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The exodus of companies leaving New Jersey has been a relative trickle, but Exxon may have inadvertently opened the floodgates, as the oil giant announced Thursday that it will be moving its legal headquarters to Houston, Texas, pending likely approval at a stockholder meeting in May. It would be the first time the oil giant’s headquarters were based outside the Tri-State area since John D. Rockefeller ran Standard Oil in 1882. That’s great news for Houston, where oil is still king, but in New Jersey, the move means a loss of thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue, at the very least. Can New Jersey afford or recover from the potential financial ruin, and what does the ExxonMobil exodus mean on the other side of the Hudson River?
John Boyd is the principal of consultation company The Boyd Company, which advises companies when they are looking for places to relocate. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning to discuss why it’s bad news when large corporations think they can find greener pastures far away from the Garden State.
Boyd laid out for Curtis and Larry the reasons why New Jersey puts itself in a hole it can’t easily fill in when companies pull up stakes and head elsewhere: “It puts a spotlight on the consequences of bad policy. When a company like Exxon relocates out of New Jersey, you’re talking about hundreds of high-paying jobs leaving the state, tens of billions of dollars in taxable income [and] corporate profits over the next twenty or thirty years, and it becomes a real location branding challenge for these states. A major factor also with the Exxon deal was the pro-business court system that Texas has. That’s an advantage that they’ve really been promoting in addition it their favorable tax structures.”
Boyd added that New York’s business and political leaders should take note, as the Big Apple is already on an even worse course: “There’s a real sense now among many of our clients and amongst many of the influential business leaders that I talk to almost every day that New York City is being attacked from within, and this latest money grab [is] unprecedented, okay. This will affect virtually any New Yorker with equity in a home.”
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