Tennessee officials are expected to bestow an unspecified amount of corporate welfare upon Love’s Travel Stops, which wants to open a tire retread and distribution facility in Gibson County.
Specifically, Love’s officials want to set up in the city of Milan, in west Tennessee.
But Love’s won’t build unless they get state and local incentives, according to a recent article in Businessfacilities.com.
Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development spokesman Scott Harrison did not give exact amounts to The Tennessee Star in an email Wednesday.
“We anticipate the company will qualify for grant funding through ECD’s FastTrack program,” Harrison said.
“Info should be available on our public dashboards by the end of the week.”
Officials at the City of Milan did not return The Star’s repeated requests for comment Wednesday. Neither did anyone at Love’s corporate office, based out of Oklahoma City.
Love’s Travel Stops will invest $8.8 million into the proposed facility and create up to 80 jobs, according to Businessfacilities.com.
“The new facility will be the largest of its kind for Love’s, totaling 200,000 square feet,” the website reported.
TNECD has supported nine economic development projects in Gibson County since 2015, the website went on to say.
As The Star reported last week, Tennessee officials reportedly want to give Mitsubishi Motors North America more than $3.3 million in corporate welfare.
State officials reportedly do this to lure the company’s headquarters from California to Franklin Tenn.
As The Tennessee Star reported last month, TNECD bestowed corporate welfare upon a new business in Cleveland, near Chattanooga, named Triumph Sheets LLC.
As The Star reported in February, corporations seem to play the Tennessee and Mississippi state governments against one another to get the best corporate welfare deals possible — at the expense of taxpayers in both states.
Companies wait for Tennessee and Mississippi to pony up their incentives. Company leaders can only accept one of those two deals, of course. Then they set up shop in the state that made the better offer. And sometimes these companies move from Tennessee to Mississippi and vice versa — even if they’re only moving as little as 20 miles away.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Love’s Travel Stops” by Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores. CC BY-SA 4.0.
[…] The Tennessee Star reported, Love’s wouldn’t agree to build unless they got state and local […]
Corporate welfare is a pejorative term because it has no meaning except in the mind of the author and not necessarily the same meaning in the mind of the reader. Without a thorough explanation of what is actually being provided, you are doing a disservice to your readers by using the term and applying it indiscriminately to every situation. Welfare implies a payment with no expected return. The “welfare” involved in these situations is an investment with the expectation of a return much greater than the investment, such investment accruing to the citizens in the form of wages and benefits and to the local government in the form of tax revenues. It is not picking winners or losers because there is no contest between businesses, only between the states.
Another Haslem scam on Tennesseans.
Ridiculous! I guess Jimmy Haslam doesn’t want to do tire retreading. But why are “we” picking winners and losers and redistributing citizen wealth?
Maybe just maybe, we should STOP over taxing citizens and return the $600 million dollar State surplus to the rightful owners of that money. Let them decide who to “support” and who not to.
Manufacturing operations are moving to Tennessee and will continue to move to Tennessee because we offer low taxes (for the principles and the management personnel) AND we are centrally located within the USA, so shipping costs are relatively low. We don’t have to give away the farm!