Standard Integrated Solutions has gotten an incentive from the Town of Winamac to upgrade its equipment. A ten-year tax abatement was approved by the town council last week. The company says that will help them invest about $1.7 million in industrial equipment, like liquid ring vacuum pumps, and create 10 more jobs, if they can find workers to fill them.
But Council President Tom Murray worried that the company wasn’t meeting the benchmarks of a previous tax abatement. “They told us that within a year or so, they’d have 35 employees,” Murray noted. “And they don’t have that, and now they’re asking for another one.”
Company representatives said part of that stemmed from a clerical error that overstated the number of employees. They’ve also had several employees quit and struggled to find people to replace them.
As for the terms of the abatement, Pulaski County Community Development Commission Executive Director Nathan Origer said it would phase in the taxes by 10-percent a year, which is standard for abatement requests. “The new assessed value would be just under $700,000 in the first year, and it will actually increase in the second year, when they start paying 10 percent of the taxes because of the weird depreciation schedule that the state employs,” Origer explained.
The town council approved the tax abatement resolution unanimously.
