Our tax dollars and business developments, incentives: How much is too much?

DETROIT – Whether or not it’s a brand new battery plant or the reboot of District Detroit, how a lot ought to we pony up for financial progress?

And when a Starbucks has to shut its doorways due to safety worries, is that simply life in a giant metropolis, or is {that a} signal of significant bother in Midtown?

• Watch Flashpoint at 10 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 26. on Native 4 Information and Native 4+

We’re nearly three weeks from the beginning of spring. It’s possible you’ll not really feel the customary urgency to get there on condition that it’s been a comparatively gentle winter — however we paid for these hotter temperatures this previous week. Colder climate would have meant loads of snow, however as an alternative we ended up with a nasty ice storm that introduced down branches and energy traces — and led to extra conversations about infrastructure and the vulnerability of the grid. Hopefully, we’ll cope with extra snow or rain and never the damaging in-between.

We’ll focus on enterprise and improvement this morning. For a while, I’ve been inviting the parents behind District Detroit to come back on to speak about what’s about to occur in addition to what hasn’t occurred but — and so they’ll be right here right this moment to put out the imaginative and prescient for us, one which was first promised practically a decade in the past.

We’ll additionally speak about simply what’s truthful and clever in relation to public cash and spending on improvement and incentives. It’s a aggressive world — little question about that. However some concern that the competitors quantities to a race to the underside and that plenty of the breaks given out to huge firms can by no means be amortized in a significant method.

And what about protecting current companies? I don’t need to sound like a espresso snob snubbed as a result of a Starbucks at Woodward and Mack is closing. However after they say it’s as a consequence of safety issues — nicely, that’s not good. We’ll see if my roundtable can speak me out of that fear — all right this moment on Flashpoint.