re: Together Louisiana is at it again with some pure propaganda

quote:

---

Why do we need to reign in ITEP? It's a tax on capital expenditures. That's just dumb.

But even if we wanted to do that, we can reign it in when we fix our property tax system overall.

Put another way, don't you think we should reign in the homestead exemption?

---

Yes and yes.

We all know this is La. and that some industries regularly get special favors as do certain citizens when it comes to their Homestead exemption.

I think both the ITEP and the Homestead exemptions need to be investigated.

There are so many issues with this it isn't even funny.
First off you have to do mental gymnastics to say that an area just gave away millions in tax revenue. All of these economic development deals are competitive bids. Unless you really think that a company has to choose Calcasieu parish over Texas, Mississippi and Alabama. So you do away with the itep and their is a very real probability that the company chooses elsewhere to locate.
so they're are many things that go into this calculation to see if it is a worthwhile endeavor. The first of which is the value of the land in the beginning vs the value of the land today.
1. If this project isn't built then the property taxes built would be essentially 0. Which would mean that you don't start at 0 it isn't an either they give the tax break or they don't they are playing the long game for once. They forfeit some taxes in the beginning in order to collect them later.
See what happened to West Feliciana and because of ITEP their public school system has skyrocket, in return many more professionals have chosen to relocate and make it a much better community than it ever was. Having worked with that parish for many years I can guarentte you if it had been held to a local vote the itep for the nuclear plant would have never been issued and the parish would be in 3x worse issues.
2. This totally throws out the job component and the employees and the impact that they have on the local community.
3. The biggest issue is that now individual parishes have to make complicated decisions that they don't understand the long term impacts. If you show me 10 small town mayors with a decent understanding of compounding interest, economics, and finance that is needed to make a good decision, I will be amazed.
Together Louisiana decision and JBE to turn the decision over to the locals is the biggest mistake that he has made in his governorship. If the republican party is semi intelligent they can make a case right now that could sink the democratic party in Louisiana for the next 30 years.
Imagine this commercial.
In the 4 years leading up to JBE Louisiana won 12% of the economic development deals presented to them. Since JBE has tried to make irrational decisions and play party politics Louisiana has only won 7.2% of the economic development deals presented to them over the past 4 years. That is a costs of over 15,000 construction jobs and 25,000 direct and indirect permanent jobs per year. if you or someone you know is out of a job ask JBE why did you mess with success.

and that system is partly driven by our massive underclass

People like you have no idea how industry works, nor what the ITEP nor PILOT programs really are, who we compete against nor why. Add that to assuming we have a river, rail, pipelines everyone falls over to be here and you have an uneducated body of residents. Look what Houston has become thanks to politicians running the oil business out of NOLA. Without industry we have.l nothing left.

quote:

---

Corpus Christie over Baton Rouge or the massive multi-billion dollar shell project near Hymel's that, I believe, went to Houston. I will try to get the links lined up for you, but please keep that in mind.

---

You know that project was lead by a guy who was a high up in LED right? He was a great economic developer, and left for a better job in Texas.

His name is Tommy Kuntz and went from LED to corpus and got the Sabic ExxonMobil 12 BILLION dollar project from LA.

What sucks is that many people without critical thinking schools buy the propaganda hook line and sinker.

many things.
1. the epa and emissions cap over baton rouge had a huge impact.
2. The TEF Texas economic development fund cut a mighty nice check to exxon. No need for property tax exemptions when you can stroke hundreds of million dollars in checks.
3. Exxon didn't want to have to go through several layers of bureaucracy getting approval from local, parish and state governments doesn't make sense.
4. You have an administration that hasn't been nice to them and have made them villeins. They don't forget.
But I was never involved in industrial projects so I don't know the rest of the details.

quote:

---

I was hoping for hard numbers so we could compare it to what Louisiana could have offered/ did offer.

---

LOL it never got to that level on a serious note. Exxon said it doesn't matter they were tired of playing the game.

Because Texas doesn’t pay shite for BI claims unless it’s surgical.