Jobs

On July 27 the Commissioners Court threw out Leon County’s tax abatement rules and adopted new ones. I read the old and the new side by side. Parts of the rewrite are a genuine improvement, and I’ll get to those. But six things came out of our rules that day: The twenty-job minimum The requirement that half the new hires live in Leon County The step-down schedule that shrank the tax break year by year The rule barring projects that create adverse impacts on adjacent properties The rule barring projects that pose a hazard to public safety The requirement that the project wouldn’t have been built here anyway Every number an applicant could actually fail is gone. ...

There’s a new application sitting in the County Judge’s office, and it’s a big one. Crusoe Technologies, LLC — a Denver company — wants Leon County to carve a piece of Precinct 3 into a reinvestment zone and grant it a property tax abatement to build an AI data center campus. Multiple buildings, electrical substations, banks of backup generators. The works. They’ve put a number on it: $34 billion at full build-out. That number does a lot of heavy lifting in this application, so I read the whole thing — alongside the county’s own abatement rules — to see what we’d actually get in return. The short version: not much, and they’re asking for more than our rules allow. ...