Tesla has collected $9.6M in tax breaks so far

The Tesla Gigafactory project collected $9.6 million in tax credits between October 2014 and June 2015.

Steve Hill, head of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) said as of the first quarter of 2016, the company was more than meeting its obligations to get transferable tax credits. He said during the first quarter of this year, there was a weekly average of 599 workers at the site in Storey County east of Reno, 458 of them or 76 percent of them Nevada residents.

To date, Hill said Tesla and its partner in the project, Panasonic, have invested a total of $508 million in the giant, high-tech battery factory project.

He said those figures come from the six-month audits of the project’s process.

“Tax credits are granted after an audit where the performance of a company is certified,” Hill said.

The transferable tax credits are granted based on hiring at the site and the investment at the site.

Asked about whether the project was on schedule in meeting its projected benchmarks, Hill advised the committee the nine-month plus delay between when those projections were made and when the special session granting the tax breaks was completed and the contracts signed put the company about that far behind the benchmarks. He said that gap is his mistake and he’s going to talk to company officials to adjust the benchmarks.

Just for that quarter the company reported paying workers a total of $6.8 million in wages. He said that brings total wages paid to date for the entire project to $14.7 million.

When completed, the Gigafactory will have 1.9 million square feet of manufacturing space to produce high-tech lithium based batteries to power Tesla’s electric vehicles, home energy systems and other products.