The Gravel Pit Tesla Bought

Before it was a car factory, the land on the Colorado River east of Del Valle was a hole in the ground. A sand and gravel quarry operated there under TXI Operations, which Martin Marietta acquired when it bought Texas Industries in 2014. On a July 2020 earnings call the company's chief financial officer described what it had just agreed to sell as a depleted sand and gravel location in Austin, Texas, for nearly one hundred million dollars. The buyer, a Tesla subsidiary named Colorado River Project, paid about ninety seven million for roughly twenty one hundred acres. The arithmetic underneath the deal is the part worth keeping. The concrete operation that had been working the pit paid Del Valle Independent School District about fifty eight thousand dollars a year in property tax. On 9 July 2020 the district's board voted seven to one, with trustee Susanna Woody dissenting, to cap the new plant's taxable value at eighty million dollars against a projected seven hundred and seventy three million in added value. The district projected it would still collect about twenty eight million dollars in taxes across the ten years. Travis County followed on 14 July with roughly fourteen and a half million in rebates, approved four to nothing with one commissioner abstaining. Preparing the ground meant filling the exhausted pits and levelling them. Tesla's own land use attorney, arguing the case to an Austin council committee, said the site had looked like two thousand acres of craters, and that anyone who had seen what sand and gravel mining does to a piece of property would call it a moonscape.