"Competitive incentive package available" appears on hundreds of community profiles submitted to site selectors every year. It communicates almost nothing. What it does communicate is unintended: that the incentive capacity is either unknown, unapproved, or both.
A selector reading that phrase generates two questions immediately. Does this director hold delegated authority to commit anything, or does every term require a council vote? Does the jurisdiction's public record support whatever the director is about to claim? Both questions are answerable before the selector picks up the phone. GASB Statement 77 disclosures sit in the audited financials. Council minutes are online. The selector's client has a finance team that knows where to look.
The 2026 Site Selectors Guild/DCI Pulse Check puts the hierarchy in plain terms. Only 2% of Guild respondents identified state and local incentives as a current top site-elimination factor. Utility and infrastructure capacity: 61%. Available suitable sites: 53%. Workforce availability: 51%. Incentives land at the bottom of the elimination stack because they are a late-stage variable. At a 2025 Guild panel in Little Rock, site selector John Longshore described incentives and negotiations as coming after selectors have already narrowed through client needs, RFIs, and face-to-face engagement. Monty Turner, at the same panel, called financial incentives a "deal closer."
That sequencing is why incentive credibility hits tier-3 cities harder than anyone else. By the time incentives matter, the city is in a final set of three to five. Infrastructure, sites, workforce have already been verified. What remains is the economic pro forma. The incentive package is a line item in it. An unbounded promise at this stage injects timeline risk into a process where 67% of Guild respondents reported compromising on product, regulatory, or incentive factors specifically to guarantee speed to market.
The selector needs a package that can be modeled, verified against the public record, and executed within the project timeline. A bigger number with vaguer terms loses to a smaller number with a documented approval path. A tier-3 city with a documented 45-day approval path and a five-member council holds a structural timeline advantage over a larger jurisdiction where the same tool requires multiple committee reviews and a more complex political calculus. The work is documenting that advantage.
The artifact that delivers it is an incentive authority matrix organized by tool, authority level, approval timeline, precedent, and constraints. What follows is how to build one.
What the Public Record Already Shows
A site selector can see a great deal without asking.
GASB Statement 77 requires governments to disclose tax abatement agreements: descriptive information about each program, gross dollar amounts of taxes abated during the period, and commitments made by the government other than to reduce taxes. Every city that has granted tax abatements discloses them in its Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. Disclosure quality varies enormously. The variance itself is a signal.
Bowling Green, Kentucky's FY2024 ACFR discloses six distinct tax abatement programs: Job Development Incentive Program, Property Tax Annexation Program, TIF Occupational Tax Program, Historical Moratorium Property Tax Program, PILOT Program, and Tornado Relief Program. The disclosure includes eligibility mechanics, recapture triggers, and a ten-year table showing $3,387,674 abated in FY2024 and $23,389,766 abated across FY2015–FY2024. The JDIP disclosure specifies that the program credits 1% of employee withholding fees for 10 years, requires at least 10 new full-time jobs for Kentucky residents, at least $100,000 in eligible costs, county-defined minimum wages, and minimum employee benefits. Recapture triggers include failure to satisfy projected withholdings, business abandonment or closure for 30 days, material misrepresentation, and state-program default.
Muskegon, Michigan's FY2024 ACFR discloses $109,114 in property tax revenue abated under Industrial Facilities Exemptions, $253,520 under Brownfield Redevelopment Authority agreements, and $169,699 under PILOT agreements. The disclosure identifies programs and amounts by tax type. It does not itemize individual projects, non-tax commitments, or recapture terms.
Both disclosures are GASB-compliant. A selector reading Bowling Green's can extract scale benchmarks, term patterns, and recapture structures. A selector reading Muskegon's can confirm the city has used the tools and at what aggregate cost. The gap between what's extractable from one versus the other is the gap between a city whose public record supports its pitch and a city whose public record forces the director to fill blanks verbally.
Pull your ACFR. Read the tax abatement disclosure note the way a selector would. Extract program names, abated amounts by program and year, eligibility thresholds, and recapture language. If your disclosure is thin, the matrix you build will need to carry more documented detail than the ACFR provides.
Good Jobs First's Tax Break Tracker warns that GASB 77 disclosure quality is uneven and that jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction comparisons are inappropriate. Selectors know this. They are not comparing your disclosure to another city's. They are comparing your presentation to your own public record. Inconsistency between the two is the credibility risk.
Five Authority Levels That Cover Most Situations
The most common failure in incentive presentations is conflating what the director can commit with what the director can recommend. A matrix that blurs these creates expectations the director cannot fulfill on the timeline the selector needs.
Authority patterns vary by state enabling statute and local charter. Five levels cover most situations.
Staff can describe. The director can explain the program, its eligibility criteria, and its general terms. This applies to state-administered programs where the city participates but does not approve. Kentucky's Business Investment Program is approved by KEDFA; the local government participates through a payroll-tax inducement approved by council resolution. The director can describe the program. The director cannot commit the state's approval or the council's resolution.
Staff can recommend. The director can prepare a staff recommendation with proposed terms for council or board consideration. This is the typical position for local tax abatements, PILOT agreements, and Chapter 380/381 economic development agreements in Texas. The Texas Comptroller's Chapter 380 guidance makes clear that cities must establish a program and review charters or local policies before implementing incentives.
Board or council approves. Most incentive tools require a vote. Texas Chapter 312 tax abatements require governing-body approval at a regularly scheduled meeting after a public notice period. Tennessee PILOT agreements require action by an industrial development corporation that has received formal delegation from the creating municipality, and the municipality may require each PILOT to return to the legislative body for final approval. TIF district creation follows a similar pattern: Houston's TIRZ process requires a public hearing with at least seven-day notice before creating a zone or changing boundaries. If the district already exists, the authority question shifts to how increment revenues are committed. The matrix must specify which body approves and whether delegation exists.
State authority must approve. State-administered tax credits, workforce training grants, and enterprise zone designations typically require state-level approval on a timeline the director does not control. Kentucky's Bluegrass State Skills Corporation considers Grant-in-Aid and Skills Training Investment Credit applications at scheduled board meetings throughout the year. Georgia Quick Start is a discretionary incentive administered through TCSG. The director can facilitate the application. The director cannot guarantee the outcome.
Separate counterparty must commit. Infrastructure extensions, utility capacity upgrades, and overlapping-jurisdiction tax abatements require action by entities the director does not control: a utility board, a county commission, a school district, a special district. The matrix must identify these dependencies explicitly.
Most tools fall into the second and third categories. The value of documenting the distinction is showing the selector exactly where the approval boundary sits and what the process looks like on the other side of it.
Approval Timelines as Procedural Sequences
A selector evaluating a final-set city needs to know whether the incentive package can be executed within the project timeline. "We can move fast" tells the selector nothing actionable. The statutory and procedural steps do.
Texas Chapter 312 illustrates the minimum procedural path. The governing body must adopt guidelines and criteria. It must designate a reinvestment zone after a public hearing with seven-day notice. It must then approve the abatement agreement at a regularly scheduled meeting after public notice at least 30 days prior. If the guidelines and reinvestment zone are already in place, the minimum path from staff recommendation to executed agreement is roughly 45 to 60 days. If they are not, add the zone-designation hearing and notice period.
Tennessee PILOT agreements require a public meeting by the industrial development corporation after notice at least five days prior. If the creating municipality requires legislative-body final approval, add the council meeting cycle. In a city with monthly council meetings: minimum 30 to 45 days from IDB action to council vote, assuming no continuances.
Land conveyance is consistently the least delegable tool. Ohio Revised Code § 721.03 requires a two-thirds ordinance plus advertisement once a week for five consecutive weeks. Texas Local Government Code § 272.001 requires newspaper publication on two separate dates and bars the sale until after the 14th day following the second publication. A director who lists "land available at no cost" without noting a 45-to-60-day minimum disposition timeline has created a gap the selector will find.
Where guidelines, zones, or programs are already established, that status belongs in the matrix. A city with an existing reinvestment zone and adopted abatement guidelines has already completed two of the four procedural steps. That is a competitive advantage worth specifying in calendar terms.
What a Passing Answer on Clawback and Performance Terms Looks Like
"We negotiate clawbacks on a case-by-case basis" is a failing answer. It tells the selector nothing about standard terms, which means the selector cannot model the incentive's net present value with any confidence.
A passing answer specifies the standard term structure across a consistent set of fields: benefit period, job creation threshold, wage floor, capital investment minimum, reporting cadence, verification authority, maintenance period, recapture trigger, and recapture method.
Bowling Green's JDIP requires 10 new full-time jobs, county-defined minimum wages, $100,000 in eligible costs, monthly reporting, and recapture for performance failure, misrepresentation, or closure. Ohio's Job Creation Tax Credit requires annual reporting of full-time-equivalent employees, payroll, investment, and health-care benefits, with a maintenance period of at least seven years or the credit term plus three years. The City of Dallas's 2021 Digital Realty agreement required 143 relocated or created full-time jobs by a date certain, minimum average annual salary of $120,000, maintenance of 200 total Dallas jobs through 2030, and at least $104 million in capital expenditures. Round Rock's 2022 Emerson agreement required $9 million in new real-property improvements and business personal property by a date certain, 50 to 60 additional employees, and performance-based payments totaling $500,000 with clawback provisions.
The pattern across these deals is consistent enough to template. Document your jurisdiction's standard terms using the same fields, populated with thresholds from prior approved deals. If the jurisdiction has never formalized standard terms, the GASB 77 disclosure and executed agreements on file provide the precedent. If those precedents vary, document the range. A selector can work with a range. A selector cannot work with "we'll negotiate."
Pro-rata versus full recapture is a specific point selectors look for. Ohio's statute allows the Tax Credit Authority to reduce the percentage or term of a credit for noncompliance. That is a sliding-scale approach. Some jurisdictions require full repayment upon any trigger event. The matrix should specify which method the jurisdiction uses or has used.
Non-Tax Commitments and Counterparty Dependencies
Infrastructure extensions, workforce training pipeline commitments, and land conveyance share one characteristic: they frequently require action by entities outside the ED director's authority chain. Documenting these dependencies honestly does not weaken the presentation. It prevents the selector from discovering them independently and concluding the director either didn't know or chose not to disclose.
Workforce training pipeline. "We have a strong workforce training partner" is not something a selector can model. A documented commitment looks like a signed MOU or letter of intent from a community college president specifying instructional capacity, program development timeline, and enrollment targets for the relevant certification. State-administered programs add a layer. Georgia Quick Start provides customized company-specific training at no cost, but it is discretionary and administered through TCSG. Kentucky's BSSC grants require board approval at scheduled meetings. The matrix row for workforce training should identify the training provider, the commitment document on file (MOU, board resolution, or letter of intent), whether the commitment is local or requires state approval, and the realistic timeline for each. If no commitment document exists, the matrix should say so. The work is to secure one before the selector asks.
Infrastructure extensions. A water or sewer extension to a target site typically requires utility board approval, an engineering cost estimate, and a cost-sharing agreement between the city and the developer or between the city and the utility district. The matrix should document which utility entity has jurisdiction, whether the utility board meets monthly or quarterly, whether a preliminary engineering estimate exists for the target site, and what cost-sharing precedent the jurisdiction has established in prior deals. If the utility is municipally owned, the approval path may run through the same council that approves tax incentives. If it is a separate district or cooperative, the director controls nothing beyond the introduction. The matrix should reflect that distinction.
Land conveyance. The approval timelines section covers the procedural path. The additional documentation step is confirming that the parcel is free of encumbrances the selector would discover in due diligence: completed Phase II environmental, clear title, and any deed restrictions. These are not incentive terms. They are prerequisites that determine whether the land commitment is real.
The Matrix Format
The deliverable is a table. Each row is a tool. The columns:
| Tool | Authority Level | Approval Timeline | Precedent | Standard Terms | Constraints |
|---|
Tool: Name the specific program. Not "tax abatement" but "Chapter 312 Property Tax Abatement." If the jurisdiction participates in a state program, name the state program and the local participation mechanism separately.
Authority Level: Use the five categories. If a tool spans levels, list all required approvals.
Approval Timeline: List procedural steps in sequence with statutory minimum notice periods. Note which steps are already completed. Provide a realistic minimum-to-maximum calendar range based on council meeting frequency and notice requirements.
Precedent: Reference the GASB 77 disclosure for aggregate program history. Cite the most recent comparable deal by year, sector, and scale if individual terms are public through council minutes or executed agreements.
Standard Terms: Populate the recurring fields: benefit period, job threshold, wage floor, capital investment minimum, reporting cadence, maintenance period, recapture trigger, recapture method. If terms are set by statute, cite the statute. If terms have varied across deals, show the range with the most recent deal as anchor.
Constraints: Statutory caps on abatement percentage or duration. Geographic limitations. Overlapping-jurisdiction requirements. Aggregate fiscal exposure limits. This column should also flag tools the director is commonly asked about but the jurisdiction cannot offer. If the city lacks enterprise zone authority, or if state statute caps abatement at 50% for 10 years, or if the jurisdiction has no TIF district and the creation timeline exceeds 90 days, that belongs here. A constraint the director names proactively is a boundary the selector can plan around. A constraint the selector discovers independently is a credibility problem.
A fully populated row, using Chapter 312 as the example:
| Chapter 312 Property Tax Abatement | Board/council approves (staff recommends) | Guidelines adopted [date]. Reinvestment zone designated [date]. Agreement requires 30-day public notice + governing body vote at regular meeting. Minimum 45–60 days from recommendation to execution. | 3 agreements approved 2019–2024; most recent: manufacturing, $12M capital investment, 75 jobs, 10-year term. ACFR shows $X abated in FY2024. | 10-year benefit period. 50% abatement. Minimum 25 FTE jobs. Wage floor: county median. $5M capital investment minimum. Annual reporting. 3-year maintenance post-term. Pro-rata recapture for underperformance. | State cap: 10 years maximum. Abatement applies to real property improvements only; land and existing improvements excluded. School district must execute separate agreement for ISD portion. |
Populate each row with your jurisdiction's actual data. Where a field is empty, that gap is the preparation work that remains.
The Forwarding Function
The matrix is built for the selector. It must also survive forwarding to a city manager or council member who has not been part of the conversation.
A city manager who receives the matrix before any RFP arrives can identify which tools require council action, what the procedural timeline looks like, and whether the jurisdiction's precedent supports the scale of commitment the director might need to propose. A council member who sees the matrix can read what the jurisdiction has done before, what the standard terms look like, and what the procedural path requires. When a time-sensitive opportunity arrives, the approval process starts from shared understanding rather than from a standing start.
The matrix does not pre-approve anything. It establishes existing precedent, confirms the procedural path, and makes the timeline implications visible. That shared baseline, documented before a deal is on the table, is the difference between a city that can respond credibly and one that has to say "we'll get back to you after the next council meeting."
"Competitive incentive package available" could describe any city in the country. It differentiates nothing. It documents nothing. The matrix compresses three follow-up calls into a single document. It shows what exists, what requires approval, how long approval takes, what the jurisdiction has done before, what the standard terms look like, and what falls outside the jurisdiction's capacity entirely. A selector reading it can model the incentive's contribution to the project pro forma, assess the timeline risk, and determine whether the city belongs in the final set.
For tier-3 cities, the gap that costs deals is not the size of the package. It is whether the commitment can be verified, modeled, and executed on the project's timeline.
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GASB 77 disclosure quality: Good Jobs First's Tax Break Tracker warns that uneven disclosure makes jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction comparisons inappropriate, which means directors should audit their own ACFR against peer cities' disclosures to understand how much detail a selector can extract.
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Incentives versus elimination factors: The 2026 Guild/DCI Pulse Check ranks utility/infrastructure capacity at 61% and incentives at 2% as current site-elimination factors, a gap that should reshape how directors allocate preparation time across their proof artifacts.
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Texas Chapter 380 reporting: The Texas Comptroller now requires local governments to report Chapter 380 or 381 agreements entered, amended, or renewed after January 1, 2022 within 14 days, creating a public record that selectors and their clients can cross-reference against a director's presentation.
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Speed-to-market tradeoffs: The Guild/DCI data shows roughly 67% of site selectors have compromised on product, regulatory, or incentive policies to guarantee speed to market, which means a documented 45-day approval path may outweigh a larger package that requires 120 days of political negotiation.