the economic landscape
Its time for the Paris Chamber to express a well-meant “Good Job” to the Paris Economic Development Corporation (PEDC). Despite challenges that comes with ignoring certain economic facts, thereby, to increase a perception and promotion by an oversell of smart planning, hard work, job growth, and the total dollar investments in Paris, the PEDC actually has seen extraordinary success over the past two or three years.
Almost as extraordinary as the lack of transparency.
The March 2023, Universal Fabricating announcement came with an anticipated 100 new quality jobs.
In April 2023, Houston-based Ametsa Packaging, LLC, announced a sugar liquefication and packaging plant and 100 new quality jobs at the former Sara Lee and J. Skinner facility.
Huhtamaki announced its expansion plans in August 2023 for 80 new jobs, increasing their already impressive workforce of 200. This project promises approximately $75 million in new investment for a reported 400,000 square feet of facility expansions and road and rail enhancements. (Huhtamaki’s announcement demonstrates why supporting the existing employer base is important for a community’s economic health.)
The PEDC claimed that over the next 10 years, these projects would infuse an estimated total economic impact of $1 billion into the local economy. And that the “ripple effect” of these investments will stimulate further economic activity.
“Enhancing our economic landscape”, the PEDC celebrated projects such as the Texas Department of Transportation on their new district headquarters in the PEDC-owned Gene Stallings Business Park, Delco’s grand opening of a state-of-the-art 550,000 SF facility on HWY 82 West, as well as the above LionsHead Specialty Tire and Wheel’s locating (the best-looking industrial building in Paris, [our opinion], closely followed by the Texas Highway Department’s new building, which as a government project is not subject to financial limits.)
All this, of course, is worthy of praise for a job well-done, even if other towns in the Dallas metroplex are seeing much greater job and residential growth. It doesn’t need, however, the exaggeration, nor the fuzzy obfuscation, which ignores obvious facts.
The objective facts:
Since 1993, when voters approved tax-funding the PEDC, General Plastic, Turner Industries, Oliver Rubber, Westinghouse, General Electric, and others are no longer here; those jobs are gone; payrolls missing in action. But all those jobs, and others from the numerous recent business closings, must be deducted from the number of new jobs being reported in order to have a half-way decent understanding of where we are in NET job creation.
Past payrolls are NOT objectively compared to current ones. Payrolls, investments, property taxes and sales tax receipts are subject to inflationary figures, which, in examination, are subjective.
Objectivity demands that if you are taking credit for every new gain, you must take credit for every loss.
But the PEDC is claiming credit for a billion dollar economic impact over the next ten years – not counting job loss, property tax abatement, misplaced priorities, plus an average $3 million PEDC budget cost (and $93 million for the 31-years its been in operation).
Evidently, the PEDC is the only entity in the economic landscape that doesn’t have to consider expenses.
Doing Better
Regardless, the PEDC has justified its existence, even if Paris might have been better served by spending the money on creating local residential improvements.
Or picking up the trash and cutting weeds in all of the economic landscape.
Maybe then, we wouldn’t have to give profitable firms money to come to Paris; they’d come because they wanted to…
Businesses need employees in a town that the management wants to live in.
return to PARIS TEXAS CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
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