Community Corner
Folgers Property Tax Break Appeal Heads To La., State Board
The Louisiana Board of Commerce and Industry is expected to hear the appeal of tax exemption denials from Folgers Coffee Co., next week.
- February 24, 2023
6:00
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Folgers property tax break appeal heads to state board
By: Wesley Muller - February 24, 2023 6:00 am
Find out what's happening in Across Louisianafor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Folger’s Coffee Plant near the Industrial Canal in New Orleans East. (Jo Naylor, April 2018. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons).
The Louisiana Board of Commerce and Industry is expected to hear the appeal of tax exemption denials from Folgers Coffee Co. next week worth more than $5 million to New Orleans government, schools and law enforcement that want the revenue.
It has been more than two years since Folgers filed six different applications for Louisiana’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP) for upgrades the company completed at its Chef Menteur Highway and Old Gentilly Road plants. The company sought lucrative ITEP breaks covering an entire decade on top of the roughly $121 million in tax exemptions it had already received from 2000 to 2017.
Local residents and advocacy groups lobbied heavily against the tax breaks until all three local taxing bodies — the New Orleans City Council, Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office and Orleans Parish School Board — denied all six of Folgers’ applications. However, the company has filed a last-ditch appeal with the Board of Commerce and Industry, asking the board to overrule the local governing bodies.
Folgers tax-break saga ends with rejection by New Orleans City Council
Folgers owes Orleans Parish about $5.1 million in current and back taxes, and the company has been exhausting all its legal options before paying the bill.
The city council, sheriff and school board published a joint letter this week urging the Board of Commerce and Industry to deny Folgers’ appeal at its upcoming March 1 meeting.
“It is time to bring this lengthy saga to a conclusion,” the letter states. “We ask this Board to deny the appeal and make clear that Folgers must pay the taxes it owes when its applications were denied by our elected bodies.”
The Folgers case has become one of the most prominent examples of local governments taking control of local taxing matters after Gov. John Bel Edwards issued executive orders to change ITEP approval standards in 2016. However, many believe the clock is ticking on those reforms to expire once Edwards’ final term ends this year.
The J.M. Smucker Co., the parent company of Folgers, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
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Wes Muller traces his journalism roots back to 1997 when, at age 13, he built and launched a hyper-local news website for his New Orleans neighborhood. In the years since then, he has freelanced for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and worked on staff at the Sun Herald in Biloxi, WAFB-9News CBS in Baton Rouge, and the Enterprise-Journal in McComb, Mississippi.
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The Louisiana Illuminator is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization driven by its mission to cast light on how decisions are made in Baton Rouge and how they affect the lives of everyday Louisianians, particularly those who are poor or otherwise marginalized.
