FARMER CITY - As Monsanto Co.'s Farmer City plant moves forward with a $100 million expansion designed to triple it capacity, company officials are asking the Blue Ridge school district for tax breaks to help pay for it.

Monsanto became eligible for a variety of tax breaks when local taxing bodies agreed earlier this year to extend the Lincoln/Logan County Enterprise Zone to the Farmer City plant.

DeWitt County has agreed to abate all of the plant's county property taxes for five years, but Monsanto has made no specific request of the school district.

"I know what it takes to run a school, and we're not asking to take away money from what you get today. That wouldn't be right," said Kent Martin, North American corn and sorghum production manager for Monsanto, who previously sat on a school board in northern Illinois. "We want to be a part of this community, but we are asking you to consider some type of assistance for us to get up and running and keep it efficient."

Martin and other Monsanto officials presented the request last week to the Farmer City-based school board, which took no action. The board is expected to schedule a special meeting in which deal with the request.

Being in the zone qualifies Monsanto for property tax abatements on any new construction of 100 percent for five years and then some lesser amount for the subsequent five years.

The actual terms of the abatements can be modified in side agreements worked out with the taxing bodies, according to Monsanto consultant Andrew Hamilton. For example, the county voted for the 10-year plan, but Monsanto agreed it would not take advantage of the second five years.

"You can pretty much come up with anything you want," Hamilton said.

The expansion could be assessed at $25 million, which would generate $400,000 a year in property taxes for the school district, said Joan Steckel, senior tax manager for Monsanto.

Blue Ridge Superintendent Jay Harnack noted some of that increase would be offset by a reduction in state aid, which is adjusted based on a school district's property tax base and enrollment.

Harnack said he was running different scenarios to determine whether granting tax breaks could actually help the district overall.

St. Louis-based Monsanto is expanding plants at Farmer City and Illiopolis. The company is spending more than $610 million to upgrade production plants in Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois.

The Farmer City expansion, which is expected to be finished this summer, is the second-largest of the projects overall and the largest in Illinois.

When complete, the project will have added a 190-foot seed conditioning tower that will have the ability to process more corn per hour than any such tower in the world.

It also will have added a 125-foot storage facility that has 216 different bins and will accommodate 1.2 million bushels of corn, and a 200,000-square-foot storage facility.