Despite billions of dollars in federal aid throughout his solar energy career, U.S. Senate hopeful Jim Lamon insists the government should ‘step aside’ American companies.
Lamon is the former CEO and founder of DEPCOM Power Inc., a Scottsdale-based utility-scale solar company. In 2019, the Paradise Valley Republican claimed in a Freedom Files podcast that neither he nor DEPCOM “have ever asked for a grant or handout from anyone.”
“No handouts”, Lamon said in March. “We can’t have this constant Big Brother government to help us. It won’t allow us to be the strong and powerful nation that we can be to help our people.
But in December 2020, Lamon accepted $2,660,600 in federal relief from the Paycheck Protection Program, designed by Congress to provide economic relief for payrolls, rent, mortgage interest and utilities, records show.
At the same time, Lamon and other solar industry leaders signed a letter calling for legislation that would delay the implementation of a federal tax credit for solar companies. Solar power officials said the global pandemic had stalled solar projects, rendering federal assistance unnecessary.
“Many companies took PPP dollars during a very uncertain time at the start of the pandemic to protect employee jobs,” campaign spokeswoman Amy Wilhite said. Phoenix New Times tuesday. “Jim’s business employed over 1,200 people at the time and the payroll taxes far exceeded the PPP payment. Plus significant federal and state corporate and personal income taxes.
PPP money helped protect those jobs at the time, Wilhite said. The company currently employs approximately 300 people.
However, in October 2021, Lamon told DEPCOM “[did] don’t want to be on subsidies. As soon as we come down [the ground successfully]we want [subsidies] stopped.”
Then, at the uncancelled U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Lamon again asserted that he did not want to receive government grants, despite building his career with the help of the federal government.
He went on to criticize the government’s power to “spend so much money” last year, noting that Congress shelled out $4 trillion in coronavirus relief spending, even though his company got a slice of the pie.
Lamon thinks the solar industry could survive if its tax credit disappears and said it had to survive on its own, without subsidies.
“As an industry, we have to fend for ourselves,” he said. said.
lamon sold DEPCOM to Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Engineered Solutions in November for an undisclosed fee as he focused on his bid for the U.S. Senate. He is seeking to unseat incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly, but he must first win the Republican nomination in Arizona’s Aug. 2 primary. His opponents include Attorney General Mark Brnovch and venture capitalist Blake Masters, who is leading in the polls this week.
“Blake Masters was never pressured to create jobs and make profits so employees could keep their jobs,” Wilhite said. “He depended on the largesse of a Big Tech billionaire for his livelihood and over $13 million for his campaign. He is 100% subsidized and fully indebted to his Big Tech Master.”
Wilhite was referring to Masters’ biggest backer, billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk. Thiel has distributed more than $13.5 million from his own coffers to the Masters campaign.
But Lamon, who is the former senior vice president of engineering, procurement and construction at Tempe-based First Solar, Inc., also knows a thing or two about financial aid.
Lamon held this high-level leadership position from 2008 to 2012 and was closely involved in the company’s decision-making during his tenure there. He was responsible for overseeing the design and construction of solar farms.
In 2011, First Solar received over $3 billion in loan guarantees from the Obama administration to build the Agua Caliente, Antelope Valley and Desert Sunlight solar parks in Arizona and California. First Solar later announced that it was cutting American jobs.
Lamon played a leading role in all three projects that were funded by the Department of Energy’s $3 billion loan guarantees in 2012.
First Solar has implicitly threatened to abandon plans for its manufacturing plant in Arizona if it does not receive loan guarantees for the three projects.
“If First Solar’s project applications are not approved, or delayed beyond September 30, we believe this could compromise our ability to close funding…and, frankly, undermine the rationale for a new manufacturing center in Arizona,” said First Solar Director Jens Meyerhoff written in a May 2011 letter to an official of the Ministry of Energy.
Lamon’s team built the Antelope Valley Solar Ranch in Los Angeles County in 2012, and he was embroiled in contentious settlement talks that resulted in the laying off of American workers. The solar panel connectors that Lamon planned to install were not certified by the Common American Standard for use with such a large system, which caused a construction stoppage and furloughs. 230 construction workers.
The furloughs have been “a blow” for a metro city of Los Angeles suffering from high unemployment, where “recent studies have found as many as one in three homeowners late and / or underwater with their mortgages, Greentech Media reported at the time.
After telling Congress that the company was “financially sound,” First Solar fired 2,000 employees, nearly a third of its workforce, in 2012. The company did not disclose the number of layoffs in the United States.
“Jim was not the owner, president or CEO of First Solar,” Wilhite said. “He had no control over this company.”
But Lamon took the credit in a press release about First Solar’s work at Antelope Valley Solar Ranch, the Agua Caliente Solar Project in Yuma County, and the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm in Riverside, California.
Loan guarantees for power plants totaling $3 billion have all been repaid with interest, for a small profit for the taxpayer.
Yet the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform critical the federal loan First Solar received for massive power plants in Arizona and California, alleging Energy Department officials broke loan rules to secure money for the company.
A committee report said two of First Solar’s projects were not “innovative,” a requirement for the loan guarantee. Its authors even alleged an internal effort to wrongly consider the technology used in First Solar projects as innovative, when it was not.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney highlighted the controversy in a campaign ad, noting that First Solar took billions from the federal government and then fired workers.
First Solar said most of the layoffs were overseas. President Michael Ahearn admitted that “most of our full-time employees are outside the United States”
The layoffs coincided with First Solar’s cratered performance in the stock market, in which its share price had fallen 85% from $137 in April 2011 to less than $21 a year later.
Lamon, who promises to curb labor outsourcing and stop buying Chinese products if elected to the Senate this fall, denies playing a role in the decision to lay off American workers.
“His record of investing in his employees, including a 22% veteran workforce, while donating 10% of company profits to area charities and purchasing billions of Made- in-America is virtually unprecedented,” Wilhite said.
Lamon argues that First Solar’s reliance on foreign manufacturing and labor, coupled with furloughed American workers, is why he left to found DEPCOM in 2014.
At First Solar and DEPCOM, Lamon benefited from government programs to help his businesses.
During its first year, DEPCOM established a strategic banking relationship with The Biltmore Bank of Arizona, a division of Grandpoint Bank, one of the largest community banks in the Southwest which at the time held nearly $2.5 billion in assets.
Grandpoint Bank participated in the Arizona Innovation Accelerator Fund, funded by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Small Business Lending Initiative and administered by the Arizona Commerce Authority.
Yet in April, Lamon preached that “Washington has no idea what it’s like to make a payroll. They need to get rid of American workers and American businesses and allow them to produce the jobs we can. »
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