Location: Top Secret
PLUS: Break up Ticketmaster.
This is Boondoggle, the newsletter about corporations ripping off our states, cities, and communities. If you’re not currently a subscriber, please click the green button below to sign up. Thanks!
The electric car maker Canoo — which doesn’t make boats, despite the name — last week announced that it will be building a new plant in Oklahoma, a state from which it is already receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate subsidies for a factory in Pryor. (You can read this piece for the gory backstory on that prior, errr, Pryor deal.)
Where will this new plant, which will reportedly also be subsidized with public dollars, actually be? In Oklahoma City, somewhere, but that’s all the information that’s available. As the Tulsa World reported, Canoo “declined to release the address,” and “asked that the Oklahoma Department of Commerce not disclose the location of the proposed plant.”
Secrecy in corporate subsidies deals abounds, from the amount of money a corporation will be receiving, to how many jobs it proposes to create, to whether or not its job and investment targets are later altered by economic development bureaucrats, to the very existence and actions of the consultants who comb the country looking for politicians ready to pay up. Refusing to disclose even the proposed location of a project is a troubling escalation, one more corrupt tactic corporate interests are turning to in order to separate the public from its dollars.
Alas, this isn’t the only time I’ve seen a subsidy deal recently where even the location of the proposed facility couldn’t be disclosed. Earlier this year, when Oklahoma and Kansas were going at it over what turned out to be a Panasonic plant, state officials, including newly re-elected Gov. Laura Kelly, negotiated an $800 million subsidy package and pushed it through the state legislature without divulging where in the state the plant would be. State legislators voted on the deal not knowing if it would be anywhere close to their district or not; it could have been right in their downtown, or clear across the state.
Now, I suspect the next question from those of you reading this is: Why? Why on Earth does the location of a facility have to be secret? Boosters of these deals will claim it’s just part of the system, as they did in Kansas, a lamentable but necessary part of competing for jobs. But, back here in reality, this tactic is popping up for the same reason that corporations tend to want to avoid any level of publicity for subsidy deals until they are done and dusted: Location information may lead to opposition, specifically localized population at the neighborhood level.
For as much as the discussion of corporate subsidy deals tends to focus on higher-level effects on jobs, economic growth, or political re-election campaigns, they also have very local effects: Increases in traffic, noise, pollution, and on and on. Even if a project is broadly popular in an area — or if the population is mostly agnostic or clued-out — residents of a specific neighborhood make have qualms that can slow down or stop a particular project on hyperlocal grounds. This kind of localized opposition is an ongoing issue in Georgia’s big subsidy deal with Rivian, which a judge slammed the brakes on recently, for instance.
So what’s a good way to avoid those sorts of local hurdles? Not disclose where the project will be located, of course!
This tactic picking up any sort of steam is yet one more reason to ban secret deals at the state level, which would filter down to localities. If you haven’t signed up to join our Ban Secret Deals campaign, you can head here and do so before state legislative sessions start up again in January — it’s time to end the corrupt corporate secrecy around these deals once and for all.
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: I talked to Walt Hickey over at the fantastic Numlock newsletter about the midterm election results and the politics of corporate subsidies. You can read it here. And I was on NPR’s “Here and Now” to talk about my recent piece on Louisiana’s successful subsidy reforms. Listen here.
ONE MORE THING: My colleagues and some other allies have been running an excellent campaign calling on the Department of Justice to break up Ticketmaster, and specifically to separate it from the venue manager Live Nation, with which it merged in 2010. This conjoining of venue management and ownership with ticketing services gives Ticketmaster the ability to gouge consumers and squeeze both artists and independent venues.
And since Ticketmaster has essentially no competition in the ticketing space, there’s little for consumers or artists to do when, say, the site crashes right when Taylor Swift tickets go on sale.
If you want to sign the petition calling on DoJ to investigate and break up Ticketmaster, head here.
Thanks for reading this edition of Boondoggle. If you liked it, please take a moment to click the little heart under the headline or below. And forward it to friends, family, or neighbors using the green buttons. Every click and share really helps.
If you don’t subscribe already and you’d like to sign up, just click below.
Thanks again!
— Pat Garofalo