Missouri is offering a truce to Kansas in their ongoing battle to lure businesses across the state line with lucrative tax breaks.

Gov. Jay Nixon was to sign legislation Tuesday in Kansas City that would prohibit Missouri from offering incentives to businesses that relocate from one of four Kansas counties to any of four Missouri counties in the Kansas City area.

But the truce can take effect only if Kansas enacts a similar measure, which it has not yet done.

The two states have combined to approve hundreds of millions of dollars of tax breaks in recent years for businesses to locate in the Kansas City area. Sometimes, those businesses have moved only a few miles across the state line without much of a net gain in the workforce.