The Abatement Register

I read the Texas incentive contracts so you don't have to.

Texas cities and counties file every economic development agreement they sign with the Comptroller — as scanned paper, with no searchable text and a one-line summary that is sometimes wrong by a factor of a hundred. Inside those scans are the completion dates, the capital commitments and the repayment terms. I pull them out, quote them with the page they came from, and check what actually got built.

Updated 18 September 2026  ·  abatementregister.com
4,433agreements filed with the state
348read page by page
58with a build-by date before 2028
14large enough to matter to a builder

What that turns up

$3,000,000
vs
$300,000,000

The state's registry records $3 million for Celestica's agreement in Richardson. The executed contract commits $300 million and 2,273 jobs. Signed five weeks ago. Both figures are published side by side rather than one quietly replacing the other.

A promise is not a project

4 of 5 built

Five utility-scale agreements in Hopkins County, matched against ERCOT's grid record by county rather than by company name. Four are on the grid and operating. One has no resource under its name at all. The registry itself can't tell you that — fewer than 1.5% of its rows ever record an outcome.

How it is read

Who

One person, reading contracts. Not a platform, not a team, not a feed scraped from somebody else's database.

That's the whole reason the numbers can be trusted: every one of them was located in a document by someone who looked at the page. 757 agreements have been downloaded and transcribed so far; 348 of them read down to their terms. The rest are queued.

Start here

Tell me the counties you work in.

I'll pull the agreements in your footprint — completion dates, capital committed, clawback terms, acreage and parcels where the contract states them — and send them over. No charge for the first one, nothing to sign.

oscar@abatementregister.com