A tax abatement is the government deciding which company gets to skip its taxes. That is corporate welfare, and it is not conservative.
The short version. Every point links to the research behind it — this page is the summary, not the case.
It is corporate welfare. A company asks the county for money it did not earn, and the county says yes. The bill does not disappear. The roads, the ambulance and the fire department cost what they cost, and everyone who did not get a discount covers the difference. See it in dollars →
It is government picking winners and losers. Five people in a room decide which company pays full price and which one does not. That is not a free market. It is crony capitalism, and it is the same thing in Centerville as it is in Washington. Nobody is offering you that deal. Every reason they give, answered →
It is not conservative. Lower taxes for everybody is. Lower taxes for one company, paid for by everybody else, is the opposite. Leon County elects conservatives. Ask them to govern like it.
If it only works with a handout, it does not work. The State Comptroller says the purpose of an abatement is to “attract new industries” by “easing the property tax burden.” It is a subsidy. A project that only pencils out with one is a project the market already said no to. Let the market decide. What the state says an abatement is for →
Good companies come without being paid. Nucor has run a steel mill in Jewett for decades, pays its taxes without an abatement, and funds scholarships at every school in the county. Nobody paid it to come. That is what the market produces when government stays out of the way.
Nobody is forcing this. The abatement is a policy choice five people make in a room. They can choose otherwise.
Saying no costs you nothing. New construction is left out of the 3.5% voter-approval cap, so taxing a new project in full does not breach any limit and does not raise anyone else’s rate. How the cap actually works →
The guardrails are already gone. In July 2026 the Commissioners Court rewrote the county’s abatement rules and deleted the twenty-job minimum, the local-hiring requirement, the step-down schedule, the rule barring harm to adjacent property, and the requirement that the project would not have been built here anyway. What the county took out →
None of this is an argument against the project. Build it. Hire people. Compete. Pay what everyone else pays.