Happy Tax Day

I want to clarify statements I've made about local sales tax dollars being used to fund the state's economic development program.

No one is breaking the rules and there are not any "bad guys." The local companies that have qualified for sales tax refunds have been entitled to those refunds because the law says so.
In fact, if a qualifying company did not take advantage of the opportunity to legally recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars spent while creating jobs, we would probably see it as foolishly wasting the opportunity. Why wouldn't any business owner, large or small, want to use any means available to grow and prosper?
It is similar to each of us claiming every possible deduction as we prepare our own returns. We are legally entitled to do so.

Sidney was one of the first communities in the state to understand that funding economic development was a good thing. Locally, we have voter-approved programs to do just that. In 1988, and again in 2007, the voters said yes, they wanted a strong community and economic development plan and were willing to pay for it.
Meanwhile, the state of Nebraska wanted to do what it could to offer incentives to business to relocate to our state or to expand and create jobs. So, the Employment and Investment Growth Act, LB775, was passed and the state decided that the best grease for the wheels was city sales tax dollars.
LB 775 seemed harmless enough. If an employer spent money on goods and services that resulted in the creation of jobs, then it could qualify to ask for the sales tax on those goods and services to be refunded.

If the city had been aware of the magnitude of some purchases that would be made and the sale 'tax returns' that would be claimed, we could have prepared. Instead, LB775 gave qualifying companies several years to ask for the returns, and sometimes a company might delay in asking for the returns until it best suited its own needs. Again, as individual tax payers, we often do the same thing, deciding on certain purchases or making certain decisions based on the tax repercussions.
It's all well and good when the companies creating the jobs are small and the city budgets are large, but when the companies are large and the city budgets are small, the flaw in LB775 become apparent. It is not that job creation or expansion is bad, but the rules of the game aren't fair.

So, we should do whatever possible to change the rules.
Then it can be a happy tax day.