It may be a town that wants to remain small, rural, and quiet. I can certainly understand that desire.
Thats the premise I have started from, just basic ways to improve the quality of life and increase the towns prosperity. If this were extreme makeover, things would be easy: Build a humongous casino in the center of town.
I would like to know how the tax breaks affected your budget and what percentage of the people received the breaks. If you happen to have that information or remember it offhand, please share.
Job creation and Wal-Mart. Although you implying this would be a bad thing for the town, it might not be a bad idea. Our town has many of the human resources already trained to build, operate and maintain such a business.
While I am well versed in the complaints about minimum wage jobs, they were never meant to sustain a family on a 40 hour work week.
The majority of our towns children are in grade school, about 10 years from now they will need summer jobs and part time work. Any workers that cannot solicit, or has not earned, a raise from minimum after one year - is probably not a very good employee.
Wal Mart will even encourage our kids to go to college through their work programs... We might get a doctorate out of the deal. And a large portion of our towns population is suitable for the "Good Paying" jobs that an Ultra-Mega-Monopoly-Corporation has to offer.
Minimizing Zoning laws. This is an excellent subject! The town is pretty well squeezed into its boundaries so we can change the zoning ordinance, but only within those boundaries. We can only rezone and build on property thats not in conflict with neighboring district zoning laws, so there must be buffer zones. These zones are in place and until the neighboring zones change, they have to remain. This leaves us with, like I said, pretty little room to operate.
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Fed, you make some very good points on the purpose of tax incentives. Lets look at a different direction. We'll say the population of our town is taxed 1% of their earnings - on top of state and federal. What could we do to replace that system with the Fair Tax and would it work at such a local level?
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Thanks fellas, look forward to hearing more from both of you!
Invitation is still open for others to join.