Maloy: Cobb Should Reveal Business Incentive Details

Whenever we get close to Halloween, I can’t help but think of the last scene in the movie The Twilight Zone, when Dan Aykroyd, as the ambulance driver, says to the patient: “Do you want to see something really scary?” 

Then, of course, we see something really scary and the movie ends. 

One can draw some parallels between that movie and the Cobb County government, which is getting scarier with every passing day. The biggest difference is that the scariest things are those that we don’t see, or aren’t allowed to see. 

Cobb’s new economic development policy is full of those things we don’t get to see, and we should be scared because what the commission chairman is doing is using taxpayer money to incentivize companies to come to Cobb County and not showing us the price tag. 

It may be a great idea, if it truly has an offsetting economic benefit. But how are we to know if we aren’t privy to the amount of the deal and how it is structured. 

Commission Chairman Tim Lee says that negotiations involving such incentives can’t be made public for competitive reasons, and that does make sense. But once the favored company has agreed to locate here, there is no reason why such agreements can’t be made public.

Taxpayers need to know exactly how their tax dollars are being spent. Hiding the deal from the public and, to some extent, even from the four district commissioners gives the impression that shenanigans are afoot. And that is scary.

Scarier still is the fact that no one in our county government will lay claim to the most expensive part of the policy, that of property tax abatement. The commission chairman says that he has authority only to waive fees and permit costs, and that the Cobb Development Authority is the only body that can grant tax abatement. 

When they are confronted with the same question, the Cobb Development Authority begins an arcane semantic discussion and argues that “abatement” is not the proper term to use. Apparently it is true that even the Development Authority can’t cut a company’s taxes. 

So instead, it issues bonds on the project that mitigate the company’s ownership in the property and by doing so allows them to pay less in taxes. The result is the same: Cobb homeowners get a millage rate increase, as we saw last July, in order to offset the taxes the favored company doesn’t pay. 

Sure, it might bring in some jobs, but at what cost? Only the Shadow knows.

Now if that isn’t scary enough (and it is) it has been reported that former Commission Chairman Sam Olens has refuted the current commissioner’s claim of “no responsibility” and said that the commission chairman indeed is the ultimate arbiter of tax abatement for companies coming to Cobb. 

All this begs the questions: Why can’t the Cobb government be transparent with incentives they give businesses? What are they scared of? If they’re dealing in the best interest of the taxpayers, then we should be able to see the deal after it’s cut. 

We should be shown the amount the deal costs taxpayers and what the economic benefit will be. Then the taxpayers can decide if it was a good deal or not. 

Halloween only comes once a year. But considering a track record of misinformation about the SPLOST, subsequent cuts in services, the millage rate hike that wasn’t supposed to happen, approval of a budget based on an unsupportable tax digest projection for 2012, and all the intrigue surrounding the so-called TSPLOST project list, the Cobb County government keeps taxpayers scared all year long. Happy Halloween.

Tom Maloy, a retired businessman and 30-year Powder Springs resident, is a board member of the Georgia Tea Party. Contact him at tom@thegeorgiateaparty.org.