A cap on Georgia’s film and television production tax credit looks much different now in the latest version of a bill that’s passed from the House to the Senate.
The annual limit on tax credit transfers, the prospect of which gave the entertainment industry some agita, was actually lowered to 2.3% of the state budget (about $830 million at current levels) in the latest Senate version, from 2.5% ($900 million) in the House. However, the Senate Finance Committee inserted some major exemptions that make the cap almost meaningless.
Mainly, productions shot at the biggest Georgia studios would not count towards the cap. Big, according to the bill, means either $100 million in investment through 2023 to 2027, or a footprint of at least 1.5 million square feet of stage space. So, no worries for productions at Trilith and handful of other large studio complexes home to to Marvel and big franchises. Smaller sound stage owners are not exempt unless they are in rural areas outside the Atlanta metro area. But there’s a lot more room. With the revised bill exempting hundreds of millions worth of eligible tax credits from the cap, there almost isn’t one, as some lawmakers noted at a committee hearing this evening.
The bill can be changed by the Rules Committee — if it gets on the Monday schedule. If it doesn’t, it dies since the legislature is almost at the end of its session. If it does pass through Rules to the Senate floor, it needs to return to the House and so on, and all the back and forth would need to be done by next Thursday. So this bill is much better for film and TV production than the original, but there may be no bill at all, which would be even better yet for the industry.
Committee chair Chuck Hufstetler had not seen the bill until the hearing and “seemed very visibly unhappy about that,” said one person who was there, which may not be a good sign.
A generous tax credit regime has made Georgia a major film and television production hub, one of the three biggest in the world. A stricter auditing process implemented a few years ago made claiming the tax credits a bit more complicated, but they still cost the state hundreds of millions a year. This bill, House Bill 1180, was an attemp to make the annual hit more predictable.
The cap it envisions is only for tax credits that are transferred, or sold, which are the great majority of the total earned. Hollywood studios and other non-Georgia taxpayers can’t use the tax credits so they sell them for a discount in what has become a thriving market. In turn, production contributes significantly to the Georgia economy and jobs.
The bill also wasn’t a flat cap, more of a limit, since it allowed credits over the cap one year to roll into the next. However, as critics have noted, it did create some uncertainty.