Missouri Senate stalls money for KC Bombardier plant

The Missouri Senate grounded initial efforts to launch high-flying tax incentives help lure a Bombardier Aerospace airplane manufacturing plant to Kansas City.

The Senate voted down an amendment to an appropriations bill Wednesday that would have set aside $120 million in early round financing for the project, with 22 senators voting no.

Legislators have been trying to push through an ambitious mega-project incentives bill to provide as much as $880 million in public financing to attract the manufacturing plant, which some Missouri economic development officials have called the biggest project the state has ever tried to land.

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But the bill ran into opposition from lawmakers such as Sen. Matt Bartle, R-Lee's Summit, who think the incentives are too much of a giveaway to a project that will land no more than 2,000 jobs.

"Paying up to nearly $900 million in tax credits for 2,000 jobs makes no sense," Bartle wrote in a weekly column submitted Thursday. "If this bill passes, it would create the largest tax credit program in the state, offered to a foreign corporation at a time when we should be holding tightly to the purse strings of the state budget."

Bombardier is based in Montreal.

The Kansas City Business Journal reported March 25that Kansas City was in the running to attract the $375 million assembly plant, which would produce the world's newest full-sized jet passenger plane. The plane would have 110 to 130 seats in rows five across and come into service in 2013.

If successful, the project would include an additional $75 million investment for flight testing and research and development, Bob Marcusse, CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council, said at the time. Marcusse said Bombardier was considering city-owned property at Kansas City International Airport. The new plant eventually would employ more than 2,000 people and probably create hundreds of ancillary supplier jobs.