AT&T jobs came cheap to downtown Dallas

Steve Brown

AT&T's pending corporate headquarters move from San Antonio to Dallas is being touted as a windfall for the downtown area.

Almost 700 AT&T jobs will be moved to the telecommunications giant's existing buildings on Akard Street.

But landing a big new downtown office headquarters doesn't come cheap.

Local governments, including the city of Dallas and Dallas County, have agreed to as much as $11.5 million in tax breaks and other incentives to get the AT&T Inc. HQ. About $5 million of that will be a cash grant.

That works out to more than $16,000 per job.

At a time when the folks at City Hall and the county are scrambling to hold the line on their budgets, does spending that much money to attract a few hundred office workers make sense?

Actually, it's quite a deal by recent standards.

The state of Illinois and the city of Chicago just threw almost $20 million in freebies at MillerCoors to get the beer maker's 300 to 400 headquarters jobs.

That works out to about $60,000 per employee.

By comparison, AT&T is coming cheap.

And a few years ago when Chicago beat Dallas for the Boeing headquarters relocation, that deal cost the Windy City even more – about $60 million, or almost $120,000 for each worker.