8 | City of Victoria, Tx for the shipping of cargo along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, but also enables shipping by rail. Someday the Port hopes to have companies such as Caterpillar shipping containers directly to Victoria by barge. Trucks can only carry so much over the road, whereas barge containers can accommodate a larger load. In this case, goods could, say, arrive in Houston and be delivered by barge to the Port of Victoria for less than what it would cost to ship over the road. The EDC helped push for legislative allowance for the port to have heavy permitting, which allows for the shipping of goods without having to make changes to roads or jump time-consuming regulatory hurdles to get good from Point A to Point B. The EDC also helped secure Free Port Tax Exemption, a benefit that allows companies to have a tax break on inventory which comes in and then Caterpillar Groundbreaking Port of Victoria at Night Caterpillar completed City of Victoria, Tx | 9 is shipped outside the state within 175 days. All companies who had goods coming and going in such fashion were previously being taxed on it. Fowler says it took over a year (which he considers record time) to secure the Free Port Exemption, but that not only benefits Caterpillar, but all companies across the board, in fact, for one local company already established in Victoria, the savings amount to more than $500,000 a year. Fowler says it was all in the timing. “We have to have this big tax base coming into our community which helped offset any risk from no longer collecting the taxes we were.” The Port of Victoria operations are, as Fowler says, another example of visionary leadership and proactive planning for the future. Conceived more than a 60 years ago, Fowler says, “For those guys who thought about dredging a 35 mile-long canal to create a waterway that leads to our community... that took a lot of guts and vision to do that, but today we’re really reaping benefits because they did.” As for the implementing of new incentives allowing for quicker permitting and tax breaks, Fowler says the development of such infrastructure helps demonstrate the cooperation fostered between government and business. “So much of economic development is about relationships, and when a company arrives, there’s no time to develop relationships at that point, they have to be already in place.” DECEMBER 2023 THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE AMERICA - SOUTH
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