There are times when one wonders why we have come to the point where we are sometimes unable to just say no.
Here in Groton a developer has been building yet another tacky looking hotel, scheduled for completion in 2008. Halfway through construction he asks the town for a tax break.
Kiran Parekh, managing partner of Groton Hospitality, who also owns the Hampton Inn on Long Hill Road, said in a letter to the town that the company needs time to “ramp up and stabilize” the hotel operation, as meetings and conferences are planned in advance.
It’s patently clear that Mr. Parekh found out too late that the Town handed out a tax break to the Marriot as an incentive to get it to do what it was going to do anyway, so he figured it was worth asking that he be given an incentive to do what he’d already done.
I assume that ultimately the answer will be “no”, but should there be any doubt? Parenthetically, as the article points out, a similar need to “ramp up” justification was made in support of the Marriot project, which made the “argument that it takes time to build up business for a full-blown conference facility”. Has anyone ever seen the numbers to verify that the claim was true? And isn’t the problem far worse for a non mega-corporation entepeneur, e.g., the long a-building nursery on Flanders Road that is struggling through its initial years without, I’m sure, any tax break at all. Only the bigger pigs can make their way to the trough.
Double parenthetically, if we’re going to give tax breaks, why give them to people in the business of creating low pay dead end jobs? Have we no Wal-Marts?
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