Poll: Eminent domain

[Ron Wenrich]

I was waiting to see how long it would take for someone to see how far this could go.  That was my original thought on eminent domain.  Is zoning eminent domain?

What really frosts your cookies is when they allow a business to come in, then give them a real estate tax break for 20 years.  At the end of 20 years, the company just moves on.  So, they take a tax paying property, convert it to a lower taxed property and guess who makes up the difference.

In the meantime, they put on a larger demand on the infrastructure.  Guess who pays for those repairs.

As far as elected officials, money talks. 

[farmerdoug]

We are a rural township with a power plant but we have had one instance already were someone asked for reduced taxes for building a foundry here.  Our township said if it is not profitable to build without a tax break then you do not need to build here.  We have seen the plants around in the area cities leave after the tax breaks ran out like Ron said.  We also saw plants leave to go to Arkansas to then Govern Clinton's minimum wage job creation plan that he was elected to the White House on also. 
That said a pet peave of mine is the people that complain about the elected people but do not even vote.

[Cedarman]

When we located our new mill in Al in 98 we did not consider looking for tax abatement. They offered it to us, we took it.We were locating where we did for other reasons and abatement was not one of them. My attitude is like farmerdoug's. If it takes abatement to get us there then it clouds our decision.  I think it is wrong for any community to offer it. It hurts established businesses and when the abatement is gone the business will run to the next place that offers incentives. Local people end up the losers in the long run. They just wasted their money on us because we wanted that location. Maybe some think it was wrong to take the money. We didn't ask for it, it was given.

[Larry]

Adding insult to injury.  After the land is stolen there is this new concept call tax increment financing (TIF).  Complicated scheme written by lawyers to benefit the rich and powerful.  Company submits a request for proposal to 50 cities fishing for the best deal.  Outright tax abatement, TIF, concessions from utilities, new infrastructure, along with all the other perks and sometimes these deals are pretty sweet.

Yeap, everybody wants a fishing super shop in their town...just how much ya willing to pay for it?

Sorta amazing to me when an government entity has a huge deferred maintenance debt but plenty of money for foop and frills.  Maybe I just don’t understand things.