UPDATE: Pecos HFC Property Tax Exemption

Last week I attended a court hearing with the City of Plano regarding the Pecos Housing Finance Corporation (HFC).

You may remember me writing last year about the Pecos HFC costing Plano taxpayers millions of dollars. The short version, as I wrote at the time, is that the Pecos HFC, based in Pecos, Texas (as close to Plano than Memphis, Tennessee), assumed ownership of two high-end apartment complexes in Plano, both of which advertised “resort-style amenities” and “resort-style pools.”

The Pecos HFC, which is supposed to promote “affordable housing”, then applied to make the Plano apartments exempt from property tax in an agreement where the Pecos HFC would get a cut of the nearly $3 million in property taxes saved. Remember, that’s property taxes that suddenly disappear from the City of Plano’s and Plano ISD’s revenue and has to be made up on our backs.

The issue was fixed moving forward by House Bill 21 last session (thanks to our area legislators for helping pass it), but left a 2-year tax gap.

In court last year, the judge extended a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to prohibit Pecos HFC from requesting property tax exemption for those two years, pending a final ruling. Before a final ruling, however, earlier this year, Pecos HFC went ahead and filed for the exemption anyway with the Collin Central Appraisal District (CAD), which initially denied the exemption, but the Appraisal Review Board (ARB) granted it on appeal. I’ll assume the CAD wasn’t aware of the TRO, and that Pecos HFC didn’t inform them.

That led us to court last week, where I joined with attorneys for the City of Plano. Due to their fervent last-minute efforts, they reached an agreement where the Pecos HFC essentially dropped their pursuit of the tax exemption, and the judge ordered the exemption reversed.

And they all lived happily ever after, to the end of their days, with nearly $3 million in taxpayer dollars rightfully restored.

Read the full court order here.

*The original article noted that the exemption was approved by the CAD. While the CAD initially denied it, it was approved by the Appraisal Review Board (ARB).