Henderson printer loses bid for state tax break

David Strow

Thursday, May 9, 2002 | 11:05 a.m.

Nevada officials on Wednesday denied a New Jersey company's bid for a tax break of nearly $140,000 for its new printing plant in Henderson.

The unanimous rejection by the Nevada Commission on Economic Development left officials with Nomad Worldwide talking about the possibility of finding a new location for their West Coast plant, which opened just one month ago.

"It doesn't help," said David Stadler, a partner in the Jersey City, N.J., company. "If we can find a better location, we'd definitely consider it."

But commissioners said they had little choice in the matter. Nomad would inevitably be competing with Nevada companies for business, they said, and these companies had not received tax incentives when they opened.

"To give you incentives to compete against people who didn't get incentives is a problem," said Commissioner Peter Thomas.

Nomad is a printer of super-sized graphic materials, such as billboards and building wrap-around ads. It had previously done all its work out of its New Jersey headquarters, but decided to open a western branch to handle work on the opposite coast. The savings on shipping costs by doing work at a western office are substantial, Stadler said, given the weight of the huge graphics.

In early April the company opened a 19,000-square-foot production center on Mary Crest Road in Henderson. It now has eight employees, Stadler said, and could potentially have up to 25 employees by year's end, at an average wage of $18.93 per hour -- 25 percent above the state's average wage.

Stadler said the center is operating on a trial basis.

"If it (business) doesn't happen in the next six months, we'll have to close this facility," Stadler said."We need to see the business grow here to make this permanent."

The company had sought a sales and use tax abatement of $75,469 on the equipment used at the center, as well as a personal property tax abatement estimated at $59,000. It also requested a business tax abatement of $4,200.

Affordable and plentiful direct flights into Las Vegas made the city easy to access for customers, and attractive for the company, Stadler said. He added that a number of "large companies" had urged the company to set up shop in Las Vegas, so it could pick up some of the demand from the city's conventions.

Answering commissioners' concerns, Stadler argued much of the demand from Las Vegas conventions simply isn't being met locally, and is going instead to printers in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.

"We're coming in to capitalize on demand from the rest of the country," Stadler said. "I wouldn't have come here if there wasn't a huge void."

But there would be some competition with local companies, Stadler acknowledged. As a result, Thomas said he couldn't budge.

"It's a fairness issue for me," Thomas said.

But potential competition with existing local companies was just one concern. Berlyn Miller, vice chairman of the commission, noted that the incentives had to be a key reason in convincing a company to set up shop in Nevada before they could be awarded.

"I'm not convinced it was the tax incentives that convinced you to move to Las Vegas," Miller said.