Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more than $3 million Albert Lea handed out to help reopen the plant represented only the latest installment in corporate-welfare payouts. Because hog killing created serious pollution problems, Albert Lea earlier had kicked in $3.4 million to build a wastewater-treatment plant devoted mostly to servicing the pig factory. The hogs had your help as well: the Federal Government contributed $25.5 million, while the state of Minnesota gave $5.1 million. Total cost of the sewage plant: $34 million. The city also built new roads and water lines to the plant, built a parking lot and came up with...
...lesson was about to unfold, all right--a textbook study of the fickle results of corporate welfare. Seaboard was unable to attract enough workers from Albert Lea to run the plant. Many former Farmstead employees had already left the area in search of work. More than 100 had retired. Still others declined to work for Seaboard wages--$4,500 a year less than the plant's 1983 wage, and no vacation the first year...
Meantime, Seaboard failed to invest in upgrading its sewage-pretreatment facility. As a result, its waste began to overwhelm the city's municipal treatment plant. The city normally placed its treated sludge on soybean cropland, but by the second summer, city officials were in search of more land. As Sparks recalls, "We had so much sludge accumulation that...we had to go out in the middle of the summer, buy a crop [for $36,000] and plow it under because our storage capacity was exceeded...
Rather than overhaul the plant, Seaboard responded in the classic manner of corporate-welfare artists: it began quietly looking around for another town, another state. Alarmed, Albert Lea and Minnesota came up with an additional $12.5 million in incentives to keep the plant. But Seaboard had found a bigger patsy--Guymon (pop. 7,700), in Texas County, Okla. Guymon, the county and the state put together an economic incentive package worth $21 million to entice Seaboard to the Oklahoma Panhandle, a section of the country where hogs and cattle far outnumber people...
...million, 10-year income tax credit with the understanding that it was "unlikely" the company would pay any income tax during those 10 years. The state spent $600,000 to train Seaboard's workers. The company received grants and low-interest loans to finance a waste-pretreatment plant. (Remember the one in Albert Lea?) The company was excused from paying $2.9 million in real estate taxes...