by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The Jacksonville Economic Development Commission’s second meeting in a month will speed along the City’s application to keep downtown’s Enterprise Zone.
The Enterprise Zone is a state designation that allows businesses operating inside to claim tax refunds for hiring and capital expansions. The City has applied to expand its current zone, which covers the urban core, farther north and west of downtown.
The JEDC called the Oct. 27 special meeting to fast-track the application, which is due Nov. 30. That date would have provided a narrow window for the application to travel the normal route for City approval, which would have required appearances before the JEDC in early November and the City Council after.
“Waiting for the next JEDC meeting would have been too late,” said JEDC spokesperson Ginny Walthour.
The sought-after expansion would add three developable sites — the Cecil Commerce Center, Imeson Industrial Park and the Phillips Highway/Pine Forest area — to the existing 19.6-square-mile zone.
The JEDC wants to continue to use poverty and unemployment rates as the primary criteria for an area’s eligibility. According to JEDC documents, the poverty rate inside the current zone exceeds 35 percent compared to the county-wide average of 11.9 percent. The zone’s unemployment rate is 13.6 percent versus a state-wide average of 5.6 percent.
The Enterprise Zones are designed to narrow the gap between those numbers by offering tax credits to business who locate, hire and expand within the boundaries.
The state’s Enterprise Zone program offers sales tax refunds to business that buy business machinery, equipment or building materials. The zones offer 20 percent credit on wages paid to employees who live inside the boundary. If more than 20 percent of a businesses’ employees live inside the zone, the credit increases to 30 percent of wages paid.
Since the existing zone was created in 1995, it has alleviated the poverty rate inside its boundaries although the unemployment rate has remained stubborn, according to the JEDC’s numbers. The poverty rate inside dropped from 41 percent to 37 percent from 1990 to 2000. The unemployment rate, however, nudged upward from 13 percent to 14 percent during that same span.