The state publishes 4,428 Chapter 380 and 381 economic development agreements as scanned PDFs and structures none of them. I read the executed documents and record what each one actually commits a company to — the build-by date, the repayment remedy, and the page it sits on.
Celestica's agreement contains all three. The recital reads Company intends to make a Capital Investment of approximately Three Hundred Million Dollars
. Section 4.1 reads shall be … of not less than Two Hundred Twenty-Five Million Dollars
, by 1 January 2028. Intends and approximately bind nobody. Shall and not less than do. The state publishes the $3 million.
Taylor. Agreements 0013289 and 0013291 are both filed at $50,000,000 and both describe the same 366,000 sq ft building — one from the property owner's side, one covering the leased premises. Added up, one building reads as $100 million.
Waco. Graphic Packaging International appears under two agreement numbers for one project: 0012282 with McLennan County and 0013548 with the City of Waco.
No single filing is wrong. They are wrong when you add them — which is what every summary of this data does.
Go For Three, LLC holds the largest commitment in the register — a hotel, convention centre and parking facility in Arlington, effective 21 December 2023 and running to 31 December 2078. Fifty-five years.
Search the registry and you get agreement 0008301, filed at $97,500,000. But 0008301 has been superseded. Agreement 0011400 names it as its predecessor and is filed at $99,253,255 — an amendment adding a pedestrian walkway reimbursement capped at $1,753,225.42.
I had the $97.5 million figure on this page myself until I re-checked it. That is the problem in one row: not that anything was hidden, but that the document the state shows you is frequently not the document in force.
For a Hopkins County brief covering five agreements, I took each generation project to ERCOT's interconnection records. Four were already operating — the deadline had passed and the registry still showed nothing. The fifth appeared nowhere.
That pattern now has 297 verified examples. Texas records what was promised and never records what happened.
Each row carries the sentence that creates the obligation, the page it appears on, and the repayment clause where the contract states one.
Every value is quoted from the document and cited to a page. Nothing is inferred, averaged or reconciled. Where a contract is silent, the field stays empty rather than being filled with a guess.
A recital is not a covenant. A registry summary field is not a contract term. Two filings for one project are not two projects. Corrections get made within a day, because the citation is there to settle it.
And the rule applies to my own work. 335 obligations survived the amendment check. Of those, 20 turned out to be defined terms rather than covenants — “Completion Deadline” means on or before October 31, 2024
defines a word, it does not create a duty. A further 19 carried a date their own quoted sentence did not support, usually because the contract states a term and the date had been calculated from it. Both sets were removed. 297 is what is left, and every row’s quote carries its own date.
Across the 138 agreements I have read where the contract states both a committed investment and a committed permanent headcount, the total is $11.0 billion against 39,080 jobs — about $282,000 per job. The fifteen highest are all utility-scale solar, and they run a thousand times that.
This is not an accusation. A solar farm genuinely does not need staff, and counties often justify these on the tax base returning rather than on employment. It raises a different question: if everyone involved knows the facility will employ two people, what is the jobs covenant in the agreement for? Every figure above is quoted from the executed contract with its page.
Email me a Texas county and I'll send back every agreement in it with a deadline in the next eighteen months — quoted, page-cited, and checked. If there's nothing there, I'll tell you that instead.
[email protected]Under Chapter 312 of the Tax Code, Texas counties exempt new projects — many of them solar, battery and gas plants — from property tax for up to ten years, often in exchange for payments in lieu of taxes. The state collects these agreements, but reports are only due before 1 July of the following year. The terms live in county postings. I read them and record every payment, cited to its page.
Duval sets an annual payment of $120,000.00 per year plus $1,200.00 per MW (AC)
above 120 MW, and adds two $120,000 development payments, a $100,000 community payment and $7,500 toward legal fees. Haskell charges $1,300.00 multiplied by the total number of megawatts
, with a 200 MW minimum, and a $1,000 administrative fee.
Over ten years both land within $110 a megawatt of each other. One county took the money before a panel went up; the other waits for it.
Add every payment written into the Dove Run agreement and you get $1,648,000. Two of those lines are not owed in every case.
$100,000 is optional. It is a deferral payment the developer makes only if it chooses to push back its construction deadline by a year.
$500 is a ceiling. County costs are reimbursed not to exceed $500.00
— a cap, not a payment.
What the county is owed in every case, at the 120 MW minimum: $1,547,500. A total that counts the optional fee and the cap is $100,500 too high, and nothing in the document says so on its face.
Haskell gives the developer a one-time right to push either Inertia deadline back by a year. Duval's agreement ends automatically if no construction notice is sent by the third anniversary of its effective date; a $100,000 deferral payment buys one more year.
A deadline in a contract is not a record of what happened. Whether these projects were built on time is a separate question, checked against the grid before it is ever stated here.
A county must post notice of a proposed abatement at least thirty days before it votes. Duval's notice for its 13 July 2026 meeting listed three agreements for one zone:
The agreement itself is only due to reach the state registry before 1 July of the year after it is signed.
Some counties post an agreement before it is signed. The Dove Run copy on Duval County's site is the agenda version — its signature lines are blank. The Inertia Solar agreement in Haskell is signed.
Every 312 document here is marked signed or blank before any figure from it is used, because the terms can change between the agenda and the signature.
Every value on this page is quoted from the document and checked against the page it cites. Each payment is classed as fixed, optional, a cap or a reimbursement before anything is added.
The per-megawatt figures are the one exception: they are calculated, not quoted. Ten years of the annual payment at the agreement's minimum capacity, plus fixed payments only, divided by that capacity. Optional fees, caps and reimbursements are left out.
Chapter 312 expires on 1 September 2029 unless the Legislature continues it. In 2025, bills to bar these abatements for wind, solar and battery projects passed the Texas Senate and died without a House vote. The question returns in 2027.
The agreements already signed carry ten-year payment schedules and construction deadlines of their own. Whatever the Legislature decides, those terms keep falling due.
Chapter 312 coverage is new and growing. Email me a Texas county and I'll send what its posted abatement documents commit to — quoted, page-cited, and marked signed or draft. If I haven't reached it yet, I'll tell you that instead.
[email protected]