The Star’s John Wall tells us that Nestle USA is providing a “rare treat” to the good people of Anderson by deciding to build a beverage-product factory there which will employ 300. And in exchange for that “rare treat” city taxpayers will fork over $46 million in tax breaks and incentives, and the state will kick in another $7.8 million in incentives. That amounts to almost $180,000 per job if you’re keeping count—one of the highest incentives ever paid to lure a manufacturer anywhere in the country.
Folks up in Anderson might have done well to consult with the folks up in Allen Co. before they decided to invest so heavily in Nestle. Fort Wayne Observed relates the story of a big distribution facility Allen Co. landed from the company back in 1990 with the help of incentives. The company closed the facility four years after it opened. Adding insult to injury, the company demanded and got a several hundred thousand dollar property tax break on the abandoned facility. Maybe Nestle will be sweeter to Anderson than it was to Allen Co.
3 comments:
I don't know a lot about Anderson, so I may have to stand corrected on this.....but when I watched the news report on where this new plant will be located, it is currently a soybean field. What view the news showed of it, it looked rather quiet and pristine with and old barn in the background and everything.
Isn't Anderson chock full of empty factories, warehouses, etc.? Why must we continually eat up good farmland? Especially now that Indiana wants to be the leader in alternative fuels. We will need lots of available farmland to accomplish that.
Kevin: I went to college in Anderson, and yes, that city is full of sites that could be used instead of losing farmland. What a lot of folks don't understand is that once you take land used for crops, you really can never go back and reclaim it for that use.
Anderson has always been about the short-term, and this Nestle deal may come back to haunt them like the many city blocks that sit in virtual ruin there.
explain to me again why "welfare mammas" are bad, but corporate welfare is good?
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