Summary: In Central Texas, a new data center for the tech giant is underway. Meta will receive a 75 percent property tax break for the first 10 years from the city of Temple, with additional unknown levels of property tax breaks for the subsequent 10 years.
Latest Update: Wednesday, 13 April, 2022
Tags: #StateLegislation
Texas Taxpayers Forced to Tithe at Facebook ‘Temple’, Texas Scorecard 12 April 2022
Excerpt:
A 900,000-square-foot Hyperscale Data Center for the technology giant Meta, formerly Facebook, was announced late last month. Temple will house the second Meta data center in Texas, with the first located in Fort Worth.
According to the Temple Economic Development Corporation, Meta will invest $800 million and host approximately 100 permanent jobs in the region.
But that “investment” will also come with taxpayer subsidies.
According to Meta’s announcement of the Temple Data Center, which references their commitment to investing in the local community, “Since our data center in Fort Worth began serving traffic in 2017, we have provided over $2.6 million in grants to schools, small businesses, and local organizations.”
Besides Fort Worth ISD and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, other local partnerships include Girls Inc., which “equips girls to navigate gender, economic, and social barriers, and grow up healthy, educated, and independent.”
Girls Inc. celebrated the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown and acknowledged the International Day of Transgender Visibility, remarking, “We stand with LGBTQIA+ youth and continue to advocate for the rights and dignity of girls and all youth.”
Read Fort Worth is another of Meta’s local partnerships. Its board includes Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, who has spent the past month attacking Republicans for refusing to expand Medicaid and support “gender-affirming care,” also known as child gender mutilation experiments. The board also includes Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Kent Scribner, who is retiring early after failing to address parental concerns over critical race theory and explicit materials in their children’s schools.
Local news also reports that Meta will receive a 75 percent property tax break for the first 10 years from the city of Temple, with additional unknown levels of property tax breaks for the subsequent 10 years.
The city will reportedly still receive around $7 million in property taxes from Meta per year, and other taxing entities such as Bell County and Temple Independent School District were exempt from the tax breaks.
Thus, a 75 percent tax break means the city could have been receiving nearly $28 million in tax dollars from Meta. However, the burden will undoubtedly shift to citizens.
Nevertheless, Gov. Greg Abbott has explicitly invited Meta into Texas despite having publicly lambasted them, as Texas Scorecard previously covered. It appears the Temple Data Center is the project the governor and Meta were so insistent on maintaining secrecy around last year amid open records requests for transparency.
Additional Articles:
National Corporations Sign Letter Supporting Mutilation Experiments on Texas Minors, Texas Scorecard, 14 March 2022
Apple, Google, PayPal, Meta (Facebook), Macy’s, LinkedIn, and dozens of big businesses signed onto the Human Rights Campaign open letter urging Texas politicians to “abandon efforts to write discrimination into law and policy” and allow the disfiguring procedures, which include cutting off the healthy breasts of adolescent girls and chemically and surgically castrating minors.
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