Chiquita could not make a monkey out of Ohio, so the company headed somewhere it could make a monkey out of someone, The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch says. That would be Charlotte.
The company is leaving Cincinnati after 25 years there because Ohio said no to its shakedown efforts. Specifically, the company wanted millions in cash and incentives to stay. Ohio officials didn’t think it was worth all that to keep a few hundred Chiquita jobs.
Rob Nichols, spokesman for Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, told MarketWatch the state just couldn’t justify the investment given the return. It would have taken over a decade to recoup taxpayer’s money, he said.
“We had to be able to justify that their incentive package would be a benefit to our taxpayers,” Nichols said. “This one would not have benefited Ohioans quickly enough to justify that kind of money.”
So Charlotte and the state paid $22 million in cash and tax incentives to get the 375 to 417 jobs that pay an average of $107,000. But what is Charlotte actually getting for that?
The average $107,000 per job pay scale is a bit deceptive, since CEO Fernando Aguirre’s $5.6 million compensation last year and that of other executives will skew the average deceptively upward. Here is what Charlotte is really getting, MarketWatch says:
What Charlotte is mostly getting is a flashy consumer brand to put in the vacant spaces of its Nascar Plaza. And what Chiquita is mostly getting is a better airport so its executives can more easily visit their banana republics.
Chiquita was likely to move closer to a better airport, anyway, after a dramatic decline in Cincinnati’s international air service. So it put on a beauty pageant where the most beautiful thing was the public’s money.
In the end, Charlotte’s $22 million kept Chiquita from moving to Atlanta or South Florida, which is actually a bit closer to those banana republics.
Democrats now run Charlotte and expect government to do these deals. It would never dawn on these people to competitively slash taxes overall to compete for businesses by the dozens rather than one at a time. That would probably be too much to ask.
That said, the Chiquita deal didn’t bother me so much, probably because I was relieved that it didn’t run us $50 million to $100 million or more. As desperate as Charlotte and state elites are, it could have been much worse. In fact, I’m surprised Chiquita wasn’t able to shake them down for more.
Then again, that we are paying hard, cold property tax cash ($875,000 each from the city and county) out of desperate families’ pockets to move a company with $3.2 billion in sales last year here is of couse obscene. That’s right. We are paying their moving expenses. Holy cow.
