JASPER, Tenn. – When a local industry wants to expand, Marion County leaders typically grant a 10-year tax abatement on the project to encourage them to go forward with it.
At its September meeting, the Marion County Commission voted 14-1 for such an abatement for one local company planning a $1.5 million expansion.
The project would create about 40 new jobs.
Commissioner Joey Blevins, who cast the lone dissenting vote, said he wanted to see language in the county’s tax abatement agreements that would require those job creation projections to be met.
“We need some kind of clawback provisions in the future where if we’re going to give these people a tax break for 10 years, that we have some way to enforce them holding up their end of the bargain,” he said. “That’s not in here.”
County Attorney Billy Gouger said he doesn’t disagree with Blevins’s sentiment, but those kinds of conditions have not been included historically in the county’s abatement agreements.
He said the reasoning behind not including those types of provisions is that if a company doesn’t make the investment, there’s no tax benefit to give anyway.
Blevins said adding the requirements would “make a fair playing field for everybody.”
“If we’re going to relieve them of that tax burden, there needs to be some reason for us to do that,” he said.
Commissioner Mack Reeves said he could see how a clawback provision might be a good thing to have for a new company moving into the county, but for established industries, it doesn’t make sense.
“We all have lived through being burned by people coming in, and then they’re gone,” he said. “If you have any age at all, you know that and have seen that happen. When you’re talking about a pillar in the community for years, I think that we could send a really wrong message.”
Blevins made a motion to add language to future tax abatements requiring specific numbers on the jobs created and to give the board the ability to rescind tax relief if those jobs weren’t generated.
“I’m just trying to set a precedent for going forward,” he said. “We need to set it where there is some kind of guarantee that [a company] is going to reward us with jobs if we’re going to reward them with tax breaks.”
The motion died for lack of a second.
Commissioner Tommy Thompson said sometimes people have “a different idea” on giving tax breaks to local businesses.
“We’re not taking money out of the coffer and giving it away,” he said. “I think this [a tax abatement] is one of the few ways we can help industry and encourage them to expand and come in. We’re not getting that money to begin with. In 10 years, if we get 100 percent of this assessment, we’ve got something. That’s the way I look at it.”
Ryan Lewis is based in Marion County. Contact him at ryanlewis34@gmail.com.