As a local committee continues to explore consolidating Evansville and Vanderburgh County governments, a key objective remains finding a way to get the two entities on the same page in the property tax phase-in game.
Tax phase-ins are considered a prime tool for luring new businesses to the area and persuading existing businesses to expand. A company granted a 10-year phase-in would start paying property taxes on the new investment in the second year, with a gradual increase until it is paying 100 percent of its new tax obligation at the end of 10 years.
But, owing primarily to differences in philosophy and available resources, city and county governments have different scoring systems to evaluate companies' requests for phase-ins.
That doesn't help economic development, said Greg Wathen, president of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana.
"(The City Council and the County Council) can literally score the exact same project and offer different levels of years of (tax phase-in)," Wathen said. "The exact same project.
"At a time of such economic uncertainty, what a business wants more than anything else is certainty and clarity."
The County Council approved Vanderburgh County's scoring system — its first — in September 2005.
The scoring document, conceived by an eight-member committee of business leaders and three council members, uses a point system to evaluate companies.
To earn points, companies must make promises about their levels of investment, jobs retained and created, wages and benefits and several other factors.
Before the County Council created its system, council members relied on the Evansville Department of Metropolitan Development to make recommendations about tax phase-ins based on companies' answers in a department application and a state-required statement of benefits.
The City Council created its scoring system in February 2002, having also relied on Department of Metropolitan Development.
Differences in the county and the city's scoring systems involve subjective judgments on such issues as credit points for investing in equipment and technology.
But for County Commissioner Troy Tornatta, who helped draft the county's version as a County Council member and pushed for its passage by that body, the differences themselves are not the point. It's the fact that there are differences.
"I thought for an economic unit, city and county, we should both be playing from the same deck," Tornatta said, recalling the months committee members spent drafting a document and vetting it.
Tornatta is waiting to examine a final proposal by the Evansville-Vanderburgh County Reorganization Committee.
But the longtime officeholder knows how the separate city and county phase-in scoring systems would be affected by consolidation.
"You'd only have one score sheet," he said.