Today, the Mobile City Council is set to approve a project agreement with Airbus for their new facility and third final assembly line. As part of that agreement, the city is expected to Airbus a $10 million cash incentive, to be used for construction costs as well as workforce recruiting and development efforts.

The Mobile County Commission was scheduled to approve a similar agreement yesterday, with an additional $10 million incentive, but pushed the vote until next month, amid concerns from one of the commissioners about ensuring that Mobile County residents would be prioritized in the job recruitment and training process. It’s a concern shared by at least one member of the city council.

“That ‘good-faith effort’ has been written for a long time, but it doesn’t have enough teeth in it,” Councilmember William Carroll said May 16 during the council’s pre-conference meeting. Later that day, however, Carroll told reporters that he was supportive of the incentive.

The investment by Airbus will bring an additional 1,000 jobs to Mobile. David Rodgers, vice president of workforce development with the Mobile Chamber, told the county commission that, when the development is complete, Mobile will be the fourth-largest city for commercial aviation manufacturing in the world, behind only Toulouse, France (where Airbus is headquartered), Hamburg, Germany and Seattle, Wash.

Five million of the $20 million that the governments are considering is set aside for workforce training of Mobile County residents. That money is supposed to be spent in partnership with schools in Mobile County, local community colleges, the University of South Alabama and Mobile County Public School System, according to attorney Britton Bonner, with Adams and Reese, the firm that assisted the city in preparing the city’s project agreement.