“I am elated!” said Local 476’s Mark Hogan, exulting over the virtually unanimous state legislature’s passage of the 30% filmmakers’ tax incentives Thursday, and how it will reignite Illinois’ film production industry.
Passage of Senate bill #1981 was so overwhelmingly fast that the IPA legislative committee and other filmmakers who went to Springfield are still pinching themselves to make sure it really happened.
But that it did! In the space of just a few hours, the House voted 108-2 and the Senate, 52-0 to approve the bill and making it veto proof.
The bill wended its way swiftly through the legislature. The House read it into the record at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, shot it over to the Senate committee where it was passed without opposition, and onto the Senate floor, where the vote took place at 2:45 p.m.
The tax incentives were increased from the 20% of the past three years to a competitively healthy 30%.
Equally gratifying was the elimination of the burdensome one-year-at-a time Sunset Clause, which now clears the way for Illinois filmmaking to go forward without having to stop every Dec. 31 and wait for annual January renewal.
With the help of John Coli, president of the Teamsters Joint Council 25, “We were able to convince the legislature that the incentives were not only good for the film industry, but for the entire state by creating new good-paying jobs,” Hogan said.
Last year, the incentive created 26,500 jobs and pumped around $155 million directly into the Illinois economy. “We are looking forward to tripling that number in the next several years,” he added.
Now the bill awaits the signature of Gov. Blagojevich, a consistent supporter of the tax credit and the state film industry, before the end of the year.
