A financing deal that will help SOLARCYCLE build their new plant in Cedartown is going before the City Commission this coming Monday night for approval.

SOLARCYCLE plans to construct a multimillion dollar facility on more than 200 acres of property (formerly the York property) that was purchased by the Cedartown Development Authority in recent years to become an expansion of the northside industrial park off of Davis Road and the Highway 27 bypass.

The original intent was to have several smaller manufacturing facilities in the area – which got some utilities development help thanks to Georgia Power and state grant funding – but the deal with SOLARCYCLE came up and the opportunity for hundreds of new jobs and state of the art manufacturing was too good to pass up.

Alongside solar panel recycling using a patented process developed by the company in their original Texas plant over the past two years, the expansion also includes a glass manufacturing facility to immediately reuse portions of the cells in-house and create a product needed by a solar cell manufacturing facility QCell in Dalton.

The funding being sought by SOLARCYCLE with the help of the CDA as a pass-through agency will help defer some of the initial costs of construction and site preparation on the company’s bottom line. The company is still going to ultimately invest more than $300 million when the project is completed, but will get time to repay bonds sold on the market to investors instead of having short term loan financing deals that usually come with higher interest rates and faster repayment times.

Commissioners have the request to approve the financing deal on Monday’s agenda, noted as “Consideration of the Solarcycle TEFRA Financing Resolution.”

TEFRA is an acronym for “Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act,” which set rules and regulations for how tax exempt organizations are able to issue debt via bond sales and other regulated securities on open markets.

The Cedartown Development Authority approved of the request for SOLARCYCLE to seek bonds through the organization to help finance the overall construction cost of their new plant during a May meeting.

The plan now goes before the Cedartown City Commission for their approval, which will then allow SOLARCYCLE if given the go-ahead to sell bonds for the project up to $500 million.

The bond request doesn’t put taxpayers on the hook for the cost of the guarantees if the company shouldn’t be able to complete or follow through with the project, but only acts as a pass through agency for SOLARCYCLE to seek the money they want for construction.