Republicans on the St. Joseph County Council are again asking Amazon to give back some of the property tax break it received to build its data center. But he council’s top Democrat dismisses the effort as political posturing before an election.
Republican council member Amy Drake says it was a different world two years ago when the county eagerly approved the property tax abatement for the data center. Now counties are enacting data center moratoriums. She says Microsoft knows this and that’s why they aren’t asking for an abatement for data center they’re building in Granger.
Drake says Amazon will pay about $12.6 million in property taxes the first year but the abatement will save them over $50 million for the year. She says if Amazon would repay the county just $7 million of those savings it would give each of the county’s 71,000 homeowners a $100 credit on their tax bills.
“I think $100 is a big deal to most people," Drake says. "I think that everybody wants to start seeing these data centers put their money where their mouths are. And I don’t necessarily think $100 is the place that we stop but I think it’s a great place to start.”
Drake says Amazon officials said in a closed door meeting last week that they are not interested in revisiting the issue but she’ll keep pushing it.
“We’re not asking for a total renegotiation of the abatement but we think that having these property tax funds for our taxpayers would be beneficial to them," Drake says. "A lot of the argument for data centers coming into communities is that it’s going to bring your tax bill down. Well, people want to see that very directly and they don’t see that very directly.”
But Democratic Council President Bryan Tanner says Amazon is projecting over 3,000 permanent high-paying jobs, while creating other community benefits. He doesn’t think they would have invested that much without the abatement.
”It was a good faith effort that was approved by a supermajority of the council as well as the commissioners, so to me it’s a political tactic leading into an election and it has no basis in reality or fact," Tanner says. "Yes, there is still some frustration, some concern over data centers as a whole, but at the same time I think the benefits that we’ve already seen out of Amazon’s investment in the community at least negate some of the concerns that Amy and other Republicans are continuing to raise.”
