In The Game

On May 7, the Missouri legislature approved a massive tax-credit program aimed at landing the assembly facility at KCI. The program would offer up to $240 million in tax credits over eight years to companies investing at least $300 million in the state and creating more than 1,000 jobs. While the legislation is aimed squarely at Bombardier and is specific to this one project, the ramifications are historic and global, regardless of which site Bombardier selects.

“We’ve already scored a major victory,” said Missouri Department of Economic Development Director Greg Steinhoff.
“Location consultants and economic development professionals around the world have taken notice that Missouri is interested in economic development.”

The Bombardier deal offered Missouri its first real opportunity to pursue a “mega-project,” Steinhoff added. “This is something Missouri has never done before. We hadn’t been competitive with our incentive tools.”

But other states were competitive, and were attracting mega-projects, like a car assembly plant in Alabama, and a motor speedway track in Kansas. It wasn’t just that Missouri wasn’t landing the mega-projects, the state wasn’t even in consideration. But now Missouri is back in the game, attracting the attention of site selectors who scour the planet on behalf of companies looking to build new plants or relocate old ones.

“If you go back six or seven years, Missouri was in a difficult place in its ability to attract economic development
projects,” said Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields, a St. Joseph Republican. “Then around 2002, people started
examining what we could do better. We passed tort reform, worker’s compensation reform. Those are basics you have to have in place. Then we passed MODESA [the Missouri Downtown Economic Stimulus Act], followed by the Quality Jobs Initiative. That started giving us the tools we needed.”

All of the pieces were important steps in the process, Steinhoff concurred. Collectively they helped announce to the world that Missouri is open for business again, although most of the incentives to-date were geared toward attracting only small- to mid-size projects. “Which is great, since most of our work is in that space,” said Jeffrey Kaczmarek,
President and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Kansas City.

“What we didn’t have was that mega tool that would allow us to compete with other states for major projects like automotive assembly plants or aerospace projects,” Kaczmarek continued. “Now, thanks to the legislation aimed at Bombardier, we have that mega tax-credit program in place to attract projects of that scope.”

 

Welcome to the Bigs

Kaczmarek believes several things have come together in a perfect storm that helped propel Missouri into the big leagues of economic development opportunity.

“Missouri has lost something like 80,000 manufacturing jobs and hasn’t landed any big, new projects in awhile,” he said. “A lot of people were finally ready to work together to reverse that, including a legislature and a governor who are pro-business. With the devaluation of the dollar, combined with all these
new incentives, the thought of bringing manufacturing facilities and jobs back into the U.S. is a very realistic possibility for the first time in awhile.”

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