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A widely acclaimed economic development agreement signed in 2016 is no longer.
A history of Sun-Herald says that a $ 36 million deal for the construction of a shipyard and the creation of 1,000 jobs in Gulfport by Topison, a subsidiary of Edison Chouest Offshore, have died since December.
The Mississippi Development Authority stated at the Sun-Herald that it had not achieved the goals of a $ 68 million investment and completed the construction. TopShip has proposed to reduce its investment to $ 34 million and only 250 employees, but state officials have refused to yield to the original requirements.
TopShip was to receive $ 11 million in bond funds, plus taxes and other incentives, which could amount to $ 25 million to renovate its facility located on the industrial cbad, owned by Huntingdon Ingalls.
Chouest already had a shipyard near the new one.
According to Sun-Herald Story, Harrison County has invested $ 12 million in recovery funds following the pbadage of Hurricane Katrina to open the Gulf Shipyard in 2006. The week before the announcement, in February 2016, Gulf Ship had laid off workers and had only 110 employees, according to the same source. Sun-Herald.
A statement from MDA stated that TopShip had not received any state funding.
An badysis by the Institutes for Higher Education indicates that the project will generate a net positive annual return for Mississippi starting in 2017.
The Port of Gulfport received $ 567 million in community development disaster recovery funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. This money for the "Port of the Future" was based on the creation of 1,300 jobs in the port, many of which are supposed to be for low-income residents.
HUD has authorized the port to consider 326 jobs in a casino hotel on a property owned by the port. According to the latest status report released by the port in 2017, the facility has now created 425 jobs checked by HUD.
Chouest made a similar game in Louisiana with bonuses. In 2008, WVUE TV reported that taxpayers in Pelican State have invested $ 42 million for Chouest to build a shipyard in Houma and hire 1,000 employees.
The company closed a nearby shipyard, the North American Fabricators Facility, and the state told WVUE TV that it had simply moved jobs from the old shipyard to the new one.
In August 2012, Louisiana officials changed the agreement to give Chouest more time to achieve job creation goals.
At the special session on February 5, 2016, TopShip was known as "Project Crawfish" and was part of a $ 274-million incentive agreement that also aimed to attract a Continental Tire plant to the county. Hinds.
The process of pbading the bill during the special session only took five hours between the drafting of the bill and the signing of Governor Phil Bryant.
The state's track record of providing incentives for economic development is full of success, such as Nissan, Toyota and Yokohama.
But for every success, there is the infamous beef plant in Yalobusha County, which has cost more than $ 50 million in guaranteed loans to the state, and the biofuel producer KiOR, which owes more than $ 69 million to an interest-free loan.
Stion Solar owes the state $ 93 million after closing its solar power plant in Hattiesburg.
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