GISD receives wind farm update

Last week, the Graham ISD board received a status update on the wind farm project Young Wind, LLC, from Apex Clean Energy. GISD and Newcastle ISD granted a property value limitation under Chapter 313 of the Tax Code, and GISD is currently in the waiting process with the Texas Comptroller’s office regarding documentation related to the project.

The district retained Moak, Casey & Associates to prepare an analysis of the value limitation and help the district with the process of filing a Chapter 313 application and the wind farm agreement process. Apex is planning to invest $163.9 million into new taxable value to construct a renewable wind energy electric generation facility.

“So basically what the company did on their application is they said they want you guys to grant them a $10 million taxable value limitation from M&O purposes. (...) They want that to start in the 2023 tax year. We call that VL1, Value Limitation year one. The maximum taxable value of the project occurs in VL1 (in) 2023 (and is) $163.9 million. So you are not going to collect taxes on $163.9 million for M&O purposes. You are only going to collect taxes on $10 million for M&O purposes in the first year of the limitation and then for the next 10 years. For I&S purposes, it is fully taxable at the $163.9 million and of course from there it depreciates down,” Kathy Mathias, of Moak, Casey & Associates said.

Mathias spoke to the GISD board last Wednesday regarding their application progress and presented the board a financial impact statement regarding the proposed project within the district.

“The company presented an application to the school district early this past summer. They proposed to build a 500 megawatts project split between Graham ISD, 28.81% in Graham, and Newcastle ISD, 71.19% (in Newcastle), which equated to about 144 megawatts in Graham. You accepted the application (...) on June 9 (...) this past summer. The application actually didn’t get submitted to the comptroller until Aug. 25. The company needed to make some additional updates to their application regarding their maps, and maps can be a little complicated to get in the right order that the comptroller likes it,” Mathias said. “So it got submitted to the comptroller on Aug. 25, and then we had to wait for them to do a completeness letter. They issued that completeness letter on Oct. 15, which is why we did the finance report and sent y’all the finance report. That completeness letter date starts a (...) timeline. There’s a 150-day complete process timeline started from the date of the completeness letter. Ninety days from the completeness letter, the comptroller has to issue a certificate and that would be around Jan. 13, 2022, for that 90-day part. They can issue it earlier. Typically, it seems like they go pretty close to the 90-day (period) and then after that there’s another 60 days. If they wait up to 90 days to do the certificate, there’s another 60 days to do final action by the board. So it would be like 150 days from Oct. 15, which would end up being March 14, 2022. So right now we are basically in a waiting period for the certificate to be issued.”

For the rest of the story, see the Nov. 20 edition of The Graham Leader.