A taxpayer group on Thursday urged Chattanooga officials to try to collect $13 million from Alstom plant owner General Electric rather than take ownership of equipment worth that amount.
“Why would you want to own equipment at a steam turbine facility?” asked Helen Burns Sharp, founder of Accountability for Taxpayer Money, at a meeting of the city’s Industrial Development Board. “That’s a head-scratcher to us.”
The two options were offered to GE recently by Chattanooga and Hamilton County, which are trying to recoup $13 million awarded to Alstom in property tax breaks when the turbine manufacturer announced a $300 million expansion nearly a decade ago.
Earlier this year, GE said it was shutting down manufacturing in Chattanooga and cutting 235 jobs by the end of this year.
Sharp said the city’s first choice should be collecting the $13 million from an auction last week of the plant’s equipment.