Washington, DC — Good Jobs First today announced an update to its Subsidy Tracker database that adds 57,000 new entries with a total value of more than $14 billion.
Subsidy Tracker is available at https://goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker
The update includes the latest results from the ongoing Good Jobs First effort to collect especially hard-to-find data on local government subsidy awards. During this round, we added data from 110 local programs from 85 jurisdictions in 21 states; 47 of the programs are entirely new to Subsidy Tracker. Among the costliest programs were the Allen County, Indiana property tax abatement ($490 million for 2016) and Denver’s tax increment financing ($244 million over last two decades).Data was obtained both from online sources and directly from localities that do not put their subsidy awards on the web. Our public records requests yielded data from 69 programs in 37 localities.
Good Jobs First also continued to update data from state programs. New Jersey stands out. New information we collected shows that in 2016 and 2017 the state approved a total of more than $1.95 billion in its Economic Redevelopment and Growth Program and the Grow New Jersey Assistance Program.
The update also includes additional historical data for state programs, such as New York’s Empire Zones, which has not added new recipients since 2010 but is still costly. Good Jobs First obtained 45,000 records from data that become public as result of a lawsuit filed by The Post Standard in Syracuse. The new entries have a total cost of over $7.5 billion.
“Subsidy Tracker is a great tool for concerned citizens, public officials, journalists and activists. Each expansion gives new information to those who want to know how and where public dollars are being spent and empowers those who want to reform economic development practices,” said Good Jobs First Research Analyst Kasia Tarczynska, who led the data collection effort.
Subsidy Tracker allows users to search state and local economic development awards by company, program, state and/or locality, and it links the recipients named in individual awards to their corporate parents. Subsidy Tracker is the only free economic development incentive awards database in the U.S. The database includes data from more than 1,000 federal, state and local programs and from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and is updated periodically.
Contact: Kasia Tarczynska 202-232-1616 ext. 214, [email protected].
Good Jobs First is a non-profit, non-partisan, Washington, DC-based resource center promoting accountability and transparency in economic development subsidies. Subsidy Tracker was launched in 2010.