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| For anyone to say EDATES' profound positive impacts on our community provide no benefit to the average citizen is a postition that is uninformed, ignorant, and incorrect. It is an opinion that's "Out to Lunch."--and when stated at a public meeting will be immediately challenged with the truth and facts. |
EDATE's are simply one economic development tool in our "tool kit" of incentives that allow for time limited (10 years maximum) forgiveness of some county ad valorem taxes in exchange for certain committments by large employers in our area. These are allowed under statute, but the voters must approve these every ten years. And the tax forgiveness only applies to county taxes--such businesses that receive EDATES must still pay 100% of school taxes from day one. So these are actually good for us--but even better for the school board.
And not every economic development deal we do includes EDATES. ST Engineering Aerospace, for instance, didn't get one. Others have done deals to build jobs here without EDATES. But still others required the use of EDATES to either keep an employer here, induce an employer to come, facilitate a developer to build (As the case was for Quint Studer's 'SouthTowne' building downtown) or to allow for an existing employer to expand their footprint.
A couple of years back the BCC was being relentlessly attacked by our liberal daily paper's cartoonist over EDATES. And I pushed back with a three part series of posts that completely and thoroughly explained EDATES, described and provided documents about the then current EDATES the county had outstanding, and in the process totally obliterated ignorant Andy Marlette's position on EDATES.
Now we are asking citizens to renew our ability to offer these selectively and judiciously when and if they are appropriate------- and one member of the board is apparently staunchly, stridently opposed.
That's fine--one member of the BCC can say whatever he wants and in his circle of influence he can
