TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV)- Update: The Vigo County Council approved both tax abatements during Thursday’s meeting.
Original Post: The Vigo County Council will hold a special meeting this Thursday to vote on 10-year, 100% tax abatements for two companies, Entek and Wabash Valley Resources.
Both businesses have said they will bring hundreds of jobs to the community and millions of dollars in investment. Vigo County Council President Todd Thacker said they wanted to hold the vote this month– the county council is usually off for July– to continue to move these projects along.
“It’s a special request from the petitioners of the tax abatement,” he said. “They asked if we did pass the economic area for the tax abatement, if we pass that in June which we did, then we could have this to vote on the tax abatement itself in July so that they could move forward with the projects that they have.”
Giving out the abatements was “a tough pill to swallow,” according to Thacker, but he thinks these companies are worthy of receiving them.
“Wabash Valley Resources is the smaller one of the two, it’s still three times the Steel Dynamics size, and [Steel Dynamics] also was a 10-year, 100% [tax abatement,]” he said. “We got Entek, which we courted with the help of Steve Witt and his group, the Economic Development Corporation, and the only way we can compete with other states and other counties is to offer incentives.”
The discussion in June also touched on a related issue, one county officials have considered for a while– adopting a uniform process to help them give out tax abatements.
The Terre Haute City Council has had a points system for incoming businesses for years now, and Curtis DeBaun IV, the president for city council, explained how it works.
“They have a paper with a point system, and they are given different points for different requirements. How many new employees will the business attract? How much will they pay these employees? What will the total investment be in the community,” he said. “It’s a number of things and it allows us to consider the big picture.”
City council will also hold a meeting on Thursday, making sure about 15 companies they have given abatements over the years are reaching the projections they made.
“It’s important because, again, we need to make sure we’re holding them accountable,” he said. “Giving an abatement is a big deal, we don’t want to give them to anybody and everybody, so we are careful when we give them.”
Thacker said conversations have already taken place between the city and county on having the same system in place across both government bodies, a goal he hopes to accomplish by the end of this year.
“We will continue to meet and we are going to come up with a rubric of some kind. The city and the county will work together so we have a little more standardization on our tax abatements,” Thacker said. “Hopefully they will try to amend theirs to mirror ours once we get ours adopted.”
The vote by the county council will take place at the Vigo County Government Annex Building at 4:30 on Thursday, while the annual compliance meeting with city council will be at 5:30 at the Terre Haute City Hall building on the same day.
