Response to Joe Derella
Monday, April 20th, 2009
PAUL R. PORRECA
19 Porreca Drive, Millville, NJ 08332
Tel. (856) 825-1445 Fax 293-0433
Stableflex@comcast.net
April 20, 2009
Re: Tax abatements
Commissioner Derella’s defense of un-American tax abatements is both superficial and flawed. He failed to state: 1) you can only give an abatement in an arbitrarily created zone. 2) Other than the “say-so” of the business, there is no evidence that, without the abatement, the business would not have come. 3) The schools and County do share in abatement payments so you pay twice. 4)Abatements are selectively doled out creating a fundamentally unfair, competitive disadvantage. The Commissioner failed to mention the $2.5 million dollars of borrowed money paid to Goodmill.
The Target long term abatement is far worse and the NJMP deal is worse yet. Both are paying a small fraction of what the normal tax would be. The payment is fixed for 15 years. Their taxes will never increase even though you may rest assured your taxes will. The schools get nothing and the County gets 5%.
NJMP is in a class all its own. Even though the cost of the initial phase is three times Target’s ($40 million versus $13 million) and its land (500 acres) is 125 times the size of Target’s (4 acres), its payment is $90,000 less than Target’s and cannot be increased for 15 years. The City spent an estimated $25 million dollars for land acquisition, environmental cleanup, utilities, roads and other infrastructure projects on the airport industrial park. Only occupant, NJMP.
The underlying issue for both projects is the destruction of open space, our rural lifestyle and our peace and quiet. We are still waiting for someone to identify the community that developed its way out of higher taxes, or the community with denser population that did so. Is it Atlantic City or, perhaps Cherry Hill?