Lenoir Officials Abandoned Economic Study of Google Tax Incentives
Friday, February 16th, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |
Wow, it’s going to be hard for Lenoir and Caldwell County officials to keep justifying their decision, to provide Google with 30 years of tax breaks, when they didn’t even finish an economic study to see if a data center would be beneficial or not.
Local officials ran a computer analysis that determined a state job-creation grant of almost $5 million would generate more than $45 million in state revenue over 12 years. But they didn’t study whether committing to three decades of tax breaks made economic sense. “Intuitively, the numbers showed it was a good deal,” Lenoir City Manager Lane Bailey said Wednesday.
Oh cool, because there’s nothing us taxpayers trust more than the intuition of our elected officials.
Hat-tip Techdirt.
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February 16th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Now THAT’S the stuff I like to see. Google strong armed them and they just wanted to save face. All bow before the throne of all-mighty Google! lol
February 17th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Andy, you certainly appear to have changed your tune since last month:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/google-officially-selects-leno ir-for-data-center.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/2cd76x
What’s changed? The size shouldn’t affect your opinion of the deal.
February 18th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
T.J. who says my opinion has changed? I’m still happy to see Google coming to NC. That being said, since that post, we’ve learned the incentives could be $260m instead of $100m, and local officials didn’t complete their due diligence - that certainly raises questions.