fuels including landfill gas green gas and pontiac clean those credits from twenty four landfills all of which had landfill gas collection facilities some of those facilities were connected to gas through a tricity equipment some were not the production tax rate statute makes no distinction between those two the tax court created such a distinction out of thin air and on that basis those disallowed all production tax credits from all the landfills not connected to such gas is either blown off into the air or it's a flare off burned off the right well i think there are there are many ways you can do it it could be vented and can be flared or it could be connected to some sort of generator or other you have wastes the whole point of it at least by the titles of the statue idea is to be producing some kind of alternative fuel and if all you do is blow it off of the air it's not really an alternate fuel is it is just a way of polluting the atmosphere i totally different for tax credit section forty five which is a tax credit for electricity generation from landfill gas and other not special survivor here i'm sorry who was the buyer the buyer here was r t c resource of knowledge corporation can be but i think there is a feral there oral equivalent goes to the methane content of whatever of the gas and the same way for the other types of dump eventual fuels that are addressed in in the production tax credit stat so i do believe that in one nine hundred eighty what congress intended to do was to support people in entering the industry for the landfill gas as a potential energy source and that will certainly includes a subsidy element the ones we're going to be used for anything else this will be the record is it that was the original intention there were that all of these were intended to be eventually gas to energy plants there was financial difficulty for c which led to bankruptcy and hope for the bankruptcy was there any was or there was no i mean i can understand why congress would want you to build the pipes but why get the credit until it actually resistance often is neighboring communities and their system only the record from the commissioners expert about it isn't medicine wisconsin but where there was nothing in the statute suggesting that the purpose here is to prevent that kind of thing purpose is to create an alternative fuel right into the purposes of forget about the legislative history just just because apparently government has a different view about even the legislative history you cite but with respect to the statute itself there's no suggestion that the purpose is some kind of environmental purpose other than the environmental purpose of competing with oil and gas regular gas if you look at the statute the question you producing qualified fuel are you producing landfill gas and without question the facilities that were in place in all twenty four landfills were producing them they were taking the landfill gas from out of the bowels of the say released i would disagree with that because if you're looking at oil for instance oil in the ground i can't say well there's oil in the ground but the dinosaurs died away years ago you know that's the production i don't think that's right the production is bringing it to the all their output for i think it was six month periods so the fact that they could use some or all or none of it really isn't relevant to the tax credit that the seller is entitled to a tax credit for the seller and i  independent of the statutory interpretation and there still is substantiation question for each of the two guys of landfills that's correct right yet we would still have to reach that even if we agreed with you with respect to the statute that is correct you the court said was because they died come up with some other witnesses in your failure to produce other witnesses is used against you is that right well the court said is i want you to bring the people to compare these logs the only people who prepared those logs were the who prepared them and there were other logs that were prepared by other people or other people who could have observed the logs were actually there approximately eighty five percent of the logs were prepared by mr walker mr johnson the direct supervisor of the two deceased individual he didn't see and he didn't see them being made he doesn't know whether they were made he's just a supervisor or what i would suggest a supervisor he's the one that also directed the methodology that they would use so i think that you know his in the absence of think it doesn't i'm just it's a long opinion if you could help me find out that the great i guess ago following exactly what you said that in deciding that there was a lack of substantiation the court said that the people who actually or something i'm going to hold this against you but that's why i'm asking him to show me where that yes well that's exactly what he did by saying that we by saying that we don't find mr ted kali's testimony because he's not the one that  the court below to judicial notice in which there were discussions of gas price and gas sales agreements involving those those landfills actually some of them were assigned by the district courts or by the bankruptcy court excuse me so i think but i will also say that as far as the site logs you know they were signed by one individual johnny johnson the richard walker and my understanding is that that was rather solitary exercise not many people want to go to the landfill with them so interpretation which goes into production facility sales in service then there substantiation just being clear about the independence if we agreed with you on the statutory interpretation landfills now as it happens because the final partnership administrative adjustment or after part in this case actually gave credits for those landfills the decision did as well and i don't know that the parties actually went back and said what substantiation justify this exact number because under the court's holding zero would have been justifiable so they just went with what the final partnership and ministry adjustment went with now let me put it to you this way if you were to reverse that everything with substantiation and send it back for recalculations a decision i cannot hear and she but the numbers for congress peoria and springfield would be the same i also can't guarantee you that they were changed by even ones is i guess what i would say so probably if you were trying to do the very low then i'm all you know i don't want to decide i actually have to decide you can decide substantiation and you can decide the contract attribut that i'm just not sure how exactly the parties worked through the numbers or they just simply adopted what was in the final partnership and ministry to the just met i'm not sure whether the tax payers would say i says i agree these are huge problems you know there's farce there's a lot of them have recurring numbers of don't actually make sense given how landfill gas works and it causes a not to be credible and the only witness they put hardily he didn't participate in the site as it logs we also know that while they say oh eighty five percent of these logs for were done by these two people we also know it sounds like there's there's reason to believe that they relied on landfill operators for at witness inference is appropriate because they could have provided other witnesses they were the only ones who knew they were necessary and they've never given any indication that these witnesses were not available to them but even if you were to conclude that the missing evidence inference party i believe that there is a match against terrorism i don't know i'm just asking i believe that there is but i certainly they've never indicated that there was any problem with getting a witness to come and testify but moreover you know they had the are highly problematic that on their face their own witness said well if there's repeating numbers that could mean estimation that could mean that they got this from some other party it could mean manipulation and so you have these documents that are sparse that  lack credibility on their face and the only witness they brought forward to try to support it and bolster these documents that it was their burden to provide had no credibility and of personality and a self serving he's evidence to show that they lost but those third parties lost those rights or those rights were given the green gas all you have is connelly all you have is his word now in there upon brief the taxpayer's going forward and said he exhibit fifty twenty six dash he is a bankruptcy court order where gas sales agreements gas rights agreements between r t c and green grass were assumed and assigned to us to approach a successor entity that means that those those contracts exist actually no it doesn't the trustee steinberg was actually asked about these that document at trial and this is this is can we transcript pages thirteen eleven to twelve from the transcript he was asked would you look to see if these these contracts existed he says no basically at the end of bankruptcy case such as this one when i'm i'm required to close down  basically the business i've been kind of running i just transfer any interest if any to the success or interest i think i looked to see of these contracts and then he was asked well i don't see the language if any in the in the in this document he says but that's what it  s and again this kind of goes to the fact that sometimes you get a court order and it's not necessarily clear the full consequence of what it means all you know is that any rights for a transfer you don't necessarily know contracted and certainly the trustee is not telling you that it does not seem very right about the statutory issue absolutely is there a definition somewhere a facility there really isn't a standard definition  facility and there's a facility no i mean i think that the way that the commission has consistently interpreted the statute can look at the facility in production and sales and the statutory purpose holistically and says it capable of being transferred to a third party for uses the same for use as fuel and that's how the court interpreted it and we think that that's correct is that it really needs to be capable of being used by fuel by the purchaser even if the parties within doesn't use it now there's an argument that was made for a special strongly in the reply brief to say oh actually it was sold and then it was burned off they told us to burn it off so we did this again is not entirely accurate based on the documents if you look at and a six twenty two to twenty four is testimony that said a well there's commercial quantity requirement in the sat in the contracts and there was no sale until that was mapped and we the taxpayers come back and say well look at exhibit thirty seven dash j and that shows that their title is transferred as soon as it came out of the ground again i don't really think that it does if you look at paragraph three point two of that contract that's going to have a sixty eight not have been determined until really the end of a six month period at which point all of the gas issue for a six month period had already gone up in the air so what you really have here is a situation where you know r t c determined this gergen that's right the tax court explicitly said that it was not deciding that issue that eight to fourteen no four and the fact that there were credits given for electricity let's tax court certainly never decided that that meant oh it's not a sham you know and i think there's a lot of interpretations that you could have including the fact that look are after all gave credits for these and the tax court didn't say oh that you shouldn't because it was a sham the court just didn't resolve that question at all and it's obviously load mr connelly they made an assumption a rule of thumb for the electricity generating plant saying that well if we know that some co on ours have you have been transferred over but we know that there's more we know that electricity had to be expended actually to run the generator so forth i didn't meter them i didn't measure it ten percent and the experts at their ok fine but you're credible i agree with that then you go to the  parasitic amount and so far as reasonable to make it make an estimate it's different than whether anybody ever actually and so they're credible because some will maybe should have been twenty percent maybe she'd been ten percent said expert testified the other one's that's not the problem  the problem is whether he's being honest or not whether he actually saw any of this or not whether he's making up numbers in a way that gives us maybe that gives a tax court more credibility they separate the credibility on them  what seemed like a reasonable estimate and disavowed credibility it with respect to other things that really weren't based on logic or logical estimate from agreed facts except i was just that they were for instance using account of the spanker of c and you know and the of the you know contract issues i would point the court to page ninety one of the opinion of they three hundred one for that and i would be remiss if i didn't at least touch on penalties because even if matter you had a chance to open on that i mean your worry about penalties from the government just now so we'll have to rest on the race and if there are no further questions i thank you thank you will think about our special take a brief break