If you think that minimum-wage jobs are the secret to Hillsborough’s economic future, then you would join the majority of commissioners, led by the impassioned pleas of Chairman Ken Hagan, to cough up $6.2 million to woo Bass Pro Shops to Brandon. Sure this move may hurt locally owned small businesses and give an unfair advantage to a Fortune 500 company, but don’t we need this marker of sophistication to make our market competitive? When tech folks argued at the public hearing that this was not a strategic investment of public funds for economic development, Hagan pointed out, “We can’t all be engineers.” Mmmm, that’s good Bass!
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2013.