BARKER — Somerset Operating Co. LLC has reached agreements with Niagara County and the Town of Somerset to settle multiple years of past-due property taxes on the site of the former coal-fired electric generation station.
Niagara County will be receiving $851,000 in back tax payments from SOC. The company also owed the Town of Somerset $312,000 in outstanding special district taxes that were not covered under SOC’s Payment In Lieu Of Taxes agreement for some of the parcels at 7725 Lake Road.
The county and the town were in negotiations with the company in regards to its now-expired PILOT agreement, its cessation mitigation program through Empire State Development, and assessing the property through the Town of Somerset, for the past two years.
The cessation mitigation program provides funding to local taxing jurisdictions that lose property tax or in-lieu revenue when an electric generating facility closes.
Previous PILOT agreements with the county, the Town of Somerset and Barker Central School District were terminated when the plant closed in 2020.
SOC paid $1 million toward its obligation to the Barker school district in 2022.
At the Somerset Town Board’s May business meeting, the board approved an agreement to have the company pay the town 80% of the $312,000 balance, town supervisor Jeff Dewart said.
“I didn’t see where it was worth trying to go to court over to get all that money, for what it costs. It would’ve cost a ton of money in attorney fees and who knows if we would’ve even gotten it then,” Dewart said.
As a part of determining the back tax payments, an agreement was also reached to reduce the assessment on the property to $8.7 million from $13.3 million, according to first assistant county attorney Katherine Alexander.
“Obviously, we didn’t want to work on and settle the assessment challenge without ensuring that the other matters were settled as well,” Alexander said.
Over the past two years, SOC had sought to legally challenge the $13.3 million assessment.
The recent agreement has now “wiped out” lawsuits brought against the town’s Board of Assessment Review, Dewart said.
Other parcels on the site now host SOC’s Lake Mariner Data facility, a high-tech campus focused on supporting various high energy use industries including bitcoin mining, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.