EDITORIAL: Henderson wastes almost $100K on dubious study

Henderson recently produced an analysis identifying industries it hopes to attract. The top five targets are logistics management and technologies; electric equipment and components manufacturing; financial and credit services; media and sports production; and back-office management and support services. This analysis didn’t come cheap. City documents show that it cost city taxpayers $96,500.

“You can’t build a road map if you don’t know where you’d go,” said Jared Smith, Henderson’s director of economic development and tourism. “We wouldn’t be able to best target companies if we didn’t know what those targets were.”

There are a couple of problems with this viewpoint. The most fundamental is that there’s no need for a “road map” because there’s no place for the city to go. The core function of cities is to provide communitywide services that individual citizens and businesses can’t provide on their own. That includes infrastructure (roads, sewage and water) and public safety (police and fire departments) and schools. Amenities such as parks and walking paths also benefit the community at large.

If a city does those basic things well, it becomes a desirable place to live, attracting both residents and commerce. That’s especially true when it does so while keeping taxes low. Despite its insular politics, public records opacity and problems under its previous police chief, Henderson does this fairly well. This is a major reason it has become the second-largest city in Nevada.

But city officials — like many toiling in the government bureaucracy — also fancy themselves as captains of the local economy, fearlessly steering their municipality to prosperity by the insight they alone possess. That’s fool’s gold. Too often their prescriptions for economic development involve taxpayer subsidies for the companies they covet. This can be useful in rare instances but is most often a drain on public resources and an inefficient and wasteful use of both human and physical capital.

There’s nothing wrong with Henderson seeking to attract new business. But the most promising means of doing so isn’t to target select industries with promises of tax breaks. It’s for local governments to be competent at maintaining core services while also creating an attractive regulatory and tax climate that allows entrepreneurs to flourish.

It shouldn’t cost the city’s taxpayers six figures for Henderson officials to grasp that reality.