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Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
Senate of Pennsylvania
Session of 2019 - 2020
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | June 11, 2019 04:36 PM |
|---|---|
| From: | Senator Wayne D. Fontana and Sen. Vincent J. Hughes |
| To: | All Senate members |
| Subject: | Uncapping the Film Production Tax Credit |
In the near future, Senator Hughes and I will be introducing legislation that would uncap the Film Production Tax Credit. During the 2018-19 Fiscal Year, the program is funded at $65 million but the department has received 72 applications for a total of $293 million tax credit requests. In 2016, Georgia overtook California as the state with the most featured films produced due to the generous tax breaks for productions the state offers. Last year alone Georgia boasted 455 film and television projects that had an estimated impact of $9.5 billion as well as provided nearly 100,000 jobs. During the same time, Alabama achieved a record year for production with nearly 150 projects. With Alabama and Georgia passing restrictive abortion bans, many large film and TV production companies like Netflix, Disney, WarnerMedia, AMC Networks, NBCUniversal and CBS Corp. have threatened to go elsewhere. Now is the time to offer incentives to this industry to relocate to the commonwealth and the way we can achieve that is by uncapping the tax credit. The Pennsylvania Film Offices have stated that the lack of an increase of funding have stunted the state’s ability to grow within the industry and compete on a national scale. In addition, Pennsylvania has lost out on numerous TV productions and feature films because all of the funding has been exhausted before the ending of the fiscal year. This industry has a proven track record of investing additional funds into the commonwealth’s economy not to mention the thousands of jobs it has created. We hope you will take this opportunity to welcome these film and tv production companies to our state by co-sponsoring this legislation. |
Introduced as SB816