I like to follow the economic development debates on how municipalities and counties and states can attract new businesses and expand their existing ones.
Too often, the tool that governments use to attract businesses is a tax break of some kind. The pitch is essentially “Open your business here and we won’t tax you.” That’s a cost to the government (the special tax break is called a tax expenditure, and it’s essentially the same thing as the government just cutting a check to the business) and the tax cut strategy of economic development should be compared to other methods of economic development using government money to see which one is the most efficient and provides the most benefits to everyone.
A better economic development tool (in lots of circumstances) is spending government money on good transit. For the business that opens or expands near the transit network, the benefit is that the business doesn’t have to pay for parking. That’s a big savings. And, of course, everyone gets to use the transit network (including customers and neighbors of the business). A tax cut check from the government to a single business doesn’t provide any benefits to anyone else.
Sometimes these policy debates occur in separate silos and it isn’t often that the people making decisions about extending economic development packages to new businesses in a city or state include the transit agency leaders at the table (to come up with a special bus route or free passes for the first year or some other creative idea to leverage transit). That should change, and it’s probably the job of the transit agency leader and board members to kick down the door of the economic development offices and offer transit up as a tool to attract new businesses to the community.
Using transit for economic development is part of a well-thought-out communications plan that focuses on all stakeholders.
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