Two items on Economic Development
1. Council cleans up some ordinances on committees. Most of them are very pro forma – formalizing how many members on different committees are from different groups of people, for example. Or deciding if the City Council rep should be a voting member, or not, on a committee. (It depends on the committee, and whether items are then headed to Council or not.)
The one that gets a little extra time is Economic Development San Marcos, or EDSM. Apparently this is a giant group, with like 13 members. Currently, the City Council representative, the City Manager, and the Greater San Marcos Partnership (GSMP) representative are all non-voting members.
Commissioner Baker points out that the Chamber of Commerce representative, the Hays County Commissioner, and the School District Representative should also be non-voting members. Secondly, while the GSMP rep is a nonvoting member, there are a bunch of other voting members who have close ties to GSMP.
EDSM gets pulled, and it gets kicked to the Finance and Audit committee, which Commissioner Garza and Mayor Hughson are on.
2. The City of San Marcos Economic Development Policy
Like all cities, we give away tax breaks to lure businesses here. I’m generally extremely skeptical that tax breaks attract enough businesses to make it worthwhile. And it’s easy to find lots of sources that agree with me.
The sense I’m getting from those papers is that poor communities pay a lot per job in incentives, the and while the jobs generally do materialize, it doesn’t tend to spill over into creating any bigger robust economy.
It sounds like generally, businesses narrow down their top three locations, and then the towns get into a bidding war with each other. So the local governments are pitted against each other. A city could only opt out if all the cities agreed to opt out. (Why is everything always a collective action problem?!)
Anyway, today’s particular policy updates actually do sound good. Companies that get incentives should have to use local resources for job postings. They should have to pay the average of Hays County as a wage, which is $22/hour. They should have to meet some sustainability criteria. Etc. So while I’m grumpy about tax breaks, these sound like improvements.
(It passes unanimously.)
The San Marxist 