MASON CITY – Businesses in Mason City have received millions of dollars in incentives over the last decade, according to a database compiled by the New York Times. The database is searchable by town name once you select a state.
The database may or may not be 100% complete, but it seems to have caught a lot of the big deals the city has brokered in recent memory.
Among those listed that took money from the city are Kraft, Freedom fuels, Golden Grain, Harley Davidson, Vi-COR, Assa-Abloy, Behr, Sunny Fresh, and more.
Incentives are common tools used by cities and communities to lure and keep businesses and jobs.
Left off the list is Metalcraft and other brand new deals the city is working on with its partners. The city’s Micro-enterprise partnership with the NIACC Pappajohn Center wasn’t on the list, either.
Brent Willett of the North Iowa Corridor recently described the economic development that is taking place in Mason City and the surrounding area when he gave a quarterly report to the Mason City Council. He described some of the tools that are used to bring business and industry to the area.
See the following graphic/screenshot of the New York Times database for Mason City (click the graphic to view larger):