The film tax credit program, which had been pushed by Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik and film industry executives, has been abandoned by Arizona lawmaker who rejected corporate welfare. Arizona Free Enterprise Club Executive Director Scot Mussi told the Yellow Sheet that the film industry’s decision to abandon S1242 (multimedia production; tax incentives) is a big win for Arizona taxpayers.
“It’s a recognition that corporate welfare won’t sell at the Legislature,” Mussi told the Yellow Sheet.
Kozachik, whose bother is a Hollywood filmmaker, made the film tax credit and gun control his missions this election year.
The credit would have steered millions of taxpayer dollars back to Hollywood. It had been sold by Kozachik and others as “jobs bill.”Tucson, with a rich history of filmmaking, is now the sixth poorest region in the country. City fathers have rejected high-paying permanent jobs supplied by the mining and defense industries.
The FEC has been at the forefront of the battle to kill the proposal and had recently launched a campaign to explore the supposed ills of “corporate welfare.” Mussi said that campaign was going to include radio and newspaper ads, mailers to voters and aggressive lobbying, but those plans will now be re-evaluated.
According to the Yellow Sheet, when the bill failed to even get out of committee, they attempted to make it a striker bill in the House, but the bill faced “strident opposition.” The lobbyist said it was time to give up, “There was a Broadway musical years ago called ‘Promises, Promises,’ and there’s a song in there, and the quote is, ‘Knowing when to leave is the smartest thing that anyone can learn,’” Aarons told the Yellow Sheet.
The program being proposed was designed to address the shortcomings in the original film tax credit law which was enacted in 2005 and ended in 2010. It cost the state roughly $10 million, including $2 million in losses in 2010, when the state issued $2.6 million in credits but only took in $600,000 in revenue.
Last month, Mussi told Arizona senators that a similar Michigan program that was implemented brought little revenue to the state. He said, “It’s another dollar not spent on other priorities” such as education.