Fort Wayne City Council to Reexamine Tax Abatements

From a lengthy article in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette:

Four years and one City Council later, property tax abatements are back in the cross hairs of Fort Wayne’s legislators.

Tuesday, the council will conduct a special session dedicated to determining how and which businesses should receive tax breaks in return for investing in the community.

Based on the council’s history and its current members’ comments, it is more likely the discussion will push toward making the tax breaks more restrictive instead of less.

The issue received initial scrutiny this month as the council debated the merits of granting a tax break to a proposed dentist office that also needed to be annexed. That proposal received some strong opposition, while several other members said it might be appropriate to change abatement policy but not to punish this development for its timing.
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The council’s examination comes almost exactly four years after the previous council conducted a similar meeting. That council met in April 2008 to discuss tax abatements, prompted largely by a number of retail businesses that qualified for the benefits.

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Discussions in 2008 led to a revised abatement-grading scale that ranked requests based on merit, meaning some companies would be eligible for more of a benefit than others. The criteria for the ranking included money invested or jobs created.

The last council in December also approved new “super abatements” that extend the time companies can avoid paying any property taxes on new investments. The policy will allow companies to avoid paying any property taxes on a project for the first five years.
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See the full story here:

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20120528/LOCAL/305289996/1002

Some earlier posts on the proposed abatement:

http://indianapropertytaxreporter.blogspot.com/2012/05/despite-reservations-fort-wayne-city.html

http://indianapropertytaxreporter.blogspot.com/2012/05/annexation-request-bypasses-countys.html