By David Henke in the Elkhart Truth:
While Elkhart city and surrounding communities struggle to gain jobs, the use of tax abatements have increased in that effort. As publicized in The Elkhart Truth, I questioned the current process and unchecked methodologies that are used to validate that abatements actually grow our local economy instead of adding an additional cost to taxpayers.
While I desire this community to be business friendly, we must acknowledge the many companies that already exist and pay their fair share of taxes without government help. While being business friendly, elected officials must also be diligent to protect future business taxes collected as abatements may very well lower the margins in which the city needs to continue full services.
While normal business cycles will continue, we hope that new business starts and expansions equal the business that are experiencing slow down or shut down. From a finance standpoint, that business cycle provides municipal government, schools, trustees and libraries with necessary taxes to sustain services. If, however, abatements are encouraged without measurable, sustainable returns, the amount of money collected may not offset the taxes lost by failing companies and those experiencing slowdown.
For these reasons, I voted no on the Keil North America expansion. Scope Technologies’ owner stated that if another competitor comes in with $450,000 of government assistance someone has to fail, as there is not enough demand for their specific industry. Mind you that this seating company just completed a $2.5 million expansion without government help, taking the number of jobs from 20 to 150. In my opinion, adding 62 new jobs to replace an equal number of existing jobs is a fail.
For the Elkhart Truth editorial board to quickly and flatly declare the question of abatement wrong implies that everyone agrees with the process and it consistently benefits the municipality and community. That simply is not accurate.
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As always, I believe that more discussion and debate is healthy and warranted or the government we have today is the best we can hope for.
See the full article here:
http://www.etruth.com/article/20120728/OPINION/707289999/0/FRONTPAGE
