Proposed revisions to the financial incentive policy by Erie County’s six industrial development agencies hold the promise of attracting more outside companies to locate here and helping existing companies to expand. They deserve support.

The changes would add an extra boost for projects that would have special impacts on the local economy, a move definitely in keeping with the IDA mandate of aiding regions and not just promoting individual business efforts.

The region’s IDAs—representing Erie County, Amherst, Clarence, Concord, Hamburg and Lancaster—have had a decade-long uniform policy that determined which projects were eligible for tax abatements, and for how much. That was designed to eliminate interagency competition that would just shuffle company locations within the region without attracting new businesses and jobs to the region. In that same vein, all the IDAs now will consider changes that will create a three-tier system for new-project incentives and shorten the number of years in which the incentives are provided.

Changes to policy are hoped for by early next year, in order to boost the region’s competitive ability to attract business dollars.

Stemming from work done by regionalism experts on planning and growth for the county, the idea is to develop new-project incentive criteria that would promote growth patterns in alignment with overall growth strategy. Factors would include industry clustering, attracting specific industries and encouraging companies to invest in such things as brownfield redevelopment, adaptive reuse of existing structures, innovative research and green technologies.

Those factors would be evaluated to rank projects into three tiers, with a top tier for projects deemed to have strong potential impacts on the overall economy. The scoring would add clarity to project rankings, and top-tier consideration would include not just job creation but regional impacts of expansion or relocation proposals.

The scoring system also would emphasize the development of industries within six strategic categories—manufacturing, back office, agriculture, life sciences, regional tourism and distribution logistics.

For businesses, the new play also tries to tie IDA-channeled tax incentives more closely to the typical timetable for projects; benefits would be received over a shorter time span, closer to project launch and completion. The current benefit package is scheduled over a span of 10 or 15 years, and the changes would provide two schedules of seven and 10 years.

The idea is to shorten the time period for a more direct relationship between incentive and investment, and to return the properties to the tax rolls more quickly. While both the company benefits and the community’s concessions stay about the same, proponents argue, the package fits much more efficiently into business time frames and the community’s need to return to full property taxes.

The added clarity should aid the business-attraction process, while adding regional strategies more strongly into the mix. And the idea of special consideration for special-impact projects is a good one, and well worth pursuing.

By advocating a leaner, more efficient incentive program focused on a regional goal, the six IDAs are on a shared path that should benefit everyone.