St. Joseph County Council holds first reading for bill looking to revise County’s tax abatement ordinance

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The St. Joseph County Council held its first reading Tues. evening for bill 60-25, called ‘The Community First Investment Ordinance of St. Joseph County’ by the five of the nine council members petitioning it.

County councilman for District H, Bryan Tanner, said over the last year, it’s been brought to the council’s attention by the Saint Joseph County Economic Development team and the South Bend Regional Chamber that updates were needed for the county’s tax abatement ordinance.

“The ordinance as it was previously written and exists today is a roughly 24 page document, and through refining and consolidating and reducing redundancy, it’s effectively a 9-page document moving forward if this were to be approved, making the life of our economic development team easier, as well as a clearer picture for those who are applying for such an abatement in our community,” said Tanner.

While councilwoman for District B, Amy Drake, said she and several other council members pushed a different, 2-page revised policy a few months ago that did not pass.

“Me and some of my colleagues had actually brought up a new abatement policy several months ago, and several months ago before that, we’ve tried twice to revise our county’s tax abatement policy… we wanted to make it simpler and make it more like county’s could come here and do business and this won’t be an impediment, so what we’re seeing today is the opposite. It’s still a long document, it’s not being proposed by me, I’m not in favor of this document, I think it has some of the same problems we’ve seen before, very long and complicated,” said Drake.

Tanner is joined by Daniel Schaetzle, Mark Catanzarite, Diana Hess, and Jennifer Shabazz as the petitioners. One of the things their proposed bill includes as a minimum requirement for an abatement is the use of regional or local companies for at least 50 percent of the total cost of construction.

“A lot of these economic development projects are rather large, especially if they qualify for an incentive such as a tax abatement, so while we would love to see 100 percent of the project worked on by local labor, local companies, local suppliers, we know that’s not always possible or feasible so we wanted to set at least a reasonable threshold to garner our qualification,” said Tanner.

Drake explained she worries about fairness for everyone with the new bill.

“In this bill I want to make sure all of our local companies can compete and that they all have a chance to compete whether they’re union or non-union. We’ve seen some issues in the past with union companies getting preferential treatment, we really don’t want that to be the case because there’s a lot of local companies here that are not-union. We want them to be able to work in the this county just like the union companies, we want everybody to have a fair shot,” said Drake.

“We welcome that comment, that feedback during our second reading and public hearing at our first meeting in September,” said Tanner.