The hits just keep on coming for Montgomery County. Its moribund economy took another cannonball to the gut yesterday. Human BioSciences announced it will be the latest company to move its corporate headquarters out of Montgomery County to a lower-tax jurisdiction in the region. It will move its current HQ from 940 Clopper Road in Gaithersburg to wild, wonderful West Virginia.
The blow is an especially painful one for the County, as the biotech industry is the only bright spot in MoCo’s private sector economy. According to the Maryland Department of Labor, all Human BioSciences employees are being offered positions at the new West Virginia facility, meaning that the taxable revenue of any MoCo residents leaving with the company will also be lost to the County’s coffers.
It says quite a bit about the state of business in Montgomery County and Maryland that a biotech firm would leave. Remember, the County and State both provide financial incentives and tax breaks to the biotech sector, decisions made decades ago by smarter leaders that allowed for the creation of a strong life sciences presence in the I-270 corridor. In recent years, that strength has begun to weaken. It hasn’t been helped when you have the state legislature and Governor Wes Moore wallop firms that are immersed in technology with a new 3% tech tax, as of July 1 this year.
The tech tax is piled on top of the fact that Montgomery County already suffers from the highest tax and fee burden in the region. We’ve seen the results over this century, as companies like Discovery Communications have fled. Only a week ago, Rocket Money announced it was moving its HQ from Silver Spring to Washington, D.C…