ITEP is a bad bet,
paid for by you.
You’ve probably never heard the name, but you’ve been paying for it your whole life.
What ITEP costs communities.
Between 1996–2024, Louisiana parishes were denied $43 billion in tax revenue from the petrochemical industry. Of that $43 billion, $1.8 billion would have gone toward hospital services. And that’s just one example.
Explore how your parish is directly being impacted by ITEP.
The fight is on the front lines.
Here’s how to join them.
Who got the money instead?
The chemical companies that received the exemptions are not local businesses. Many of them are not based in the United States.
Motiva, one of the largest single recipients in the state, has received nearly $700 million in Louisiana tax exemptions. Motiva is owned by Saudi Aramco. Aramco is one of the most profitable companies on the planet. In 2024 alone, Aramco made $106.2 billion in profit.
The other names on the list of Louisiana’s largest petrochemical beneficiaries are also foreign:
Why are these companies building in Louisiana? Because the risk is too high in many of these countries due to the existing environmental and health protections in place for their own communities. Or if they could, the requirements would be far stricter and costlier than they are here.
The most recent Census Bureau data places Louisiana 48th out of 50 states for median household income. Only Mississippi and West Virginia have lower-paid families. A typical Louisiana household earns about $60,756 a year before taxes. And the parishes giving up the most tax revenue have working families like yours.
That means a state with one of the lowest incomes per household in the nation has been subsidizing some of the richest companies in the world.
Petrochemical companies put all of the risk on the communities we call home, and take all of the reward.
Where did the money go?
If your parish was denied billions in property taxes it was owed by petrochemical companies, that money doesn’t disappear without repercussions. It becomes a significant cost to the community in two ways.
The first way is that public services like schools, hospitals, ambulances, roads, and water don’t receive funding. That’s costly in the context of your daily life.
The second way is that the community has to pay the taxes that the chemical plant did not. The chemical plant pays no property tax for ten years. Yet you pay property taxes every year, as does the small business down the street, and the family across the road. In addition, after the ten year period, many of these companies are able to renew large tax breaks in perpetuity.
Louisiana’s own Legislative Auditor put it in numbers. In a 2022 fiscal-impact report, the Auditor found that the parishes with the highest ITEP-exempt property per resident were charging 48% more in local property tax per resident than the parishes without those exemptions.
Not only did the chemical plant not pay its share, everybody else paid 48% more to keep the parish running.
The chemical plant’s exemption did not eliminate the parish’s bills. It just moved who pays them to you.
What the deal was supposed to do.
You probably heard the argument that while the tax breaks are large, they bring jobs. Without the tax breaks the chemical companies would not invest in Louisiana. Without the investment there would be no jobs. We give them a break, they give us employment, and everybody wins.
A Tulane University study2 revealed that people of color, particularly Black residents, are systemically underrepresented in petrochemical plant jobs, despite living in areas heavily burdened by industrial pollution.
There is also no accountability from these companies or the state if promised jobs never come to fruition, or if they replace jobs with automation or AI.
The real cost of jobs.
The number of jobs promised by petrochemical facilities often does not come to fruition. And if they do, the tax subsidies far outweigh the value of those jobs.
For example, in Ascension Parish, the community was denied $5.1 billion in public revenue for the petrochemical industry. In exchange, the petrochemical industry created 15,295 permanent jobs. Divide $5.1 billion by 15,295. You get $334,842.
That’s what the parish lost in tax revenue to create one job.
Below, you’ll see how many jobs were created per parish against the Superdome’s 70,000+ seat stadium. You’ll also see the cost of each job.
Calcasieu Parish is even worse. Calcasieu’s population is about 216,000, with Lake Charles as its largest city. Calcasieu was denied $9.3 billion in tax revenue and got 6,130 jobs. That comes out to roughly $1.5 million in forgone parish revenue per permanent job.
The industry was not what they said it was.
The argument for ITEP rests on a story about the petrochemical industry being “the engine” of Louisiana’s economy. The data says something else. In 1999, oil, gas, and petrochemicals were 33% of Louisiana’s GDP, a third of the state economy. By 2022, only 14%. That’s less than half of what it was, and the largest decline of any industry in the state over that period.
Over the exact same years, the industries that actually pay most Louisiana paychecks – retail, healthcare, food, education, and hospitality – grew from 23% of the state’s economy to 39%. They did it without massive tax breaks. Petrochemicals got $43 billion in exemptions and shrank. Services got nothing and grew.
Louisiana bet its economy on the one industry that was shrinking, and gave away tax revenue the whole time.
Jobs went the same way. Louisiana oil and gas employed 120,000 people at its peak. Today it’s 75,000. The state was giving the industry tax exemptions while 45,000 jobs disappeared. The tax breaks were not buying jobs. The industry took the money and shed workers anyway.
In the 1960s, oil and gas funded 60% of Louisiana’s general revenue. By the late 1990s, 40%. Today, 4.5%. The state is not running on this industry anymore.
Know what your parish lost in revenue.
49 parishes forewent $43 billion in revenue under ITEP.
Now you know.
This page exists because most of Louisiana does not know any of this has happened – that the state made a bad bet for 30 years and that the jobs they promised never came. $43 billion dollars that belonged to these communities became profit in countries most of us will never visit, while the parishes that paid it watched their schools, fire stations, hospitals, libraries, and roads go without.
The lever to undo it has not been destroyed. The 2016 reform proved it can be pulled. The only question is who pulls it next.
Look up what your parish was denied in revenue. Find Together Louisiana and the frontline groups already in this fight, and let them know there are more of you. Tell whoever represents you in Baton Rouge what you have just read. Hand this page to a neighbor who has never heard the word ITEP and tell them that they have been paying for it too.