New Albany's City Council will hold a work session concerning tax abatements tonight at 6:00 p.m. prior to their regularly scheduled meeting with Thomas A. Pitman, a partner from the Indianapolis law firm of Baker and Daniels.
Council President Jeff Gahan says the Council has lacked consistency when dealing with the incentive and is attempting to be more fair. To that end, council members requested a training session to ensure evenhandedness.
Regular council meeting attendees might be surprised to learn that CM Dan Coffey has declared the Baker and Daniels firm "an acknowledged expert" on state taxes prior to the meeting. Given that Coffey once accused bond firm Ice Miller's Buddy Downs of not being as familiar as he was with some of the state finance rules that Downs himself helped to write, these guys must be the shit.
Other business, including the potential expansion of the Park East Industrial Park TIF district, will be handled during the regular 7:30 meeting. Both the work session and the meeting will be in the assembly room on the third floor of the City County Building.
New Albany examines tax policy by Dick Kaukas, Courier-Journal
Wow, I'm impressed. Baker and Daniels is probably the top law firm in Indiana, how did NA score that help? One caveat - BD is part of the status-quo in the sense they are direct beneficiaries of the current system of tax abatements as they, like CPA's, are often retained for the specific purpose of avoiding paying taxes. Abatements being one of their "tools". Given that presumed bias, are they coming to rally support for abatements? I'd be somewhat surprised if a truly balanced presentation of the costs/benefits took place.
ReplyDeleteYou could be right, G, about potential bias. So much of good education derives from the ability of learners to ask good questions.
ReplyDeletePast city council experiences may lead one to believe those questions may unfortunately come in the form of "Screw you, you don't know what you're talking about", directly from someone who most definitely doesn't know what they're talking about.
Hopefully, the cast of characters has changed enough to improve the learning environment.
I am impressed also that this Council is willing to go the extra mile by bringing in people like this to provide the training needed to make the proper decisions concerning the Abatements. That's some of the "change" I think we were looking
ReplyDeletefor with regard to the Council.