Officials at Anheuser-Busch’s St. Louis brewery are seeking to persuade the head office to invest $75 million in the Soulard brewery so it can make new products and retain jobs.

The St. Louis Board of Aldermen is considering a bill to issue $75 million in bonds that would facilitate a personal property tax break on the new equipment, which brewery officials say will help it persuade corporate parent A-B InBev to put that new equipment in St. Louis.

“Our goal is to keep the St. Louis brewery competitive and also to retain the 700 manufacturing jobs, 600 of those are union jobs,” Lance Warren, an Anheuser-Busch director of business tax and incentives told an aldermanic committee last week. “Currently, we’re under pressure from other competitors: wine, spirits that type of thing, other products. What our response to that is, we’re coming out with new products, new packaging, new things to enter into the market to better compete.”

The bill, if approved, would grant five years of 75 percent personal property tax abatement on the new equipment. That represents a savings to the brewery of about $65,000, an amount that would be far outweighed by the continued payment of earnings taxes by brewery manufacturing employees, said Matt Bauer, a financial analyst with the city’s economic development arm, the St. Louis Development Corp.