Boeing's aggressive timetable shows it's in a big hurry to establish a new home. It's like a design-build deal, where you're drawing plans as you go. The Broomfield area, which is home to the posh, headquarters-heavy Interlocken office park, is on Boeing's short list of headquarters sites, according to real estate sources. The city of Broomfield doesn't have a laundry list of incentives to offer prospective newcomers to its market, preferring to address companies' individual desires. Broomfield wooed Level 3 away from Omaha in the late 1990s partly by putting some of the tax dollars the city gets from the telecommunications company back into infrastructure that helps it.
Cities can also help new companies cut moving expenses by rebating a portion of permitting fees.
They may give companies a break on sales and use taxes while they build a new structure. Through the Colorado First program, it can also give grant money for employee training, and retraining if a company that's already here has to retool itself. The Colorado Legislature decided nearly a decade ago that municipalities can rebate part of the corporate personal property tax, which is a tax on things such as furniture, equipment and fixtures but not real estate. As much as half that tax can be returned for as many as four years. But that rebate is significant largely for companies like manufacturers, which have huge investments in equipment.