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to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.Nutter promises not to poach businesses from suburbs
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 12:17 pm - by Dan Pohlig. Filed under: Economy.
Just a quick link to start things off today. I missed this story when it came out earlier in December. Apparently, Mayor Nutter, in a grand gesture of regional cooperation, pledged not to actively woo businesses to relocate jobs from the suburbs to Philadelphia:
“It’s bad business and even worse politics,” said Nutter, who was the guest speaker at the chamber’s general membership meeting and percolator program held at the Sheraton Bucks County Hotel in Middletown.
We’ll definitely see true regional cooperation for economic development when Mayor Nutter is actively trying to attract companies from outside the region to relocate in the suburban counties. For example, if a major Fortune 500 company showed interest in relocating to a transit accessible community like Bristol, Bucks County or Ambler, Montgomery County, we’d see the Mayor and a contingent of officials from those counties approaching executives and selling them on how great the region is. How easily that company’s employees could settle in the city and reverse commute or in other suburbs and have the city’s cultural and entertainment amenities at their fingertips. They would demonstrate the belief that where the business ultimately locates become less important than getting it here in the first place.
Of course, this cuts both ways. Officials from the suburban counties could also demonstrate the attractiveness of their own locations for living and recreation while the Philadelphia Mayor lays out the benefits of locating a business within the city.
January 7th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Hogwash. A denser business community in Center City is better for the region. I’m really supportive of Michael Nutter representing the region, but it distresses me whenever anyone in the Delaware Valley wouldn’t want to see more jobs in the most transited part of the state. Folks can still live in the ‘burbs, but it makes a lot more sense to have a thicker financial hub in one place.
January 8th, 2009 at 8:58 am
Certainly, the ideal would be for any new business from outside of the region to locate in Center City but you can’t ignore the political ramifications when the central city mayor actively pursues companies and jobs that are already providing a tax base for another part of the region. This is especially true if that pursuit entails some sort of tax break of costly incentive that, in the end, takes from the region’s overall pool of money and gives it to a company that was already paying into the the region’s pool of money.
Again, ideal = mayor and suburban folks in joint pursuit of a company with mayor touting the transit and density benefits of Center City for the job location and suburban folks putting in their pitch as a great living location for the workers.
At this point though, if a large company from, say, Chicago is sniffing around for a location in one of the burbs and absolutely against moving to Philly (taxes, whatever), then it’s not inappropriate for Nutter to join in the effort to land them to the region.
January 8th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Ah, instead of “luring” firms with rent-seeking and privilege-granting, why cannot the city create a tax climate that in general lowers taxation of either capital and labor?
Collecting publicly-created economic wealth for public services can provide needed revenue while not enacting economy-killing taxes that keep firms in the suburban periphery.
As Michael Kinsley noted:
“Ideally, all taxes should be zero because all taxes discourage the activity being taxed. (The exception is the land tax, as Henry George famously noted, because land has nowhere to go.) Taxes on labor discourage work and encourage sloth. Taxes on capital discourage thrift and encourage consumption.”