Texas Sales Tax Sourcing Fight Is More Reason to Drop Incentives

The Texas Comptroller’s new sales tax sourcing rules have exposed the fragile economics behind warehouse development deals, forcing cities to reckon with whether subsidizing fulfillment centers was ever good policy. The city of Coppell, joined by other Texas municipalities, is suing the comptroller over rule changes that it argues could exclude fulfillment centers and online sales from being taxed in its jurisdiction.

The revised Rule 3.334 clarifies that unless a location is staffed and actively engaged in receiving orders, not just fulfilling them, it doesn’t qualify as a place of business for local tax purposes. In other words: No orders from customers? No sales tax revenue.

Coppell’s lawsuit, regardless of its outcome, shows that local governments should stop chasing revenue through sales tax shell games. Texas cities should prioritize investments that can provide lasting economic value instead of luring multinational corporations with sales tax incentives.

For years, municipalities have handed out generous tax incentives under the state’s Chapter 380 programs—local incentive packages that promised infrastructure upgrades or direct rebates in exchange for the projected tax revenue uptick.

Now, the decades-old system that has allowed cities to rake in sales tax revenue from fulfillment centers is at stake. The new sourcing rules raise the question of whether these deals were ever about real economic development or just a game of sales tax arbitrage.

For cities such as Coppell, the deal was relatively simple—land a fulfillment center, have it deemed a place of business for sales tax purposes, and capture revenue from “sales” every time an online order was routed through it.

Never mind that no one in the warehouse took the order or interfaced with a customer. Under Texas’ old interpretation of sales tax sourcing, there was enough to justify funneling revenue back to the fulfillment center’s city.

But sales tax sourcing magic, not job creation or community development, undergirded these Chapter 380 deals. In the race to the bottom to attract facilities, municipalities weren’t just competing with each other; they were undercutting their own long-term stability by pegging their budgets to private corporations’ backend logistics operations and state-level politics.

The case for subsidizing fulfillment centers was always built on relatively shaky ground. These facilities are often highly automated, a trend poised to accelerate in the coming years.

They also rely on temporary or low-wage labor, so they can vanish almost as quickly as they arrive if another city offers a sweeter deal. In many cases, the “economic development” may have amounted to little more than a giant concrete box with a loading dock, a few part-time or gig worker jobs, and a lot of additional traffic.

Municipalities should invest in the kind of growth that sticks: people, skills, and place-based industries.

Photographer: Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Cities could justify these deals because they could quantify the sales tax that would flow through the facility—not because the jobs were great or had a positive economic impact on the local community. When that flow becomes a trickle, only a tax-subsidized logistics hub with minimal community benefits remains.

The irony is that many cities likely banked on these facilities because they weren’t labor-intensive. That made them easier to land politically—no union issues, housing crunch, pressure on local schools, or any of the usual problems that can emerge when growth involves people instead of just pallets. But that also makes the facilities easier to automate, relocate, or render superfluous.

The revised rule didn’t really destroy economic value per se; it just revealed that much of what municipalities labeled development or progress may have been built on definitional ambiguities and order routing software. With that façade crumbling, Texas and other warehouse-saturated states—such as Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania—have a chance to rethink what economic development really means.

Rather than cutting deals with multinational logistics firms and e-commerce platforms, municipalities and states should refocus on investments that build on local capacity and comparative advantages. That means workforce development in regionally appropriate sectors, technical training, support for local manufacturers, and incentives that are tied to real economic outcomes—with clawbacks when they fall short—not just the movement of goods.

In Texas specifically, Chapter 380 agreements could be reimagined to reward businesses that create good jobs, build infrastructure, or plug into regional supply chains rather than hastily constructed distribution centers. Chasing fulfillment centers was always less about growth and more about gaming the rules.

Now that the rules have changed, so should the strategy. Municipalities should invest in the kind of growth that sticks: people, skills, and place-based industries.

Cities in Texas and elsewhere need to ask: Are we building local economies or renting them by the square foot? If your local budget is imperiled when the definition of “received” changes in the state tax code, you haven’t built a durable economy—you’ve built a dependent one.

The case is City of Coppell v. Hancock, Tex. App., 15th Dist., No. 15-25-00022-CV, briefs filed 11/26/25.

Andrew Leahey is an assistant professor of law at Drexel Kline School of Law, where he teaches classes on tax, technology, and regulation. Follow him on Mastodon at @andrew@esq.social

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