Rivian has told Illinois regulators that its factory in Normal is worth $115 million, about a fifth of the $527 million the local assessor puts on it, in an appeal that could cost the town’s school district millions of dollars a year.
The argument is unusual. Rivian is not saying the plant is run down or idle. It is saying the company has made it so big that almost nobody would buy it.
The case is set out in a 122-page appraisal filed with the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board and obtained by the public radio station WGLT through a records request.
Rivian’s current tax bill on the site is $13.8 million. About $8.4 million of that goes to McLean County Unit 5 schools, the county’s largest district, which says $6.8 million a year is at stake.
Heartland Community College puts its own exposure at $800,000.
“Like any taxpayer, Rivian has the right to ask that our property be assessed fairly and accurately,” the company said in a statement to WGLT, adding that it remains committed to the community.
The Argument
The plant covers 4.6 million square feet on 524 acres, roughly the footprint of 25 supermarkets side by side. Rivian bought it in 2017 after Mitsubishi walked away, and has added more than 1.5 million square feet since.
That expansion is the heart of the appeal.
The appraiser, Robert D. Becker of R.D. Becker Valuation in Mattoon, Illinois, argues that plants on this scale are almost never built on speculation and almost never change hands.
When one does sell, he writes, it goes to a narrow set of buyers at a steep discount.
Across the five years to the valuation date, the largest comparable industrial sale anywhere in Illinois was about a third the size of the Normal plant. Only two sales in a 12-state stretch of the Midwest reached even 2 million square feet.
Of industrial buildings above 100,000 square feet in the United States, he found, just 0.36% exceed 3 million.
So the appraisal applies what valuers call obsolescence — a deduction for a building being worth less than it cost because the market cannot use it. Here that deduction is applied mostly for size.
Start with what it would cost to rebuild the plant today: about $1.17 billion. Take off 90% for age and unusability and you are left with roughly $117 million of building value.
Add the land, and the appraisal lands at $112 million on that method, and $115 million on the sales comparison it ultimately relies on.
The largest single deduction in the document, more than $319 million, is a penalty for the building being too large.
The Timing
The appeal values the property as it stood on January 1, 2025.
The figures exclude the $1.5 billion Rivian has since spent in Normal on its new R2 model, which was not finished at the time.
It is a legitimate valuation date. It also means the company is arguing its plant is worth little in the same year it has been publicising the biggest investment in the town’s history, including a visit from Governor JB Pritzker in May.
What the Market Says
The appraisal includes a table of 16 American car plants that changed hands. Ten of them, 62.5%, were liquidations or bankruptcies.
The list runs through General Motors sites sold by the trust set up after its 2009 collapse, the Delaware plant Motors Liquidation sold to Fisker for $20 million, and Tesla’s purchase of the old NUMMI factory in Fremont for $42 million.
Of the five largest, only two were ordinary commercial deals. One was Tesla’s, now 16 years ago. The other was Rivian’s own.
That transaction is itself a comparable in the file, and the price the appraisal uses is $2 million for the real estate — not the roughly $16 million widely reported.
The difference, the document explains, is equipment: Rivian bought from a liquidator that was selling the machinery too, assigned no value to it, and scrapped most of what it did not keep.
The County’s Answer
McLean County’s supervisor of assessments, Tim Jorczak, would not discuss the pending case but pushed back on the idea that Rivian was blindsided.
Assessors kept the company informed at every stage through site visits, meetings and phone calls, he said, particularly from 2023 when construction picked up.
Every year, he said, the county sent advance notice of the value and offered the chance to raise questions before it was finalised, and never once was there any indication of a problem.
Next Steps
Rivian first went to the county’s Board of Review asking for about $215 million. The board left the assessment largely alone.
The company then went to the state and cut its own number to $115 million, after the new appraisal was completed on June 29.
Objectors have until October 14 to file evidence. No hearing has been scheduled, and none is expected before spring 2027.
Unit 5 reached one with a large local landlord over 85 properties in 2017 and 2018, and State Farm settled a similar dispute in 2010.
