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Regular Council Meeting February 9, 2015 Page 16 22. Discuss and possibly act on a motion to transfer the monitoring, accountability, and responsibility of all tax abatement agreements from the Paris Economic Development Corporation to the City of Paris, and more specifically the attorney for the City of Paris. Council Member Pickle said at some point tax abatement monitoring was turned over to the PEDC. He said the City determines the tax abatements and that he thought the City should monitor them instead of the PEDC. Council Member Pickle said he and Mrs. Clifford had gotten the incentive agreement monitoring up to date and a few of those did include tax abatement agreements. He also said PEDC was in agreement in asking for the Council to move the monitoring of tax abatements back to the City and place that responsibility under the City Attorney. Council Member Pickle said if companies were compliant, then the attorney could go ahead and send them a non - compliance letter. Council Member Hashmi mentioned the information that Council Member Pickle had supplied them about best practices in Tyler and Kilgore EDC and inquired who did the monitoring in those cities. Council Member Pickle said Tyler had a different setup and their EDC only dealt with incentive agreements. Mrs. Clifford said that Kilgore EDC monitored tax abatements for the City of Kilgore. Council Member Hashmi said PEDC had more contact with companies and had a close relationship with businesses, but that he had never seen a close relationship between companies and the City Attorney. He also said businesses always go to PEDC and he felt compliance should remain with the PEDC so that it was better coordinated. Council Member Pickle said he agreed but at this time there was too much placed on board members and staff at the PEDC. Council Member Hashmi told Council Member Pickle since he had been there, PEDC was doing better with compliance reporting and he did not understand why they wanted to change it when it was working well. Council Member Plata also said PEDC was the first entity to be in contact and to him it seemed as though this would be crippling, because he felt sure that tax abatements were discussed when a company contacted and met with the PEDC. Council Member Plata asked if Mrs. Clifford would come forward, which she did. Mrs. Clifford said she, Edwin and Shannon Barrentine had been working on compliance and there were a couple of incentive agreements that did not include tax abatements. She said they had compiled everything together in order that companies could send to them one piece of data which was comprised of the number of jobs, the capital investment and so forth for compliant purposes. Mrs. Clifford said she and Mr. Pickle had agreed on most things and they had a good working relationship. Mr. Godwin said for clarification, PEDC was suppose be doing the monitoring for quite some time and the PEDC Director dealt with business prospects and had sometimes already negotiated a deal. He said the new policy approved about a year ago was to have the tax abatement committee be more involved and that PEDC would be responsible for monitoring agreements. Mr. Godwin said the taxing entities had the same agreement. Mrs. Clifford said Mr. Pickle represented the City and she represented PEDC. Council Member Lancaster said PEDC was better now. Mrs. Clifford said when her tenure was over that Mrs. Barrentine would be able to carry on with the procedures for compliance. A Motion to retain monitoring and compliance of the tax abatements with PEDC was made by Council Member Hashmi and seconded by Council Member Lancaster. Motion carried,