Carbon County Commissioner Casey Hopes stopped by Castle Country Radio to talk about the solar plants coming to the area. He wanted to clarify some questions that residents may have about the development and process of these new plants coming into the area.

“I wanted to talk a little bit about the process of these solar companies coming in. One, these are private lands that they’re working with so they have the right to let something happen on their property. But the thing that I think is important is they do come to the government entities and ask for what’s called a CRA or a Community Reinvestment Area,” said Commissioner Hopes. How this work is they take the taxable value of the land as it sits and they continue to pay that set rate and this creates a baseline. The factoring into the solar plants is similar to what was arranged with Intermountain Electronics new expansion project.

“So then they take the base value of the land and add the new value of, this case, the solar plant, and what we do is we share some of the taxes that they pay, the new taxes that are generated from the increase in property value. So because you take that raw ground that has nothing on it, put the solar plant on it, now it has a huge value. So that increase in value creates more tax revenue,” explained Commissioner Hopes. So what this means in a CRA is the county splits some of that new taxation with the company so that they can put in some of that infrastructure. This includes roads, powerlines in this case, substations, everything that they need to do to make the project happen.

“But the good thing, in this one, is that we get the added taxation, so we’re going to get probably 50 percent of that right up front. Well its not quite 50 percent, its about 45 percent up front. They’ll get a portion of that right up front, 10 percent of that goes into affordable housing, we have a housing shortage so that’s automatically going to go into fixing our housing problem and then there’s some administration costs that we’ll be able to use to administer this program, the CRA,” stated Commissioner Hopes. This will be very beneficial to the community as the solar company is very invested to the area.

Hopefully this sheds some light on the solar projects. Commissioners want folks to know that they have an open-door policy so if further discussion is needed you can stop by the commissioner’s office. “We’re there and willing to talk and hopefully we are explaining things well enough that they’re understandable and that you can see the reason why we are making some of those decisions.  Its not that we’re all into solar because we certainly want to support, and back, and try and do things that help our coal community, that’s the backbone of our community, we certainly want to do that. If we get a coalminer that comes in and says hey I want a CRA to start up, absolutely we will use these same processes to help those types of projects happen as well,” said Commissioner Hopes.

To listen to this interview in its entirety visit www.castlecountryradio.com