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Lenoir Officials Abandoned Economic Study of Google Tax Incentives

posted on February 16, 2007


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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  • http://www.seorefugee.com SEOrefugee

    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

  • T.J.

    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.

  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    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.

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