First-ever binding end to a border war: Missouri-Kansas UPDATED

Kansas Governor Laura Kelly has just signed an executive order that prohibits state subsidies being used to move existing Missouri firms in four Missouri counties to three Kansas counties, which together make up the Kansas City metropolitan area. Unlike previous voluntary no-raiding deals, such as NY-NJ-CT, Council of Great Lakes Governors, and even Australia's Interstate Investment Cooperation Agreement, this is not a voluntary agreement, but one with the force of law, a first in the country's history.

The binding nature of the agreement comes from the fact that both states have legally bound themselves. In June (h/t New York Times), the Missouri legislature passed and the Governor signed into law restrictions on using state subsidy funds (such as Missouri Works) from being used to attract companies operating in three counties in Kansas in the Kansas City metro area. The law stipulated, however, that this would not go into effect unless Kansas passed similar binding regulations on its state subsidies (Promoting Employment Across Kansas, or PEAK) being used to attract firms on the Missouri side of the metro area. Today's action by Kansas' Kelly meets the stipulations of the Missouri law.

Kansas and Missouri have thus joined the European Union as the only areas with legally binding no-raiding rules, anywhere in the world. Of course, the EU's provisions, based in the Guidelines for Regional Aid, cover the entire territory, whereas the Kansas-Missouri ban only applies in the Kansas City metropolitan area. However, since that's where almost all the job piracy between the two states takes place, the two states' action is truly historic.

The two states made a previous attempt at a binding agreement in 2014-16: Missouri passed a similar law to this year's in 2014, but Kansas' last-minute law just before a 2016 deadline in the Missouri law precipitated a stalemate, and no new deal was made until this year.

It should be remembered that an agreement of this type has been advocated for by a number of companies in the region, notably Hallmark and the Hall Family Foundation. Their work uncovered the hundreds of millions of dollars that had gone into the border war and led to pressure being put on both state governments to end the madness.

New article on tax increment financing in Missouri shows impact of KS/MO border war

After several years of work, my colleague Susan G. Mason (Boise State University) and I have published a new article on TIF in Missouri, specifically in the St. Louis and Kansas City metropolitan areas. "Exploring Patterns of Tax Increment Financing Use and Structural Explanations in Missouri's Major Metropolitan Regions" appeared in the July 2018 edition of the HUD journal Cityscape, downloadable for free here. We omitted the two cities from our earlier statistical analysis (in the paywalled Economic Development Quarterly, May 2010) because they are much larger than any other Missouri city and use TIF far more than any of them, making them statistical outliers.

In our earlier article, “Tax Increment Financing in Missouri: An Analysis of Determinants, Competitive Dynamics, Equity and Path Dependence,” we found that early adopters of TIF tended to be heavier users of TIF far past the first TIF adopted, that TIF as used in Missouri exacerbated inter-jurisdictional inequity (cities with higher poverty rates were less likely to use it than cities with lower poverty rates), and we found strong evidence for competitive dynamics in the use of TIF: Cities that were adjacent to a TIF-using city were two and a half times as likely as average to use TIF themselves, and implement more TIF projects.

The new article is an exploratory study, as it is impossible to generalize from two cases. But one thing we established clearly, based on complete data from 1988 to 2013 for St. Louis, and from 1988 to 2012 for Kansas City, is that Kansas City's tax increment financing projects are marked by much higher aid intensity (the EU term that equals subsidy/investment) than those of St. Louis. Indeed, even excluding 2009 in St. Louis, which was marked by several multi-billion projects with low aid intensity (and at least in the case of Northside Regeneration, had substantial state funding not reflected in Exhibit 4 of the article), the overall average aid intensity, ex-2009, is 17%.

By contrast, in Kansas City, the average aid intensity of the city's TIF projects comes to a whopping 36%,* more than twice as much. Everyone we interviewed on the question considered that there is much greater competition for investment with Kansas than with Illinois in the two metro regions. The difference in aid intensities is consistent with this thesis.

These points take on renewed importance as Missouri's Governor Mike Parson is convening the Governor's Conference on Economic Development in Kansas City this week. As you may recall, Missouri and Kansas came close to a truce in the border war in 2016, but it collapsed when Governor Sam Brownback proposed legislation that did not match what Missouri passed in 2014. Since Missouri has a new governor now and Brownback will be replaced in 2019, there is renewed optimism that a binding halt can be brought to the use of state subsidies in the border war.

The Governor's Conference will include a panel Friday on the border war in which I'll take part. We will discuss the background, data on the cost of the border war, and a potential solution. I will also point out that TIF is impacted by the border war, too. It will be great to try to persuade lawmakers and the governor.

Unfortunately, the cost to attend is prohibitively expensive, but I will report back next week.


* The mandatory typo occurs in Exhibit 3, Kansas City, in the line summarizing 1988-2006. First, the correct amount for total TIF reimbursement is $3,527,420,262, excising the stray "1" in the millions area. The correct aid intensity for that period is 36%, not the 21% listed and probably copied from the previous line.

Kansas City event analyzes the border war

As I noted last time, there is finally a real possibility that the $200+ million job piracy border war between Kansas and Missouri could have a real, legally binding truce. As we wait to find out if this materializes, American Public Square in Kansas City is sponsoring a public forum Wednesday, May 11, at the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library at 6:00pm.

"Cents and Sensibility" will examine the pluses and minuses of economic development subsidies, turning to research on the effects and effectiveness of these incentives, whether it can be justified to give subsidies to private enterprises, and who benefits from subsidy programs.

I will be taking part in this event, which has an interesting format: no presentations, just questions from the get-go, and a roving reporter who acts as a real-time fact checker. The other panel participants are:

Bill Hall, President, Hall Family Foundation
Michael Farren, Research Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University
Moderator: Dr. Scott Helm, Director of the MPA program at UM-Kansas City's Henry W. Bloch School of Management
Roving Reporter: Steven Steigman, Chief of Broadcast Operations, KCUR 89.3

Be there or be square!

Breakthrough in Kansas-Missouri Border War

Via @goodjobsfirst, we learned Friday that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback had made a major response to Missouri's proposed jobs truce in the Kansas City region.

As regular readers may recall, studies have shown that more than $200 million has been spent moving jobs back and forth across the state border in the Missouri and Kansas counties surrounding Kansas City. This is to create 0 new jobs. Despite this being perhaps the country's second-largest border war after the New York City area, Governors Jay Nixon (D-Missouri) and Brownback (R-Kansas) in December 2012 both told New York Times reporter Louise Story, on camera, that they had no plans to end the incessant job piracy.

Nevertheless, in July 2014, Nixon did an about-face, signing a bill from the majority-Republican legislature to end the availability of state subsidies to be used for such job poaching. Unlike the voluntary no-raiding agreements I have discussed on previous occasions (Council of Great Lakes Governors, NY-NJ-CT, Kansas-Missouri, and even Australia's Interstate Investment Cooperation Agreement), this has the force of law. The four counties making up Kansas City would be completely barred from using state subsidies to give relocation subsidies to companies in four bordering Kansas counties, if Kansas passes comparable rules.

Now, facing an August 2016 deadline in the Missouri law for the truce to take effect, Brownback ordered the Kansas Department of Commerce to disapprove PEAK (Promoting Employment Across Kansas) subsidies for job piracy, and asking for legislation to formalize this policy.

Brownback's proposal differed from the Missouri law by allowing PEAK subsidies (and the corresponding Missouri Works program) to be used for piracy if a company invested at least $10 million in new construction. While this means really large projects would not be affected by the truce, it would kill off the dozens of deals made by what Brownback called "lease jumpers," who simply move from a leased facility in one state to a leased facility in the other to cash in on the subsidy programs.

Good Jobs First today lauded the progress on the truce, noting the five years of both public and behind-the-scenes work by Hallmark and 16 other prominent Kansas City companies to promote sanity. Good Jobs First, of course, has conducted a great deal of research on job piracy, including the 2013 report, The Job-Creation Shell Game. Executive Director Greg LeRoy expressed hope that this potential agreement would be "a wake-up call" for the National Governors Association, which he called "MIA" on the issue of job piracy since 1993.

This is not yet a done deal. However, the proposal to meet legislation with legislation would create an unprecedented advance in stopping job piracy.

Stopping Job Piracy in Dayton, Denver,... and maybe even Kansas City

As I have reported before, job piracy is a big problem in metropolitan areas like New York City and Kansas City. Giving subsidies to relocate existing facilities is a net loss for the country and for the region as well. The flip side is that the existence of job piracy makes it possible for companies to threaten to leave their current location unless they get a subsidy, as Sears has done twice in Illinois. I showed in my book Competing for Capital that several multi-state agreements to end job piracy have been total failures.

A new study by Good Jobs First, "Ending Job Piracy, Building Regional Prosperity," reports on a couple of success stories. Notably, these have not involved state governments, but take place in two metropolitan areas, in Dayton, Ohio, and in Denver. The study also reports on failed regional efforts in Minneapolis/St. Paul and Kansas City (but see more below).

The oldest of these successes is the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation, created in the late 1980s. Its aim is to promote the entire metropolitan area as a single region, using transparency and information exchange among municipalities to prevent site selection consultants from playing different cities off against one another. All members sign a Code of Ethics committing themselves to these goals.

The Code is not a law, but it does provide for a dispute resolution process in the case of an alleged violation. A complaint triggers this process:

the Chair of the organization will call together three to five members into a meeting with the offender. If the member’s behavior is determined to be inappropriate, the offending individual is asked to issue a public apology or issue a statement to staff correcting their action and guiding future actions.

As the Good Jobs First report points out, dispute resolution has only been invoked three times in the 26 years the agreement has been in effect, and no Economic Development Corporation member has had to be expelled, the strongest sanction available for violating the Code of Ethics.

In Dayton/Montgomery County, Ohio, there are two programs that promote regional cooperation. Economic Development/Government Equity (ED/GE) began in 1991, and provides a $5 million annual pool for "regionally significant projects in the county." It also shares increased tax revenues with slower-growing municipalities in the county. Applications for the $5 million fund are judged competitively and the process will only consider funding for relocations under very narrow circumstances and only then with a letter of support from the city losing the company.

In addition, all the Montgomery county municipalities, as well as some in neighboring counties, participate in a program called Business First! that promotes the region as a whole and, like Denver's Code of Ethics, requires information sharing when a company is seeking to move within the region. Business First! also provides for a transitional tax-sharing agreement when there is an intra-regional move.

The new report emphasizes the need for engagement with economic development officials, because they actually do the work and they represent the institutional memory necessary for these agreements to remain viable in the long term. As always, transparency is a key element that is a precondition for accountable governance.

In addition to these success stories, potential good news on the job piracy front came out of Missouri last week. On July 1, Democratic Governor Jay Nixon signed a bill passed by the Republican-majority legislature that would disallow the use of state incentives to firms relocating from four Kansas counties to the four counties that make up the core of Kansas City, Missouri. This represents a dramatic turnaround from 18 months ago, when both Nixon and Kansas Republican Governor Sam Brownback told New York Times reporter Louise Story, on camera, that they would continue poaching from the other state.

Missouri's law takes effect only if Kansas passes a parallel law. As Kansas City business leaders have pointed out, the two states have given more than $200 million in tax breaks for relocations, only to see a net 400 jobs move to Kansas. Unfortunately, so far Kansas leaders have given no indication that they will follow suit. However, the Missouri law gives Kansas until August 28, 2016 to do so. Hopefully, some sense will prevail in Kansas by then.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Subsidy Insanity in Western Missouri

I have written before about the gross waste of taxpayer monies on retail in the St. Louis region. According to the East-West Gateway Council of Governments (p. 18), governments in the bi-state metropolitan area pumped about $2 billion worth of subsidies into retail projects from 1990 to 2007, but only saw a net increase of 5400 jobs, meaning that each low-wage, low-benefit retail job cost the cities of the region $370,000 apiece. The price is only this low on the generous assumption that the subsidies were solely responsible for this job creation. However, given the growth of incomes in the metro area during that time period, it is likely that most if not all the jobs would have been created without the incentives provided.

It turns out something similar has been happening in the Kansas City region. As regular readers of this blog know, the border job piracy in the Kansas City metro area is probably the second-worst in the country, after metro New York City. As it turns out, there has recently been data released on the scope of job piracy there.

Less than a year after Governors Jay Nixon (D-Missouri) and Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) told New York Times reporter Louise Story, on camera, that there was no way they would back off of their wasteful poaching, a new Times story reveals that Nixon is now calling for an end to their futile battle.

Part of the reason for his change of heart probably lies with a recent study by the Hall Family Foundation showing that since 2009 alone, Missouri and Kansas City have spent $212 million on relocation subsidies to drag existing operations across the border, sometimes more than once as in the case of Applebee's. The net effect, however, has been virtually nil: 3200 jobs moved to Kansas, while 2800 move to Missouri, for a net movement of 400 jobs.

The math of course is simple: $212 million/400 equals $530,000 per net moved job. And remember, these aren't net new jobs, merely net moved jobs. As I've written on numerous occasions, job piracy is the least defensible use of development incentives, precisely because it creates no new jobs. Good Jobs First had a detailed analysis of the issue overall and the Kansas-Missouri border war in particular in January 2013.

However, if the most recent Times article is to be believed, we could be on the verge of ending this particular border war. Mind you, don't hold your breath. The two states tried before, according to Good Jobs First, and failed miserably. Indeed, there has yet to be a successful voluntary no-raiding agreement between states, even though there have been at least three attempts. But in this case, there has been a strong push for a cease-fire from a number of prominent Kansas City businesses, so there is a better-than-usual chance that this could be successful.

Really, though, there oughta be a law. A federal one.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Defending Against Relocation Threats with Retention Subsidies -- Paid with Employee Taxes

When companies threaten to relocate, often desperate states and cities will give almost anything to keep them. As I mentioned in a previous column, New York City and Kansas City have been among the larger victims of this dynamic. In his most recent column, David Cay Johnston (now at Reuters) lays out a depressing, newish, way that states are cannibalizing their tax revenues to retain existing businesses: letting companies keep withheld taxes of their employees.

Painful as it feels to have a lot of hard-earned income taken from your paycheck for taxes, a new Illinois law does something Americans may find surprising. It lets some employers pocket taxes for 10 years.

You read that right -- in Illinois the state income taxes withheld from your paycheck may be kept by your employer under a law that took effect in May.

As Johnston shows, these deals were almost entirely for retention of existing facilities. Motorola, Chrysler, Ford, and Mitsubishi were not required to create any new jobs, while Continental Tire has to create 400 new jobs. Navistar, however, is getting this subsidy despite the fact that it will lay off 900 of its 3100 current workers. (Note that Illinois did some one-off deals using this tactic before the new law went into effect.)

I mentioned that keeping one's employees' taxes is not entirely new. For example, in Missouri, cities with an earnings tax (St. Louis and Kansas City) can use those anticipated revenues in tax increment financing subsidies. In 2004, Kansas City did just that, giving H&R Block a brand new headquarters building worth $308.4 million, paying $292.3 million of the cost through its TIF (KC Star, March 4, 2004), a more than 94% subsidy! This project was a relocation within Kansas City, under threat of relocation to Kansas.

The threat of relocation of such large projects is a huge one and can generate gigantic windfalls for the companies exploiting their mobility. Ultimately, we need national rules against job piracy so retention subsidies become unnecessary.