Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TN ECD) officials had to remind Volkswagen of Chattanooga officials that they were past due on certain reports they agreed to file in exchange for corporate welfare.
TN ECD Director of Contracts Garrett Guillory had to nudge company officials in a letter he wrote in November.
The Chattanoogan recently published the letter.
TN ECD spokeswoman Jennifer McEachern told The Tennessee Star in an email Tuesday, however, that Volkswagen officials brought their grant into compliance shortly before Christmas.
In his November letter, Guillory said the company had to submit baseline reports, per the terms of the FastTrack Economic Development Program from 2014.
“Failure to submit complete and accurate revised reports within 30 days of receipt of this letter may result in repayment obligations under the Accountability Agreement,” Guillory wrote.
As reported in July, government officials reportedly gave Volkswagen of Chattanooga a mind-boggling and generous incentives package, so much so it does not even have to pay school property taxes.
This, according to Helen Burns Sharp, founder of the Chattanooga-based Accountability for Taxpayer Money.
As reported last February, Tennessee officials made concessions to Volkswagen to get the company to construct a new electric vehicle plant in Chattanooga.
As The Tennessee Star reported, Tennessee has already given Volkswagen $818.8 million in corporate subsidies going back several years. Those numbers came from Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C.-based policy resource center that monitors corporate subsidies nationwide.
The group runs a national database of state, local and federal economic development incentive awards.
As for the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant, Tennessee officials have bestowed generous benefits upon it dating back years.
Tennessee Watchdog reported six years ago that state officials offered the company $2 million in taxpayer money to use for marketing and public relations. Volkswagen officials took $266,000 of that money and painted a sign on its roof that simply said “Volkswagen Chattanooga.”
The idea was to market Volkswagen to two groups of people – airplane passengers looking out their windows as they fly over Chattanooga and people who go online to look at Google Earth.
State officials gave $577 million to Volkswagen for an assembly plant in Chattanooga in 2008. Good Jobs First said it was “the largest subsidy package ever offered to a foreign automaker in the United States.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Chattanooga Volkswagen” by Chattanooga Volkswagen.
What is a Baseline report specifically? What would it tell us?
I am sorry but this is the most confusing, ill written article I have ever read on TN Star.
I agree with concerns about corporate welfare. Most conservatives, however, choose to ignore generous de facto welfare we give to corporations while blaming only poor people who collect far less from the government in welfare checks. I am fed up with this double standard where polititions of both parties make scapegoats out of the poor while ignoring the far more greedy corporations and military installations that take huge generous welfare checks and tax breaks from both local, county, state, and federal government sources. VW of Chattanooga needs to cough up!