable to more devastation. He said Xcel has put profits over safety, and that the cities damaged by the wildfires must demand that the utility do more to protect the region.
The Best of the Tribune in your Inbox
The Y’all is a weekly dispatch about the people, places and policies that define the state of Texas. Produced by Texas Tribune journalists embedded in communities across the state.
Abraham is using his largess to do that. He has created a new company that is leading a group of 11 Panhandle towns to put pressure on Xcel to upgrade its poles and other electric infrastructure.
Abraham and the constellation of cities are also laying the groundwork for a possible takeover of the electric utility.
The coalition, which includes the cities of Canadian, Borger, and Perryton, was announced in December, following the news that Attorney General Ken Paxton was suing Xcel. The lawsuit alleges Xcel misrepresented its safety commitment and ignored warnings about its aging infrastructure. It seeks compensation for property damage and other civil penalties.
“It makes sense to me that if you do such a bad job running something that you kill people, burn down houses, destroy billions in property and millions of acres, that you might get fired,” Abraham said. “Anyone working at their job that screws up that big should get fired.”
Xcel vehemently disputed Abraham’s claims.
Adrian Rodriguez, the president of the company’s Texas and New Mexico offices, said the company has taken dramatic measures to bolster its infrastructure, including expanding and implementing wildfire mitigation plans, replacing 1,400 poles immediately after the fires and adopting a $500 million taxpayer-funded plan to bolster wildfire protections required by the Texas Legislature.
Xcel, Rodriguez added, has also paid out hundreds of millions in financial claims, settled multiple lawsuits while negotiating more, and briefed emergency management officials across the Panhandle to include them in the company’s plans.
“We have engaged our community, and have achieved a high number of resolutions with those who were directly impacted by the Smokehouse Creek fire,” Rodriguez said.
A local utility for the Panhandle
Abraham insists Xcel has to go.
“I think the communities don’t really trust them anymore,” Abraham said. “I think we’ve got reason not to trust them. And I’m talking about the Minnesota bosses … because the local people, they’re our friends.”
A fourth-generation Canadian resident, Abraham grew up on his family’s ranch. The family has been in the ranching business for more than 100 years. He has built his own small empire that focuses on buying and selling other ranches, oil and gas properties and wind rights.
He established a company, Don’t Burn Me Services LLC, which the cities hired to consult on the process, according to documents obtained by The Texas Tribune. Agreements with each of the cities state that Abraham’s company “will recommend alternatives” for each city’s existing electric services.
Should his plan succeed, Abraham would split any profits a new utility makes with the cities — 65% for cities, and 35% for him. He’s also poised to recoup $2 million he expects to spend on the effort.
There are at least two different legal paths that could yield such an outcome.
Local government officials could issue a condemnation, triggering a legal process to take control of Xcel. The process allows cities to take over electricity distribution. To provide electricity, the region can establish locally run electric cooperatives — like Abraham’s — which function as nonprofits and elect boards. Abraham said it would be up to the cities whether to ultimately acquire Xcel’s electricity-providing infrastructure and equipment.
Paxton’s lawsuit could end with a settlement agreement with Xcel, which the attorney general’s office would negotiate, and could compel the utility to reach a similar result.
Whether the cities will follow Abraham all the way is an open question. The cities have signed the agreements and approved resolutions that could set up a seizure of Xcel’s operations. However, at least two city managers who spoke to the Tribune raised doubts it would come to that.
Borger City Manager Garrett Spradling said the utility was going “in the right direction.”
“We want to make sure that they are complying in a responsible way,” Spradling said. “We want to make sure that we’re taking a more active role in the oversight and making sure that what they are supposed to be doing is getting done and not just paper pushed through files.”
Borger, a town of about 12,000 people, is 50 miles north of Amarillo.
Replacing Xcel would be a complicated and remarkably expensive task, said Jimmy Glotfelty, former commissioner of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s electricity.
Cities would have to function as a utility to maintain poles and wires, buying trucks and hiring workers to address infrastructure issues. Local officials would need to issue bonds or public loans to cover upfront costs. They’d have to learn how to buy and sell electricity and open call centers to interact with their consumers. It could take billions of dollars to achieve, Glotfelty said.
“All of those things are the responsibility of the investor-owned utility, and they’re very hard to replicate,” Glotfelty said. And the reason the companies are run that way, he added, “is because of the challenge with replicating them, and that makes it very hard for the consumer.”
Municipalities and electric cooperatives can — and sometimes do — provide utility services. But state law makes it even more burdensome to establish or take over an existing utility, as it is tilted to favor the free market, Glotfelty said. Nearly 80 electric co-operatives provide electricity services in Texas.
“The Legislature has decided over the years that they don’t want a bunch of new electric utilities in the state,” he said. “So they pass laws that make it harder for new electric utilities to come into our state and build things.”
Abraham, who is footing the bill for consulting and legal costs for the cities, said he believes that the outcome of Paxton’s lawsuit could result in a settlement by which Xcel covers the cost of the transition. The fines against Xcel exceed its ability to pay, which Abraham said makes it more likely that Xcel will agree to his terms.
“If Attorney General Paxton takes it over and basically says, ‘You guys have lost your company because you have so many fines,’ I bet we could get a good deal from him,” Abraham said. “Electrical engineers should run an electric company, and we have those in Texas, and they can run it well, and we can fix our utility and get back to living life and not have fire season anymore.”
Xcel plans on staying
Rodriguez, the company’s Texas and New Mexico president, said the company has taken ongoing measures to bolster its infrastructure and make cities safer, including implementing a wildfire mitigation plan, revamping pole inspections and adopting a legislatively required $500 million system to install more advanced technology.
Rodriguez said they would not heed calls to leave — and noted that more wildfires in the Panhandle had been started by unregulated power lines privately owned by oil and gas operators.
Xcel — which also provides energy in eight other states — could lose as many as 277,300 customers in Texas across 80 communities.
As part of its mitigation plan, the company created a meteorological monitoring system to identify conditions that lead to wildfires. This office is tasked with producing real-time forecasts and identifying long-term trends, including analyzing wind speeds and their relationship to outages and fires. Workers also installed cameras with artificial intelligence that can detect wildfires and alert nearby cities when they do. They’ve also implemented software that calculates risk for different wildfire scenarios.
It also adopted a wide-ranging infrastructure overhaul that includes wildfire-resistant equipment to reduce ignition risk and moves certain electrical distribution systems underground.
Xcel, in a statement, said there are 80 remaining priority one poles, which the utility brands with red tags. Those poles, which the utility replaces “on an expedited basis,” aren’t in high wildfire risk areas, the statement said. It costs between $1,000 to $2,000 to strengthen a pole. Replacing it altogether can exceed $15,000. Xcel has 1,338 poles, it said, that are due for replacement. Many of those are low priority, the company said.
“Since 2021, we’ve replaced more than 19,000 poles and invested over $111 million toward the safety and reliability of our wooden poles,” said Eran Moore, director of distribution design at Xcel Energy. “This is an investment in infrastructure that protects customers and communities while maintaining reliable electrical service during weather events.”
Salem Abraham shows a photo of the utility pole that caused the Smokehouse Creek fire outside of Stinnett on Dec. 29, 2025. Red tags generally designate a defective utility pole that is structurally compromised due to decay, damage, overloading, or age, making it unsafe and prone to collapse. Eli Hartman for The Texas Tribune 
A red-tagged utility pole, yards away from the same pole that started the Smokehouse Creek fire, in Stinnett. Eli Hartman for The Texas Tribune 
A red-tagged utility pole outside Sunrise Elementary School in Amarillo. Eli Hartman for The Texas Tribune 
A red-tagged utility pole outside a day care center in Stratford. Eli Hartman for The Texas Tribune
The utility’s plan additionally addresses pole replacements, transmission equipment monitoring and power shut-offs. Wood poles are inspected visually every 12 years. Older poles receive additional care, including remediation of rot. Xcel will increase aerial inspections of transmission equipment, as currently, those inspections don’t gather enough information. The areas surveyed will be divided into tiers, depending on wildfire risk. Xcel will also rebuild transmission lines.
“I certainly hope that we can bridge whatever misunderstanding or gap that there is for the work that we are doing and for which many of these communities have been a part of,” Rodriguez said.
Another city leader told the Tribune they trusted Xcel with the improvements but wanted more oversight. And they, too, said Xcel should remain as the local utility.
The utility should be afforded the chance to demonstrate how they’ve improved and strengthened their services, said Colby Waters, interim city manager of Perryton, 119 miles north of Amarillo. Waters said Xcel had been a responsible utility in his town of 8,500 and that the company always addressed the city’s concerns.
But he said Perryton’s City Council believes there could be negligence concerning the maintenance of the poles, and that the coalition awards give them more power to negotiate with Xcel — and to pay more attention to its Texas customers.
“Personally, I don’t like the idea of a governmental entity exercising eminent domain unless it is a really dire situation,” Waters said. “I think the City Council agrees that there potentially is negligence. There is a concern that maybe Xcel could be running their business differently in Texas.”
