Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Another big time article on Jersey City, fine as frogs hair, this time from the Wall Street Journal

Jersey City's new tax incentive policies gets the once then twice over from the Wall Street Journal's Heather Haddon this morning. The idea of shifting the tax incentives towards Bergen-Lafayette and Journal Square are much of the article but also the new $1 million dollar campaign to get people as well as businesses to move out of NYC and into Cool City gets discussed, as does the great Jersey City bugaboo, tax abatements.

When it comes to abatements, Fulop had this to say:

As a City Council member, Mr. Fulop was a strident critic of the abatements, saying they were ripe for mismanagement and given out too freely. He said he would—for the first time—set firm criteria for giving out abatements based on where the developers built in the city to spur more investment in targeted areas.

"We're trying to move away from the stigma that Jersey City has had for a long time that it's about who you know," Mr. Fulop said. "We are taking the politics out of this."

There's also plenty for JC residents to chew on as the article revisits some of the abatements issues and failures from the previous Healy Administration:

State Comptroller Matthew Boxer cited Jersey City in a 2010 report that found significant revenue was being lost through tax abatements. The city exempted property valued at roughly $2 billion at the time, leading to a loss of about $120 million in property taxes and $30 million in Hudson County revenues, the report found.

So get that business part of your brain to working this morning, there's plenty of brain-food in this article for everyone.

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