Indiana has given businesses promising to create jobs more than $3.2 million in tax breaks since the beginning of 2005 – possibly a lot more. But it won’t tell the public paying for the tax breaks what those jobs will pay.

Knowing the value of jobs that taxpayers are subsidizing might seem essential to evaluating the subsidies’ benefit, said Stephen Key of the Hoosier State Press Association. But the Indiana Economic Development Corp. says such information amounts to a trade secret.

“… Competing companies and adverse parties could use this information to the detriment of the company,” Shawn Peterson, IEDC’s vice president and general counsel, said last week in an e-mail.

But economic development agencies for Fort Wayne, Ohio and Michigan routinely disclose wage information for jobs subsidized by taxpayer dollars.

“We give that out all the time,” said Robert Grevey, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Development.

For example, the 50 employees expected to be hired in the next two years by Winston Products LLC in Parma, Ohio, will make on average $20 an hour plus $2.50 in benefits, according to documents from the department of development.

And in Fort Wayne, when Superior Essex Corp. creates 15 jobs by next year, each will pay between $30,000 and $40,000 a year, Elissa McGauley of the city’s economic development office said in October.

It was a different story when the IEDC announced in late November that it will provide $490,000 in benefits to Fort Wayne’s Craftline Graphics Inc. The IEDC said Craftline would invest $1.5 million and add 75 jobs by 2012, but neither the corporation nor Craftline would say how much the new employees could expect to make.

Craftline isn’t the only company to decline to disclose wage information when it gets state benefits. When Maxim Medical Services announced last month that it was moving to Fort Wayne from LaOtto and creating 51 jobs, it and the IEDC didn’t provide wage information.

But companies often give the information voluntarily. When Canadian grill maker Onward Manufacturing Co. Ltd. announced in October that it had bought a Huntington plant, company officials said they would hire 300 workers and start them at $10 an hour.

IEDC spokeswoman Blair West said her agency tries to get companies to voluntarily disclose wages because it helps IEDC illustrate the benefits new jobs bring.

One businessman who hasn’t received any IEDC benefits said he doesn’t see any business reason to keep wages secret. When Wally Comer and two others bought a Garrett manufactured-housing plant in August, Comer promptly said what he’d pay: $12.60 an hour base and bonuses that would bring average pay to $19 to $20 an hour.

“I think as long as you pay a decent wage – or in our case, a very good wage – it creates competition and keeps everybody honest,” said Comer, who also is plant manager at Adventure Homes LLC.

And Key, general counsel for the Hoosier State Press Association, disputes that salary information is a trade secret in Indiana. Key said he couldn’t find anything in the law allowing IEDC to keep secret wage data listed in the “final offer of public financial resources” the agency makes to a company.

“If the public can’t know what the terms of the agreement are,” Key said, “how can it know what it’s getting for its money?”

Peterson, of the economic development corporation, didn’t respond to calls and e-mails asking him to respond to Key’s review of the law.

If Indiana law does require that wages of jobs that get taxpayer benefits be kept secret, a prominent national advocate for open government questioned its wisdom.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she could understand not requiring companies to disclose the exact pay for each job they plan to create. That would tie an employer’s hands several ways, she said.

“But I see no reason, just as a matter of public policy, why they can’t give you a range,” Dalglish said.

Instead of a range, economic development agencies often provide average wages of jobs to be created.

For example, the Michigan Economic Growth Authority Board on Nov. 17 released a memo saying that Akebono Brake Industries Co. Ltd. was asking for tax credits in exchange for creating 118 jobs at its Farmington Hills engineering center paying on average $1,523 a week.

“I make these (memos) available every month to reporters upon request or in response to standing requests for background on projects in their region,” Bridget Beckman, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Economic Development Corp., said in an e-mail.

She said, however, that Michigan law keeps secret the amount of tax benefits companies end up claiming, calling it confidential tax data.

mschladen@jg.net