| NEWS | Hands Out from p 11 Arizona,” First Solar executive Jens Meyerhoff wrote in a May 2011 letter to a Department of Energy official. Lamon’s team built the Antelope Valley Solar Ranch in Los Angeles County in 2012, and he was involved in controversial settlement talks that resulted in furloughed American workers. The solar panel connectors Lamon planned to install were not certified by the common U.S. standard for use with such a large system, which caused a halt in construction and furloughs of 230 construction workers. The furloughs were “a severe blow” to a town in metro Los Angeles suffering from a high rate of unemployment, where “recent studies found as many as one in three homeowners behind and/or underwater with their mortgages,” Greentech Media reported at the time. After telling Congress the company was “financially strong,” First Solar laid off 2,000 employees, nearly one-third of its workforce, in 2012. The company didn’t disclose how many layoffs were stateside. “Jim wasn’t the owner, president, or CEO of First Solar,” Wilhite said. “He didn’t have control over that company.” But Lamon took credit in a press release for First Solar’s work at Antelope Valley Solar Ranch, Agua Caliente Solar Project in Yuma County, and Desert Sunlight Solar Farm in Riverside, California. Power plant loan guarantees totaling $3 billion were all repaid with interest, for a small profit to the taxpayer. Still, the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform criticized the federal loan that First Solar received for massive power plants in Arizona and California, alleging Energy Department officials broke lending rules to get money to the company. A report from the committee said two of First Solar’s projects were not “innova- tive,” a requirement for the loan guarantee. Its authors even alleged an internal effort to falsely consider the technology used in First Solar’s projects innovative, although it was not. On the 2012 presidential campaign trail, Republican nominee Mitt Romney spot- lighted the controversy in a campaign ad, noting that First Solar accepted billions from the federal government and then laid- off workers. First Solar claimed most of the layoffs were overseas. Chairman Michael Ahearn admitted that “most of our full-time employees are outside the U.S.” The layoffs coincided with First Solar’s cratering performance on the stock Gage Skidmore / Creative Commons U.S. Senate hopeful Jim Lamon, a Paradise Valley Republican, said in March, “We can’t have this constant Big Brother government to help.” market, in which its stock price had fallen by 85 percent from $137 in April 2011 to less than $21 one year later. Lamon, who’s promising to curb labor outsourcing and stop buying Chinese goods if elected to the Senate this fall, denies having a role in the decision to lay off American workers. “His record of investing in his employees, including a 22 percent veteran workforce, while tithing 10 percent of company profits to area charities, and buying billions of Made-in-America prod- ucts is virtually unparalleled,” Wilhite said. Lamon maintains that First Solar’s reli- ance on foreign manufacturing and labor, coupled with the furloughed American workers, is why he departed to found DEPCOM in 2014. At both First Solar and DEPCOM, Lamon benefited from government programs to help his companies. In its inaugural year, DEPCOM estab- lished a strategic banking relationship with The Biltmore Bank of Arizona, a division of Grandpoint Bank, one of the largest community banks in the Southwest that had nearly $2.5 billion in assets at the time. Grandpoint Bank participated in the Arizona Innovation Accelerator Fund, funded by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s State Small Business Credit Initiative and managed by the Arizona Commerce Authority. Still, in April, Lamon preached that “Washington has no clue what it’s like to make a payroll. They’ve got to get the hell out of the way of the American worker and American business and allow them to produce the jobs that we can.” 13 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES JULY 21ST–JULY 27TH, 2022
