Our 3500 population county currently has on file Tax Abatement Guidelines and Criteria, which we have used in two tax abatements in the last three years. Our guidelines have expired, and the commissioners do not want to renew them, seeing no purpose for them if we have no current applicant for a tax abatement. Do any of your counties keep current guidelines on file, or do you just wait for the need for them to arise?

Thanks for the reminder to check the expiration date on ours!

Oops! Well, our INTENT is to keep the guidelines current, but then we also have an active economic development group and the county is GROWING.

Having done several abatement agreements, we usually don't keep ours current, instead, we re-adopt or adopt new guidelines when the need arises as ecomonic development opportunities present themselves. it has been my experience in a small county that the re-adopting allows the county to taylor the guidlines for the different type businesses that might move in that might not have been forseen if a routine renewal was used.

We, also, have been reinventing the wheel. Being so small, in many ways it makes sense to make them fit the county when adopted, as opposed to fitting it years ago...........