February 7, 2023 |
At the Wyoming Legislature, the Senate Appropriations Committee moved the independent power producers bill forward Monday on a 3-2 vote.
House Bill 3 returns legal authority of assessing the ad valorem valuation of wind and solar energy installation farms to the state Department of Revenue. The authority now resides with county assessors after a similar bill failed last year. For the previous decade, the Wyoming Department of Revenue conducted the valuations. How the DOR reached its conclusion is not public information, and the accuracy of the state valuations has been the primary question throughout the discussion of the bill throughout the legislative process over the last year.
One of the arguments for county control is that wind companies have sold their projects to county commissioners with promise of high tax returns, but underdeliver once the project is built and operating.
Converse County Assessor Dixie Huxtabale told the Senate committee yesterday that all counties oppose HB 3 and want to keep the taxing authority local. Huxtable described the situation in Converse county.
Pictured above: Wind turbines in Carbon County. Photo by Jim O’Reilly/Bigfoot 99.
Huxtable added that she uses the same methodologies to assess industrial sites as the state does. DOR Director Barbara Henson described the set of choices available to assessors at both the state and the local level.
Director Henson said because of the uniform, table-driven formulas used in the process, she does not expect local valuations would differ much from ones done by the state.
Industry lobbyists, as they did during the public hearings in the House, said they want the valuations done by the state. Their argument is that the DOR has done the valuations historically giving companies a degree of stability. They argued that county assessments could vary wildly throwing making their business models less predictable.
The most interesting argument of the day occurred between committee member Sen. Tara Nethercott and Sen. Cale Case, who testified against House Bill 3. Nethercott said opposition to HB 3 is really a political pushback against wind energy projects at the county level.
Sen. Nethercott supported HB 3 when she sat on the Corporations Committee when it first drafted the legislation last year. Yesterday, she argued that county assessors are elected locally who are more apt to feel the political heat over projects than unelected state employees.
Sen. Case, a long-time critic of wind energy projects in Wyoming, said the real politics over wind energy is in Cheyenne, not at the local level.
Senators Nethercott, Gireau and Salazar were the “aye” votes. Appropriations Committee Chairman Kinskey and Senator Anderson were the “no” votes. HB 3 now goes to the Senate floor.
