CJ Reporting on Incentives Reaps Benefit

We’ve told you previously about the many media stories generated by Paul Chesser’s reporting on the “cash cow” presentation created by Ernst & Young to give lobbyists tips on tapping state economic incentive funds. Chesser reported in a CJ Exclusive today that Rep. Paul Luebke (D), Durham, introduced a bill last year in response to what CJ revealed. The goal of Luebke’s bill is to prohibit what occurred when Ernst & Young (1) advised the Department of Commerce on incentives and (2) also represented Time Warner in its effort to get tax breaks from the very state E&Y had advised. “In my judgment, making money from both sides of the street is a conflict of interest,” Luebke said in the CJ story. The incentive debacle has now garnered the attention of Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group. He recently penned a column about the ruling by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that the package Ohio doled out to DaimlerChrysler for a Toledo Jeep plant violated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. Peirce wrote that incentive opponents have been waiting for someone or something to stop the momentum of corporate welfare. “On Sept. 2, the first shoe dropped,” he wrote of the ruling.