Bob CollinsIf you move to Moorhead and raise a family, imagine the amount of money you’ll inject into the local economy, creating jobs and stabilizing neighborhoods. Maybe you could be rewarded with a tax break.
Moorhead isn’t unlike every other community in Minnesota when it comes to wanting businesses to move in but, like yesterday’s news on the giveaway in Wisconsin for a company that plans to cut its workforce, the threshold for undercutting the system of taxes is clearly being lowered.
The Fargo Forum reports that Aggressive Towing & Recovery is planning to build a 4,000 square foot building (that’s not very big) on a lot that’s empty right now. Clearly, having a business in town is better than not having a business in town but at what point are tax breaks not fair when other people aren’t getting them?
The City Council voted to give the company a $13,000 tax break over three years. Total number of jobs the business will create with its new business? One part-timer.
If you’re a towing company, you’re doing business in a town because that’s where the cars are. You can move somewhere else — there’s no indication the company threatened to — but someone else will come in to tow cars.
This isn’t at all unusual as city governments go. In my neck of the woods, zoning laws are changed almost any time a business wants to move into an area. Forget that city planners zoned a city in a particular way, if governments dismantle systems so willingly and for so little gain, what’s the point of having the systems in the first place?
Discuss.
