Coal City Unit 1 School District files assessment complaint on GE-Hitachi

The Coal City Community Unit School District 1 Board of Education has authorized the filing of a complaint regarding the assessed value of the GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy Morris Operation and directed the superintendent and chief school business official to file said complaint with the Grundy County Board of Review.

The action came during a special meeting of the Board of Education on Thursday morning, November 30.

“Our state’s entire system of real property taxation is based on the premise that every property owner should pay their fair share,” Board President Ken P. Miller said. “To the extent that any property owner pays less than their fair share, every other property owner pays more. GE-Hitachi is not paying its fair share and the only way to correct that inequity is through an assessment complaint.”

The GE-Hitachi Morris Operation was originally constructed by GE to reprocess spent nuclear fuel but that did not happen. Instead, the site has operated as a spent fuel storage facility and, for more than 50 years, GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy has been providing nuclear plant operators from around the country with storage space at its facility on Collins Road in Goose Lake Township. The facility’s deep water pools hold 3,217 fuel assemblies, that’s 773 metric tons or 1.7 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel. The majority of that was shipped to the facility from nuclear generating facilities located in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Nebraska, as well as some from the neighboring Dresden Nuclear Generating Station.

The GE-Hitachi Morris Operation, located within the boundaries of the Coal City School District, is the only permanent high-level nuclear waste storage site in the nation. There is no other property like it anywhere in the country.

“The Unit 1 Board of Education is mindful of its obligation to treat all property taxpayers fairly and equitably – not only commercial and industrial properties, but homeowners as well,” said Superintendent Christopher Spencer. “The Board of Education firmly believes that GE-Hitachi is not paying its fair share of the property taxes required to educate our schoolchildren and that is unfair to homeowners and small businesses.”

The Board of Education previously filed objections to the assessed value of the spent nuclear fuel storage facility in tax years 2021 and 2022. For tax year 2021, the county’s three-member Board of Review increased the assessed value of the site from $3.2 million to $6.13 million. There was no change in the assessed value in 2022 and, when the assessor published the county’s assessments on November 8, the assessed value for 2023 was once again at the Board of Review’s 2021 amount of $6.13 million.

The county’s assessment is based on the cost approach that sets value based on replacement cost. However, there is no property anywhere in the country like the GE-Hitachi facility and there is no reliable cost data from which to determine the cost to replace it. The School District and its Board of Education believe the value should be based on the income approach that uses the income the property generates to calculate its value, as has long been the case with the neighboring Dresden Nuclear Power Station. Reactor owners who have spent nuclear fuel at the GE-Hitachi site pay for storage space and in turn are reimbursed by the federal government who has ultimate responsibility for disposal of the country’s spent nuclear fuel.

Based on an appraisal commissioned by the Coal City School District and other taxing bodies that receive property tax payments from the GE-Hitachi site, an assessment in excess of $200,000,000 is warranted.

In its effort to obtain a fair assessment of the GE-Hitachi facility, the Coal City School District and three other taxing districts—Coal City Fire Protection District, Coal City Public Library District and Grundy County—have filed appeals from the Grundy Board of Review rulings to the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board [PTAB] for tax years 2021 and 2022. Those cases are pending and it could take several years before they are resolved at the state level.

“It is our sincere hope that the Grundy County Board of Review will set a fair assessment of the GE-Hitachi facility for 2023 – fair for the taxing bodies, fair for GE-Hitachi and those nuclear operators storing their spent nuclear fuel in our community, and most importantly fair for all other property taxpayers in our community,” Spencer said.