Wind farm district application takes next step to comptroller

The Chapter 313 application by Young Wind, LLC, from Apex Clean Energy was approved by Newcastle ISD and Graham ISD this week. The application is related to a 600 MW wind energy farm being considered for the southwest portion of Young County which encompasses 30,128.22 acres between the two school districts.

The NISD and GISD Board of Trustees Tuesday and Wednesday approved the application from Young Wind, LLC, for an appraised value limitation on qualified property and authorized the superintendent to review the application for completeness for submission to the Texas Comptroller. The boards also gave the superintendent the authority to enter into any agreement to extend the deadline for board action.

Will Presson of Merit Advisors spoke on how it will benefit GISD and stated $200,000,000 will be added to the tax base for the district. He said if the tax rate remains the same for the interest and savings rate, the fund balance will increase to around $3 million per year.

“The things you can do with your revenues,” he said. “It kind of opens the door to either pay the debt off quicker, finance some new projects and fill those needs. (...) So over the course of this we modeled this for 25 years it’s going to be $31 million to the school district, so it is a big economic boom for the district. (...) But you can see the ADA payments through the first 10 years of the project on page one on the far right column and then there is also the protection in year one. So year one in 2022, the revenue protection payment we have estimated right at $2 million or $1,952,000, so year one, the revenue received by Graham ISD will be $2.917 million, so $2.9 million in year one.”

For the rest of the story, see the June 12 edition of The Graham Leader.