Northwest Florida · the eight Triumph Gulf Coast counties · working prototype
Public money here comes from oil-spill settlements, tax increment, utility rates and bonds. Staff score sheets summarise each proposal in a few headline numbers. Follow one real decision to see what its headline number counts, what it leaves out, and what Epomena asks instead.
In August 2025, Triumph Gulf Coast signed a $25 million grant toward a $107.5 million aircraft-engine repair plant at the Bay County airport. The company promised 500 new jobs paying at least $60,000 a year.
Triumph’s staff graded it A: $19.20 in household income for every grant dollar over ten years, “discounted to present money value”. It is the sheet’s headline measure of return.
That figure counts the income from every promised job as something the grant created. It does not estimate the answer to the question that decides whether the money was well spent: would the plant have come here anyway? Neither do the score sheets for 10 of the 17 company deals, where a company’s choice of location is the question; the other 7 take it up in part or in full. (Most of the 94 sheets are for schools, training and public works, where it does not arise.)
Across 34 estimates from 30 studies, typical incentives probably tip between 2 and 25 of every 100 decisions about where a company goes. Where the middle sits depends on which studies you trust: 3.4 in 100 in studies with no obvious selection bias, 12.7 across all of them, 23.5 in those likely to overstate it. In the rest, the company would have made the same choice without the money.
Count only the promised wages, ten years of them. For the wages to equal the grant, it has to be the deciding reason in at least 10.3% of deals like this if all 500 jobs started at once, and about 13.0% to 15.0% on the agreement’s own deadlines. Against the all-studies median of 12.7 in 100, that is a coin toss, not a verdict; against 3.4, the grant falls far short. The medians are a benchmark, not an estimate of this deal. What would settle it is evidence about this company’s choice, and the record does not hold it.
Count only the promised wages, every paycheck as a gain, for ten years. For the wages to equal the grant, it has to be the deciding reason in at least 10.3% of deals like this one if all 500 jobs started in the first year, and about 13.0% to 15.0% if the company takes as long as the agreement allows (until the end of 2028 to finish the building and the end of 2032 to reach 500 jobs), depending on how the jobs arrive. The figures below use the middle reading, 14.0%. The 500 are counted across three sites: 350 at the new hangar, 25 at an engine test cell beside it, and 125 at an existing building in Lynn Haven the company is under contract for. If those 125 start in the first three years, the bar is about 12.8%–13.1%, level with the 12.7% median. The agreement requires the jobs to be kept only three years past 2032, so counting ten years of them is already generous to the grant.
At 3.4 in 100, the wages the grant causes come to $6.1 million to $8.3 million against $25 million, far short on any schedule: roughly $1.5 million of grant for each job it brought. At 12.7 in 100 they come to $22.7 million to $30.9 million, about the size of the grant, and small changes decide which side: 2% a year real wage growth, which another Triumph score sheet assumes, brings the 14.0% reading to 12.7%; a 2% discount rate, to 11.7%. At that median it is a coin toss, not a verdict. Those medians describe the typical incentives in the studies, not this one. This grant is $50,000 a job, and the medians are not scaled to its size, so they are a benchmark for this deal, not an estimate of it. So the research does not settle it. Other assumptions a reader might defend move the bar from about 4 to 55 in 100. What settles it is evidence about this deal. The score sheet says the company, headquartered in Miami, “has evaluated numerous sites over the past five years” in and outside Florida and “desires to relocate and expand in Bay for proximity to key customers and the availability of a skilled, trained workforce including those participating in Triumph funded workforce training programs”; much of its equipment “will be relocated from South Florida”. It does not say whether another place made an offer, what the company would have done without the grant, or how many of the 500 jobs will go to people who already live here; this screen counts all of them, and the full test shows the case where 70% do. Two things cut the other way: the building is leased for 30 years and then “will revert to the Airport Authority”, a public asset the screen does not credit, and the wages are counted at the agreement’s $60,000 floor, held flat.
This deal has a real safeguard. If the jobs have not arrived by 2032, the company repays $50,000 for each one missing. That is usual for company deals: 16 of the 17 have a partial-repayment formula. Of the 30 Triumph awards without one, nearly all are training or public-works grants, with all-or-nothing terms or repayment only on breach.
Epomena asks every project the same three questions, from the public record. Every answer links to its source, and anything we had to assume is labelled. The questions work the same way for a grant, a bond, a sewer line or a road.
Open award #338 in the grant database, try other deals in the break-even screen, or pick a county below.
Triumph Gulf Coast · oil-spill grants
Every posted award, what it promised, the deadlines already past and, for company deals, how often the grant must be the deciding reason for the wages to equal it. Pick a county.
County totals as Triumph reports them. They differ slightly from the sum of the 87 awards listed, which come to $804.0M as amended.