Charleston County Council voted 8-1 earlier this week to establish a fee-in-lieu-of-tax (FILOT) agreement between the state, county and Eaton Aerospace LLC., a $143 billion company.
FILOT agreements dramatically lowers business property taxes paid to the state and county. In exchange, the business commits a larger investment to its local operations, expanding its footprint and bringing more jobs to the area.
As a part of the recent agreement, Eaton Aerospace committed to a $46 million expansion, adding an additional facility adjacent to its current building on Cross Country Road in North Charleston. The expansion is projected to add more than 50 jobs to the area.
Council members Herb Sass, Robert Wehrman, Henry Darby, Teddie Pryor, Kyon Middleton, Brantley Moody, Joe Boykin and Jenny Honeycutt voted in favor of the proposal. Council member Larry Kabrovsky voted against it.
“They always argue the same thing — it brings more jobs, you give businesses an incentive to hire more people and bring them here, and there will be more taxes in the long run,” Kabrovsky said. “But that would apply to everybody who goes to the grocery store or pays a tax on their own business. How do you pick and choose who gets the incentive?”
A separate tax incentive for a second company, Metal Trades LLC., also passed its second reading at the Oct. 14 meeting. County officials said Metal Trades intends to invest an anticipated additional $66 million and hire an anticipated 170 full-time employees in an expansion of its existing facility in Hollywood, S.C.
Kabrovsky said his biggest contention was that during the initial readings of the proposals, the names of the companies were obfuscated with vague project titles. County members voted previously to approve the tax incentive for “Project Flare,” which was revealed on Oct. 14 to be Metal Trades.
“My position is, no matter what the merits are, you can’t give a vote to give tax money to a company that you don’t know the name of,” Kabrovsky said. “If there’s a windfall, and we have money we don’t need, it should go back to the people who pay for it in some way.”
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