Columbia should offer incentives for businesses to move here, grow

There was a fillip of good news the other day about some new business activity here, but the media shied away from the banner headlines that used to herald such developments in years past. Treated in about the same fashion was the not-too-surprising news from 701 E. Broadway that raises for City of Columbia workers will be restricted for the time being because sales tax revenues are flat. Just when the 168th consecutive inward rush of students and other itinerant travelers already has started.

The good news is the two almost simultaneous announcements that came down the line about a fortnight ago. The first detonation came from West Des Moines, Iowa, where employee-owned Hy-Vee Food Stores Inc. announced it would build two new grocery stores in existing Columbia retail locations as an acceleration of its head-on battle with the region’s three Wal-Mart Supercenters. Hy-Vee is already well known to area shoppers on what, by all counts, is their overwhelmingly successful location on West Broadway across the street from a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Less-well-known Menard Inc., headquartered about 250 miles away in Eau Claire, Wis., was trumpeting its plan to build a home-improvement center on a site in the Center State complex in northeast Columbia not too many steps from the Bass Pro Shop. That alone should be a headline in itself for the other businesses in the area because Center State hasn’t exactly bowled the area over as a raging retail success story.

Going against recent exasperation about declining average wage levels in the Columbia Metropolitan Area, I understand both Hy-Vee and Menards treat their employees well. The Iowa-based grocer is especially noteworthy because its employees own the company and participate both in profit-sharing and individual store bonus plans tied to performance. Menards is a privately owned company, thus exempt from the cumbersome provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that governs publicly traded companies.

The neat thing about the bursts of construction activity is the assumed minimum of hassles the companies will encounter from local authorities. With each site already properly zoned for its intended use, permits should be easily pulled from the city with subsequent protective inspection overview and, I would hope, a rather rapid pace of construction and an ultimate swing into operation. The last thing these two progressive companies need is an unwelcome wheelbarrow full of hassles and obfuscation from municipal authorities.

Hy-Vee will utilize abandoned premises for both of its new operations. At the Rock Bridge Shopping Center site, the headache ball will demo the crumbly-looking former Wal-Mart that the late Bud Walton himself came to dedicate some 30 years ago. Built on the site will be a spiffy, from-scratch Hy-Vee grocery store rivaling Hy-Vee’s first excursion on West Broadway. Far to the east at the other end of Broadway, Hy-Vee will deposit its new store into a substantial leasehold that once housed MegaMarket.

Sales tax revenues to both the city of Columbia and Boone County seem to be more on our minds than ever before. Watched and reported with hawk-like regularity at a time when property taxes are only modest when compared to other areas, it’s these sales and use taxes that governing entities have turned to that suddenly seem so vital as they periodically cycle up and down.

Encouraged as I am about any new retail development, the caveat remains about what to expect in terms of additional sales tax revenue. Unleashing these huge blocks of retail space and further segmenting the entire retail pie doesn’t necessarily translate into more total revenue from sales taxes.

We shouldn’t be so gloomy because we can hope the rate of retail sales activity will rise in the months to come with another rush of college students and other inward-bound migrants beginning to occupy their digs around the area. How convenient it is to forget but it’s been a yearly thing that started in 1839 and we’ve been built on it ever since.

It looks to me like Menards and Hy-Vee decided that Columbia was a good place to do business. The decision was easy, with no mention of any incentives or tax breaks. Such gifts though don’t always cross the transom so readily. If Robin Hood represented the city of Columbia, wouldn’t you want to know what economic-development tools the famous archer was using to stuff his quiver? If there weren’t enough of them, you certainly would want to round out the repertoire in Robin’s quiver to maintain our region’s competitiveness with the rest of the country.

The “arrows” of future economic development will have to be tipped with incentives and programs that are more than we’ve been accustomed to drawing from our quiver. At the same time gently re-writing Hy-Vee’s famous 44-year-old slogan, we’d better make sure that the city flashes a helpful smile at every step of the way when it comes to dealing with folks who want to do business here.