Texas is making efforts to attract Tesla Inc. and turn to its next electric vehicle plant after Travis County commissioners voted Tuesday to pass a 70 percent repayment of the company’s $1 billion asset tax at a location near Austin. The refund is worth at least $13.9 million.
The Austin and Tulsa regions are the finalists for contacting the facility where Tesla plans to build the Cybertruck van that executive chairman Elon Musk first unveiled last year. He said on Twitter that it would also complement the production of Model Y crossovers already manufactured at the company’s only auto meeting facility in the United States in Fremont, California.
Tesla told Travis County that its planned plant would employ 5,000 full-time employees with an average salary of about $47,000 a year. At least part of them will be county citizens.
The week-long effort to get the cut into Austin’s domain came here when Musk, 49, brabably tweeted about the point of showing up through Tulsa and Oklahoma. He visited the domain on July 3 and Governor Kevin Stitt posted photos the next day of the small contingent that welcomed the billionaire to the city.
Nate Jensen, a professor of government at the University of Texas-Austin, said getting cuts at the county level can be a step forward for Tesla to eventually achieve greater state support bureaucracy, adding the Texas Enterprise Fund, one of the largest contributors to the economy. incentives for progression in the country.
“They promise the global for the county – the best environmental and wage standards, annual audits – and as soon as they get more incentives, they will give up urban incentives,” Jensen said.
Tesla said when it planned to make a resolution at the plant’s structure site.
Other incentives the county gives Tesla with a $46.4 million asset tax cut from the local school district over 10 years and an $80 million limit on the plant’s taxable price. If Tesla follows the project, it will be one of the biggest economic progression agreements in Austin’s history.
Just before the vote, Commissioner Margaret Gomez requested a week-long delay to allow more time to review the deal, however, other commissioners expressed fear that this would cause Tesla to build the plant elsewhere.
Rohan Patel, a Tesla executive who participated in the commission’s virtual meeting, was noncommittal on that question when commissioners asked him about it. However, he told them that the company had just had a call “with a governor of another state and mayor of another town to go through a whole bunch of things similar to what we have gone through now.”
This led Commissioner Jeff Travillion, whose district includes the potential site of the plant, to say that the threat of wasting the task is too great.
Landing at the factory would be a major spice for a region that saw its unemployment rate at 11.6% in May from 2.6% in February, with more than 81,000 people wasting their jobs amid coronavirus closures across the country. Half of them earned less than $30,000 a year before being fired for recreation and hospitality, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.
Thousands of jobs would be temporarily opened to begin construction, which Tesla needs to begin this quarter.
Local Tesla supporters who spoke at Tuesday’s pre-vote assembly called it a potential blessing to the economy and a source of new jobs that are the value of taxpayer subsidies.
But others criticized Tesla’s corporate record on workplace safety and labor relations and pushed for more to be done to ensure employees of the factory are treated and paid well.
Union leaders and progressive teams had suggested the five board members of Commissioners take their time and negotiate the most productive agreement imaginable, asking elected officials to request in writing employee protection and a $15 hour-per-hour salary. All. Employees.
The information for this article was provided by Sophia Cai and Paul Stinson of Bloomberg News and Bob Sechler of the Austin American-Statesman.