Hello All! I attended the annual Arizona Association of Economic Development (AAED) legislative luncheon today. Economic development professionals were pushing a clear message to attending state legislators: Support economic development initiatives to create new jobs and tax base, which in the long run will help the state’s $1.6 billion deficit.
It’s a no-brainer, right — Economic Development 101! We have to keep marketing hard now during the recession in order to capture our share of a dwindling supply of new job creating location projects.
One of the few project growth areas now is solar manufacturing. However, AZ is getting its “clock cleaned” here by competing states such as NM, Colorado, Nevada, and Oregon. A perfect example is the German-based Schott Manufacturing which is locating a solar panel plant in Albuquerque, NM with over 1,000 high-wage jobs. One clear reason: those states have attractive solar-oriented incentive programs in place.
AZ has an attractive solar tax credit incentive bill pending, SB1403. The program is revenue-positive and could potentially create over 5,000 high-end solar jobs!
Yet, unbelievably, I heard arguments against it today. This is based on the assumption that companies awarded credits could sell them for profit (heaven forbid), and somehow Arizonans would suffer by the loss of tax revenues.
Let me clue you in, Mr. Legistator, we taxpayers will suffer more if thousands of new high-wage jobs and tens of millions of dollars in capital investment head for our competing states. By the way, AZ finished well out of the running for the Schott project.
Not giving up tax credits could mean no locations, which mean no new taxes and no new jobs! Mr. Legistator, please be forward thinking and pass SB 1403! We need the jobs and the tax base!! Regards, Deane