Nothing below is written from the applicant's chair. Every section here asks what a city council or a commissioners court is authorized to do, what it has to settle before it can do it, what falls on it once the ink is dry, and what it remains perfectly free to refuse. That is where the decision actually sits, and describing these agreements from anywhere else produces a guide to obtaining something that nobody is obliged to give.
Two provisions carry most local economic development across North Texas and they hand the power to two different bodies. Local Government Code Chapter 380 is the municipal one. Local Government Code Chapter 381 is the county one. Neither is run by a state agency and neither is awarded by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, whose pages describe both without granting anything under either.
What a city is authorized to put on the table
The Comptroller states the municipal power in one sentence: Chapter 380 of the Local Government Code authorizes municipalities to offer loans and grants of city funds or services at little or no cost to promote state and local economic development.
Three things in that sentence decide most of what follows. The resources named are the city's own funds and the city's own services, so what is being negotiated is a municipal asset and a municipal decision from the outset. The forms named are plural, a loan or a grant or the provision of services at reduced cost, which means a council choosing between them has already made a judgment nobody else made for it. And the purpose clause is wide enough to cover a great deal of activity, which hands discretion to the body applying it rather than to the reader interpreting it.
Authorizes is the operative verb, and it is permissive. It creates a power a municipality may use. It does not create a right anyone can call on, it fixes no amount and it prescribes no terms, and a council that declines to negotiate has done nothing unusual under it.
What a county is authorized to put on the table
The county power is described in a sentence that names the mechanism out loud: Chapter 381 allows counties to negotiate directly with developers and businesses to provide incentives encouraging developers to build in their jurisdictions.
Negotiation is not an informal practice that grew up around the statute. It is in the authorizing description itself.
A commissioners court also holds a second instrument that sits in an entirely different code. The Comptroller records that Counties may also develop and administer programs for entering into tax abatement agreements (Chapter 312).
Abatement runs on its own procedure, with its own notices, resolutions and time limit, and it is a separate subject from the agreements described here. What matters at this point is only that a county has two routes and a city's Chapter 380 power is a route of its own.
The consequence is an asymmetry that surprises people looking at one project. A site inside a city and inside a county lies within the reach of two authorities working from two separate authorizations, and each decides for itself. Agreement by one is not agreement by the other, and neither is under any duty to match what the other does.
Why no two of these look alike
Uniformity would require somebody to impose it, and the statutes do the opposite. They authorize a power and then leave the terms to the body exercising it. No page consulted for this article states any cap on the size of an incentive under either provision, and the missing number is not an oversight in the drafting. Discretion is the mechanism, and a ceiling would be a strange thing to legislate for a power that need never be used at all.
Below the statute sits a further layer of local difference. A council or a court works to whatever policy it has adopted for itself, on a schedule of its own, with its own view of what the community needs at that moment, and those views move with an election. Two adjacent municipalities reaching opposite conclusions about identical proposals are both applying the law correctly, because the law asked each of them for a judgment rather than for a calculation.
Which is why a deal signed one town over supports no expectation whatever. It records what one body decided about one project at one moment. It is neither a rate nor a precedent binding anybody, and it says nothing about what the next body will do.
What lands on the body that signed
The reporting duty runs in a direction most coverage gets backward. It falls on the local government, not on the business, and it arrives after the decision rather than before it. Under Local Government Code Chapters 380 and 381, and under Tax Code Chapter 312 where the instrument is an abatement, the signing city or the signing county files a record of what it agreed to into a searchable Comptroller database.
HB 2404 put a clock on that filing and Government Code Section 403.0246(c) is the provision. The trigger is any agreement entered into, amended or renewed after January 1, 2022, and the window runs to 14 days. A local government that fails to comply may be subject to a civil penalty of $1,000. That figure is worth reading for what it is, a duty owed by a government to a state agency about a decision already taken, and not a review of the decision by anybody.
One boundary limits what the database can settle. The duty reaches agreements from 2022 onward, so the collection is no complete history of what North Texas cities and counties have signed, and an absence of rows for an older deal proves nothing about whether it exists. No count of agreements across the metroplex is offered here for that reason, among others.
The offices that are not parties to any of it
The Comptroller of Public Accounts compiles and publishes and decides nothing. No Comptroller page consulted for this article describes any route by which a business applies to the state for an incentive under either provision. That is an absence of evidence rather than a stated prohibition, and it should be read as exactly that much, but nothing in the record read here points at a state counter, and both authorizing sentences point at a local one.
Even the state program most often mentioned in the same breath routes through the local body. The Texas Enterprise Zone Program is a state sales and use tax refund program, and a company cannot put itself forward for it. A nomination has to come from the community, which puts the application forward for the company, and the rounds close on the first business day of March, June, September and December. The local decision is the door in that case too.
Two large cities in the region publish written incentive policies of their own. Neither document could be opened in the research behind this page, so no clause, threshold or program name from either appears anywhere on this site, and the minimum investment and average wage figures that circulate for one of them were never read on a municipal page. Publishing a policy is also a separate act from reporting an executed agreement, and a government doing the second has not necessarily done the first.
One citation to get right before quoting anyone
Abatement belongs to the Tax Code, where the Comptroller names Chapter 312 the Property Tax Abatement Act. At least one local incentives page in this region, published jointly by a city and a chamber of commerce, files that same authority under the Local Government Code instead. The Comptroller's placement is the correct one and the other is a citation error on a secondary page rather than a second view of the question.
From the granting side the mistake is easy to see and easy to make, because the two provisions that authorize agreements really are in the Local Government Code and the one that authorizes abatement is not. It matters to anybody tracing an authority back, since a reader who follows the wrong citation arrives in the wrong code and finds nothing, then concludes the power was invented rather than miscited.
What the view from this side comes to
Read from the chair where the decision is taken, an incentive is not a program with a queue and a form. It is an instrument two parties negotiate, that one of them is free to walk away from, that binds nobody until a body votes, and that comes with a reporting duty attached to the government rather than to the company across the table. A business planning its finances around an unsigned agreement is planning around a decision somebody else has not yet made, and may never make.
The bodies holding that pen are the same city and county governments a company already dealt with when it put its formation, its trading name and its tax accounts on record, and the statutory machinery behind the rest of this material, including the abatement procedure only touched on above, is laid out across the guide to what is on the public record here and what is not. Every other subject this publication covers is listed on the page these sections branch from.