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 But 0008301 has been superseded.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 310 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.
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.
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