Q: How important are incentives?
A: "Every prospect's different and every company's different but for a large portion of them it's incredibly important. You know 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when someone was coming to the Southeast they were pretty much coming to Atlanta in a lot of respects. We still have so many more attributes that the surrounding states don't have. We have the fastest growing port, the airport."
Q: Do you support incentives?
A: "In a perfect world I would love it if no state had incentives …We would win most of the businesses. But that's not the new paradigm. That's not what we've seen transpire. We're seeing more heavily aggressive players in the incentive markets, especially in the Southeast."
Q: Is there any kind of a pattern in determining who gets incentives?
A: "More people are asking us for discretionary funds so you've got to make decisions….The first question you've got to ask yourself is, are they coming anyways? Do you have a good feel for it? It's a dangerous game but you have to. Some companies, you have a good sense they're coming to Georgia. They might be feigning somewhere else. If that's the case, your incentives should be low. If it's really competitive, and there are ways you can tell just in how the brokers interact, how much they're going back and forth to states. There are still some head fakes in there."
Q: What about a company, like Baxter International, where the state provided almost $14 million in grants and huge tax credits as well?
A: "We've been trying to get life sciences. We were much stronger (with the incentive package) because we knew it was going to also bring our name recognition up in the life science world. They're higher paying jobs. And that all goes into it too."
Q: What else do you look at?
A: "To say I don't look at geography of the state when we look at incentives is not true. I think you have to. We have some parts of the state that have 14 or 16 percent unemployment. We're probably going to be a little stronger because they don't have as many opportunities for a project….We do look at wage rates. I think it's important. Here, lately we've had a lot of high paying jobs. I think it's important to say we've got to move the needle, not just the number of jobs. We've got to move the needle in terms of salary, which I think we've fallen behind on sometimes."
Q: To keep their grants, most companies must deliver 70 percent of what they promised, meaning a weighted average of jobs and private investment. Is that good enough?
A: Cummiskey replied that he'd recently made the benchmark more stringent. "I also felt like 70 percent was too low so we moved it to 80 percent…We are trying to help these companies grow. So, we didn't want to be penal. But I felt like 70 percent was a fairly wide berth."
Q: Why not require them to meet 100 percent of their promise?
A: "You do need some variability because of anything uncertain that can happen. …We are not gaming the system here. In fact, if anything, this administration has made it more stringent and our successes speak for themselves."
Q: Isn't this ultimately gamble?
A: "I think we're making informed decisions in the best way possible…. I wouldn't consider it a gamble…We're running pretty good numbers here. If I had this kind of percentage I would be in Vegas and I'd be winning."
