Rick Weddle: Welcome to Site Selection Matters, where we take a close look at the art and science of site selection decision-making. I’m your host, Rick Weddle, president of Site Selectors Guild. In each episode we introduce you to leaders in the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak with members of the Site Selectors Guild and our economic development partners and corporate decision-makers to provide you with deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession.

In this episode we again have as our guest Andy Shapiro. Andy is a principal in the location advisory firm Biggins Lacy Shapiro & Company and the immediate past chair of the Site Selectors Guild. He’s here to talk with us about economic development in cities in the United States, more specifically, how such incentives are being or likely to be impacted by the COVID-19 health emergency. Join me as we welcome back Andy Shapiro to Site Selection Matters.

Andy, we’ve been hearing that the climate around state and local incentives has really been evolving both before and even after now the pandemic that’s underway. Tell us about that a bit and help us understand what’s happened since COVID-19 has emerged.

Andy Shapiro: Thanks, Rick. You know, in many ways the practice of economic development incentives has or soon will be unrecognizable by pre-COVID standards. But you’re correct. There’s been a change underway for quite some time now. And in particular, before COVID, we were receiving a pullback in many of those states that had typically deployed incentives strategically as part of their economic development efforts. I’ll just give you a couple of examples from the recent experiences we’ve had at BLS & Company.

For example, New Jersey, you know, under Governor Murphy, you know, they basically allowed most of those Christie-era programs such as the Grow New Jersey incentive to sunset and have done so without any clear guidance on what would be the successor incentives. This has had a significant impact on the state, not the least of which has been the cratering of the office market, particularly along the New Jersey-Hudson River waterfront, which has historically thrived on the steady diet of New York City’s, you know, out-migrating companies. So there’s a lot of uncertainty there on the New Jersey side and without a successor program in place, a lot of deals have gone basically on lockdown. This is all, again, before COVID.

Another pre-COVID example of how the incentives climate has changed to a nearby state in the Northeast in Connecticut. There, another new governor, Governor Lamont, ordered a top to bottom reevaluation of all state incentive programs with recommendations that ultimately the state curtail some of the more discretionary inducements in favor of some of the more what we would call “pay-to-play” programs such as payroll withholding-based incentives instead.

And then finally in Florida it’s been a very contentious climate for several years around incentives in Florida. A lot of that really came about during the Scott administration with a tug of war with the legislature. That has eased somewhat under Governor DeSantis. The governor and legislature seem to be more on the same page now. They’ve agreed, at least for the time being, to allow some of the state’s major incentive programs such as the QTI program and the closing fund, the governor’s closing fund, they allowed them to sunset. So, you know, again, these are three states that have actively used incentives strategically in a competitive process to lure or retain businesses over