I went to a city hearing on giving tax breaks to an alleged union-busting firm for new office space, and more or less lived to tell the tale:

Meetings of the Industrial Development Agency – the city agency in charge of approving discretionary tax subsidies to local businesses – are generally sleepy affairs. Unless sports teams are involved, the monthly board meetings typically attract a handful of business executives and policy wonks but little public attention.

This morning’s monthly IDA hearing, though, was widely anticipated for a different reason: One of the items on the agenda was $24 million in sales tax breaks on office and building materials to Thomson Reuters, the news-and-information-services giant created when the Canadian firm Thomson bought the wire service Reuters in 2008… [read more]