St. Charles woos Batavia business with property tax rebate
It only took an $8,000 incentive for St. Charles officials to tip the scales in their favor Monday night as they worked to lure an expanding business out of Batavia.
Aldermen gave preliminary approval to a property tax rebate program for Doran Scales. The company wants to expand into a $3.5 million facility as it celebrates its 40th anniversary by increasing its 21-employee workforce. Owner Mark Podl said a 33,000-square-foot facility in the Legacy Business Park near the East Side Sports complex in St. Charles will be a homecoming. The business is located just over the Batavia border on Paramount Parkway for now, but Podl's father started the company in basement of a home in St. Charles.
“We want to get construction started right away,” Podl told aldermen. “We're going to fit right in with the Legacy look and feel.”
The tax incentive is spread over three years. The business is set to open about a year from now. The city will rebate 60 percent of the property taxes Doran Scales will pay to the city in 2019. It will rebate 50 percent of the property taxes the company pays in 2020. And the company will receive 40 percent of the property taxes it pays to the city in 2021. The total length of the agreement is seven years. If the company left the city at any time during those seven years, it would be required to repay the taxes the city rebated.
City staff estimates the total value of the property tax rebate is about $8,000.
Podl seeks a similar 60/50/40 percent property tax rebate agreement with St. Charles Unit District 303. The school board's business services committee will debate that proposal Thursday afternoon. The deal with the school district caps the total amount of tax rebates back to the company at $4 million.
The deal has precedent. City officials and the school district teamed up to approve property tax rebates to AJR Filtration Inc. just last September. That company employed 250 people at the time. The city inked a deal with AJR for $29,000 in property tax rebates. The school district agreed to a much more lucrative tax rebate. The first year of that deal kicked back 90 percent of AJR's property taxes. The rebate shrank to 80 percent and 70 percent in years two and three.