On December 14th, Quincy was host to a Rural Economic Development Summit. The event featured 10 speakers and included some of the state and region's top economists, educators, tech industry leaders and others. The experts agreed that Quincy, which is one of the few bright spots in the State of Washington's economy right now, has done things right. Quincy provided key infrastructure to lure high-tech industries and the resulting payoff is millions of dollars in tax revenues.
Providing key infrastructure is different than burdening commercial development with impact fees, complex permitting processes and uncertainty. Which do you think generates more revenue for a city?
- A development burdened by impact fees, complex permitting and high upfront development costs that never gets built.
- A thriving commercial venture that is generating huge revenues, sales and providing high paying jobs.
The answer is pretty obvious, isn't it? Tax it, hit it with impact fees and restrict to death and it dies. Provide infrastructure inexpensively and revenues skyrocket. Imagine that! Mike Irwin at the Wenatchee World wrote about the summit in yesterday's paper.
"Five years ago, we were in the same situation as everyone else," Quincy Mayor Jim Hemberry told summit attendees. "We were looking at our economy and wondering: ‘What can we do?' "
The answer, he said, was to invest early in improving power, water, streets, sewer and - important to tech industries - fiber-optic computer connections. Companies building datacenters would be drawn by low electrical rates, he added, but other amenities - including improved city services such as police and fire protection - would seal the deal.
Hemberry said the payoff, compared to city revenues in 2001, was an eight-fold increase in sales taxes by 2007 and a tripling of property tax revenues by 2009. "No question, those datacenters had an impact," said the mayor. - Wenatchee World
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