MCCOOK, NEB. ? In towns like this one, small and far off the beaten path, attracting new jobs is a rarity, and losing the existing ones a community tragedy.

So it was a big deal five years ago when a multinational corporation, Valmont Industries Inc., promised to create at least 200 new jobs in exchange for a package of state and local grants and tax breaks.

It was seen as a win all around in this town of 8,500: residents would get jobs; stores and restaurants, more patrons; and families, the security of knowing that their children might have a place to earn a living in their hometown.

But the decision to lure Valmont which produces irrigation equipment in McCook was about more than keeping families together. It was a business deal that communities of all sizes make regularly in hopes of leveraging public dollars into jobs, opportunity and prosperity for their residents.

As the deadline neared last fall, Valmont was at least 40 jobs short of its goal, making it contractually obligated to repay a $1 million loan with interest that otherwise would have become a grant.

Company officials, however, appealed for a waiver, arguing that they had spent millions more than planned on infrastructure and paid higher wages than initially projected.

“We’re not a company that abuses economic incentives and moves for an extra dollar,” said Terry McClain, Valmont’s senior vice president and chief financial officer. “Where you get criticism is from people who are not educated (about projects) and assume that business is somehow (cheating) the public out of something.”

State economic development leaders and local business officials sided with the company, trying to pressure a reluctant city council to do the same.

But the town was intent on making the company live up to its end of the bargain.

Mayor Linda Taylor, the owner of a local video store, says she understands the ups and downs of business and is grateful Valmont came to town. But she said the town needed the 40 additional jobs that had been promised. She was among a 3-2 majority on the city council that rejected the waiver but allowed Valmont an additional five years to add the new jobs.

Linda Taylor, mayor of McCook, Neb., stands outside the town's Valmont Industries plant. When the company did not keep its promise to create 200 local jobs, the town refused to give the company a waiver on a loan deal.

“A deal’s a deal,” Taylor declared.

Public interest advocates contend McCook did something that few in the cutthroat world of economic development are willing to do: stand up to big business at its own peril.

“The small towns don’t want to make anybody mad,” said Steve Virgil, an attorney for Nebraska Appleseed. “They’re so isolated and so dependent on one large corporation for jobs that they don’t want to go head to head with a corporation because the corporation would leave.”

Across the country economic incentives are controversial and particularly disdained by advocates for the poor, who contend that tax breaks and grants are nothing but corporate welfare.