Mississippi has been bowled over the past two weeks with two huge economic development announcements.
First came word that a $2 billion factory to build electric vehicle batteries is coming to Marshall County in the northern end of the state.
That was topped by this past week’s announcement that Amazon Web Services is going to put two data centers in Madison County, a $10 billion corporate investment that would be the largest in Mississippi’s history.
While the champagne corks are popping, though, it again should be asked why — after months if not years putting these megadeals together — the state incentive packages are always jammed through the Legislature in a rush? Would the companies really go elsewhere if lawmakers — and those in the news media — were given the time to better understand and ask questions about what and how much the state is giving away? And if additional vetting could kill the project, might that not suggest the deal is a whole lot more advantageous to the company than it is to the state?
Gov. Tate Reeves followed the same script that all of his recent predecessors have done in getting legislative approval for these two megadeals.
With each project, he called for a one-day special session and gave lawmakers about 24 hours to digest the complicated details in giving about $350 million in taxpayer-funded incentives to the battery plant and $44 million to AWS, with who knows how many more millions of dollars tucked within an assortment of tax breaks. The battery plant legislation alone was 213 pages long. Most lawmakers had neither the time nor the inclination to read it, trusting instead that Reeves and his team at the Mississippi Development Authority did their due diligence.
Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. There’s no way to be certain, since no one independently checked their financial analysis or scrutinized the contract they negotiated.
The rushed process, to which the legislative leadership itself acquiesced, turns the Legislature into nothing more than a rubber-stamping body. Any additional attempt to ensure the end result is good for the taxpayers who are subsidizing these projects — such as guarantees that Mississippi residents would be a chunk of the hires — was summarily rejected.
Perhaps all of this will work out just as swimmingly as Reeves and his team claim it will. Between the two projects, they say, at least 3,000 permanent jobs will be created, and over time the state’s investment will pay for itself many times over.
There would be a higher level of confidence in that promise, though, if there were not an orchestrated haste in getting the megadeals completed.
