What the Incentive Question Actually Screens For

Every Project Asks This Question

Every industrial project involves an incentive discussion at some stage. Battery materials, precision machining, food processing, EV components — the question is sector-universal. It does not sort cities by asset profile the way power capacity or rail adjacency does. Every city has an answer. What varies is whether the answer can be scored.

The 2026 Guild pulse found incentives were a current elimination factor for 2% of respondents. Utility and infrastructure capacity was 61%. Incentives do not kill candidacies. But this question is usually the first point in a discovery call where a director shows how well they understand their own governing authority — whether they have administered an agreement before, and whether they can deliver an approval on a calendar that matches the project's decision timeline.

Three city profiles arrive at the question with different preparation loads. A 90,000-person legacy industrial city under strong home-rule authority, with five executed manufacturing abatements on its books, has precedent and GASB Statement 77 disclosures the selector may have already pulled. A growing 60,000-person city in a county-administered incentive state has instruments to describe but cannot independently commit them. A 40,000-person agricultural corridor city that has never structured an industrial incentive agreement has no precedent, no disclosure history, and no staff familiarity with the approval calendar. The preparation work differs across all three, but the answer that fails looks the same.

The Question

Later-stage variant: "Can you provide a written offer with an annual benefit schedule and draft agreement terms?"

The Typical Answer

It reads as flexibility and willingness. There is nothing in it the selector can enter into a comparison.

Why It Fails

The selector is pricing deliverability risk: can this director get a specific package approved, by a specific governing body, on a timeline that aligns with the project's decision calendar?

The vague answer sits in a matrix next to three finalist communities that supplied written offers with annual benefit schedules, draft terms, compliance requirements, and expected approval dates. Four fields are missing from it: the instrument and its enabling statute, the approval pathway, a precedent agreement, and a date. Without those, the selector cannot judge whether the eventual package survives a council vote the director has not yet socialized.

At 2%, elimination is not the real cost — it shows up in the other dimensions. A director who is vague about their own approval authority gives the selector a reason to re-examine the power capacity figure, the permitting timeline, and the site readiness claims, all of which came from the same source.

The Passing Answer

If you built the incentive authority matrix from Issue #1 of this section, the screening answer is that matrix turned outward. What follows is the field set the selector needs to receive.

Instrument inventory with legal authority

Name each tool: property tax abatement, TIF, PILOT, infrastructure cost-share, land conveyance from public inventory, permit fee waivers, utility rate agreements, job training grants. For each, cite the enabling statute or ordinance. A Texas city cites Chapter 312. An Indiana city cites IC 6-1.1-12.1. A city with a municipal utility cites the council resolution or charter provision authorizing negotiated rate agreements.

Where a tool requires county or state action, name the approving body and say so plainly. The selector already knows every community has jurisdictional limits. Describing a county-controlled instrument as if you can commit it is the kind of overpromise that comes apart at due diligence.

Approval pathway and calendar

For each instrument: the required vote (simple majority, supermajority, multiple readings), any public hearing or notice requirement, the statutory notice period, and the governing body's meeting schedule. Texas Chapter 312 requires at least 30 days' public notice before the meeting at which the agreement will be considered, and that assumes the reinvestment zone and guidelines already exist. A council that meets twice monthly with one required reading operates on a different clock than one requiring two readings across consecutive meetings.

Build the earliest realistic commitment date for each instrument from the actual sequence: completed application, any prerequisite district or policy action, statutory notice floor, next eligible meeting, vote, execution. If the prerequisite district does not exist yet, add the time to create it. Do not compress the calendar to sound competitive. A timeline that slips after the selector has presented it to the client costs more than an honest timeline that ran longer.

Precedent agreements

Name your most recent executed manufacturing incentive agreements: the instrument, the approved term, the performance conditions, and the investment scale. Published municipal records are the source. Lafayette, Indiana, has public records showing manufacturing equipment abatements ranging from 7 to 10 years for investments between $9.4 million and $625 million, with terms including job creation commitments, wage thresholds, and declining percentage schedules.

With no manufacturing precedent, say so and describe the closest precedent you have. A distribution center abatement or a commercial TIF district shows that your council has voted on this category of instrument and your staff has administered one. That carries more weight than a promise to do it for the first time.

What published data shows about ranges

No public source produces a national table mapping manufacturing investment scale to a typical abatement percentage and term. The data is jurisdiction-specific. Among Texas Chapter 312 agreements reported for fiscal 2022–2023, 71.2% of those with reported terms ran the statutory maximum of 10 years, though that population was not limited to manufacturing. South Carolina's September 2025 FILOT manual gives the clearest scale-specific statutory reference: negotiated FILOTs generally reduce the manufacturing assessment ratio from 10.5% to 6%, with qualifying investments meeting higher thresholds — generally $150 million or more plus 125 new full-time jobs — potentially reaching 4%. Lafayette's published manufacturing precedents span 7 to 10 years across a wide investment range, but the variation does not track investment size, because employment commitments, property type, and negotiation differ across the agreements. Your own jurisdiction's policy range and executed precedents are the defensible benchmark. State them with the vintage year of each agreement.

GASB Statement 77 disclosures

Your existing abatement agreements are already disclosed in your annual financial report under GASB Statement 77, which requires reporting of tax revenue forgone, the authorizing statute, eligibility criteria, recapture provisions, and recipient commitments. A prepared selector may have pulled your disclosures before the call. Know what they show. Modest disclosed forgone revenue can work in your favor as evidence of fiscal capacity for a new agreement. Substantial disclosed forgone revenue means you need to address the council's comfort with additional commitments before the selector raises it.

Performance terms and clawback provisions

State the standard performance metrics in your precedent agreements: capital investment minimums, job creation targets, wage floors, reporting deadlines, maintenance periods. State the recapture structure: what triggers it, what percentage is recoverable, over what period. Published practitioner guidance identifies job creation, capital investment, and wage levels as the standard compliance metrics. The selector needs to know what happens when the company underperforms, because the client will ask.

Annual benefit schedule

Selectors compare offers across communities using annual cash flows, not a headline aggregate. An immediate cash grant or tax exemption can carry greater NPV than a larger nominal benefit spread across 15 years. Present the year-by-year benefit, the assumptions behind it (assessed value, millage rate, depreciation schedule, eligible property categories), and any administrative fees. A declining schedule stepping from 100% in year one to 10% in year 10 produces a different NPV than a flat 50% for 10 years even when the nominal totals are close. Give the raw schedule with your assumptions and let the client apply their own discount rate; a pre-calculated NPV using a rate the company does not use gets recalculated anyway.

What you cannot offer

State the boundaries. If your state prohibits local sales tax abatement, say so. If your TIF statute requires a blight finding your site will not support, say so. If your county controls a tool you have described, clarify that you can advocate but cannot commit. Naming the limits shows you understand the difference between describing a tool and committing one, which the six-rung framework in Issue #3 of this section covers in detail.

The Tier-3 Translation

Tier-3 cities often hold real advantages on this dimension: shorter approval calendars, fewer review layers, direct access to the mayor and the council members who vote, the ability to structure a package around city-owned land or municipal utility rates. These get communicated as "we're easy to work with" or "our mayor is very pro-business." Neither statement can be scored against anything.

Document the specifics instead. Council approval requires a simple majority of seven members. Public hearing notice period is 15 days. The last three manufacturing abatement agreements were approved within 45 days of formal application. Lafayette's public record shows a 19-calendar-day interval from a dated Statement of Benefits to final council approval on a $725 million Caterpillar project, because the Economic Revitalization Area already existed and the council calendar aligned. Your number will be different — find it and use it. A documented 30-day approval cycle is a competitive data point against a tier-1 metro where the same approval runs 90 days across multiple jurisdictional bodies.

Who Else Needs This

City attorney: Confirm the legal authority for each instrument, the approval pathway, required votes, notice periods, and any statutory prerequisites (reinvestment zone designation, blight finding, existing guidelines and criteria).

Finance director or city auditor: Pull current GASB Statement 77 disclosures for all active agreements. Confirm fiscal impact modeling capacity for a new agreement at the scale you intend to describe.

City manager: Confirm the pre-brief process for council and the political feasibility of the instruments and scale you plan to present.

County or state ED contacts: For any instrument you cannot offer independently, confirm the approving body's process, timeline, and current appetite.