Vote NO for the Freeport Exemption

The nerve of elected officials asking every local business to sacrifice in order to build millions of square feet of speculative E-commerce/Fulfillment warehouses at Exit 6.

The Tribune & Georgian (which supports the idea) would exempt the new warehouse from personal property tax on their inventories. That’s a cost reduction that’s not available to the hundreds of small Camden businesses. In fact, not even Walmart gets such a deal.

The idea of the exemption is that to attract that type of warehouse (and the implied jobs) they propose, it is necessary for voters to exempt the new warehouses from a tax that all other Camden businesses will continue to pay. In other words, it is an unfair advantage.

Most of us make “remote purchases by electronic, internet, telephonic, or other remote means” (think Amazon, Chewy, Wayfair, Bass Pro Shops, airline tickets) but only when local stores don’t have what we need. But many people use electronic ordering for things like grocery delivery, screws and nails, fashion, and detergent which means the Camden County Freeport Exemption measure on the ballot has a very good chance of harming the local businesses that have served us for years.

Yes, it’s somebody’s job to go out there and build more warehouses, but it’s the voters’ job to not blindly fall for false promises of greener pastures. Here’s how the newspaper justified the warehouses:

I-95 runs through every Georgia Coastal County. But we're supposedly "perfectly situated"?

There is plenty of appropriate warehouse real estate near Savannah, Brunswick, Jacksonville, Fla. And Fernandina Beach ports for such warehouses. Is Camden “better” because we give the best deal to developers?

There are NO rail lines on the property. We will have to build them?

So does that mean Camden County taxpayers won’t need to build our own airport?

And finally, will local business costs increase because the demand for labor runs up local labor costs that are eventually passed to residents?

In fact, the Tribune & Georgian opined on Thursday that by “supporting the measure, Camden County voters are telling the state, the nation and the world [ED: that’s rather pretentious, isn’t it] that we are open for business.

Well frankly, we need to carefully think about how much we really want Camden to be like the places many of us escaped from. We certainly could benefit from more jobs, but those jobs should be related to the culture we want in Camden County. If you wanted a factory job, you should have moved to where factory jobs are common. If a clean, safe factory wants to locate in Camden County, we should do everything we can to make that happen, short of corporate welfare. As the Express Scripts saga shows us, businesses can give, and they can take away. 600 St Marys’ jobs vanished almost overnight. Perhaps the Tribune & Georgian can explain how that was a ‘good’ thing. Oh yeh, St Marys got a cheap building from Express Scripts for their new city hall that was originally almost GIVEN to Express Scripts in order to gain those now-missing jobs.

Corporate mercenaries have mastered the art of bait-and-switch in the name of job creation and economic development. In fact, the proposed development appears to be owned by QTR Harrietts Bluff, LLC, a New Jersey Limited Liability Corporation. So an out-of-state developer will get tax benefits that competing Camden County businesses are denied???

qpublic.schneidercorp.com--3.pdf

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Will that be the only incentive they receive? Afterall, many other counties already offer Freeport Exemptions. So will Camden warehouse promoters sweeten the pot (at resident's expense)?

Experience has shown that corporate welfare provided by tax exemptions and subsidies is hard to justify over time. We should battle back to achieve a good life for our families and more livable communities by voting NO to the Freeport Exemption on the March 12 ballot.