Today, the Mobile City Council is set to approve a project agreement with Airbus for their new facility and third final assembly line. As part of that agreement, the city is expected to Airbus a $10 million cash incentive, to be used for construction costs as well as workforce recruiting and development efforts.
The Mobile County Commission was scheduled to approve a similar agreement yesterday, with an additional $10 million incentive, but pushed the vote until next month, amid concerns from one of the commissioners about ensuring that Mobile County residents would be prioritized in the job recruitment and training process. It’s a concern shared by at least one member of the city council.
“That ‘good-faith effort’ has been written for a long time, but it doesn’t have enough teeth in it,” Councilmember William Carroll said May 16 during the council’s pre-conference meeting. Later that day, however, Carroll told reporters that he was supportive of the incentive.
The investment by Airbus will bring an additional 1,000 jobs to Mobile. David Rodgers, vice president of workforce development with the Mobile Chamber, told the county commission that, when the development is complete, Mobile will be the fourth-largest city for commercial aviation manufacturing in the world, behind only Toulouse, France (where Airbus is headquartered), Hamburg, Germany and Seattle, Wash.
Five million of the $20 million that the governments are considering is set aside for workforce training of Mobile County residents. That money is supposed to be spent in partnership with schools in Mobile County, local community colleges, the University of South Alabama and Mobile County Public School System, according to attorney Britton Bonner, with Adams and Reese, the firm that assisted the city in preparing the city’s project agreement.
Teckie Hinkebein, a spokesperson for Airbus, said that the funding would be used to scale up the company’s existing workforce development programs, such as its apprenticeship program.
And, as part of the agreement, Bonner says, Airbus must make a “good-faith effort” to recruit employees from Mobile County and must adhere to the reporting requirements laid out in the “Mobile First” initiative from the Mobile Chamber that requires companies prioritize hiring locally, as well as prioritizing local contractors in the bidding process.
But that may not be enough for all the politicians involved in the approval process. In a May 18 meeting of the Mobile County Commission, Commissioner Randall Dueitt argued that it wasn’t “fiscally responsible” to spend tax dollars on Airbus when employees were settling and spending their tax dollars elsewhere.
“I don’t hate Baldwin County, I don’t hate the area, I don’t hate the region, but I ran for office in Mobile County,” Dueitt said during the meeting. “My intent is to protect the taxpayers of Mobile County, and I want them to have these jobs, these white-collar jobs, that pay $150,000, $180,000, $200,000 a year.”
Jay Ross, legal counsel for the Mobile County Commission, who also works at Adams and Reese, said on May 18 that there have been discussions about Airbus incentivizing workers to live in Mobile County, perhaps through a housing assistance program. But that hasn’t been settled yet, he said.
Hinkebein said yesterday that Airbus is considering incentives to keep employees in Mobile County but hadn’t made any decisions yet.
There are also claw backs in the agreement, Ross says. If employment at the plant is less than 70% of the initial jobs target (1,635) by the end of 2026, then Airbus will have to return the amount of city and county incentives that have been paid by that time. If employment is less than 90% of the final jobs target (2,135) by the end of 2029, the city and county will receive an even greater sum from Airbus.
This investment from Airbus will bring the company’s total investment in the area to over $2 billion, Bonner says. It will cost about $700 million to construct the new facility, which will be owned by the Mobile Airport Authority but paid for by Airbus, Rodgers says.
In addition to the incentives from the city and county, Airbus is also receiving a $20 million economic development cash grant, a jobs tax credit valued at $17.2 million over 10 years and an investment tax credit valued at $18 million over 10 years from the state of Alabama, according to state Secretary of Commerce Greg Canfield.
Airbus will have access to recruitment and training programs from Alabama Industrial Development Training for the life of the project, which is valued at roughly $41.6 million.
In exchange, Airbus has committed to 1,000 new full-time jobs with an average annual wage of $65,000, and at least a $150 million capital investment. The state projects that it will receive $178.6 million total new revenue over 20 years and $1.7 billion in new payroll over 20 years, between construction and direct permanent jobs.
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