It’s not easy to evaluate incentive programs, but Montgomery County, MD, has issued an impressive and impressively honest review
of its economic development incentives programs. Among its findings:
- 40% of grant and loan program recipients fully
met performance criteria
- Recipients created or retained 87% of the
required total projected jobs. Companies
that met the performance criteria exceed their projected job totals, but the remaining
companies fell short of their projections by more than 7,000 jobs
- A sizable proportion of recipients, ranging from
32% to 51% (depending on the grant program), either moved out of the county or
went out of business after the monitoring period ended
- 23,246 jobs were created or preserved by firms
receiving some sort of assistance from the county
While there are no benchmarks for incentive programs, these
are actually pretty strong numbers, especially considering that higher risk
small business and technology programs were included in the evaluation.
Most impressive, though, is the willingness to take the time to carefully evaluate and
share findings about the effectiveness of the county’s incentive programs.
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