Communities across the country are selling their souls, and selling the taxpayers out, in order to win bidding wars with other communities over the retention or relocation of jobs and companies. The panhandlers in pinstripes shrewdly play one city (or one state) off against another, to secure the best "incentive" packages, usually involving huge tax abatements or cash on the barrel head.
But this is the first time, as far as I know, that City Hall has been auctioned off as part of the "deal." Reports the Daytona Beach News-Journal:
"And to sweeten the deal on their end, the city in September offered up City Hall as the company's new headquarters at $240,000 annually, with the option to buy it for $3 million within three years. Meneough said, although the company will be breaking ground soon on a 200,000-square-foot facility, the City Hall offer was instrumental in Palm Coast being selected. "Without it, it would have been a very difficult decision to make to stay here and move jobs here," Meneough said."
It's outrageous. It's pathetic. It's unbelievable. But the auctioning off of City Hall is also a fitting symbol of how mercenary, and how out of hand, the corporate whoring, and community pandering, has become.
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