NY may cut movie, TV tax breaks. See who cashes in (there’s millions for ‘Billions’) - syracuse.com

Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to scale back tax credits to companies that produce movies and TV shows in New York.

As part of this year’s budget proposal, Cuomo called for a reduction of tax credit amounts and a new threshold on spending for each project to qualify.

Credit amounts would be reduced from 30 percent to 25 percent in New York City and from the current 40 percent to 35 percent in Upstate New York.

To qualify, production companies must spend at least $1 million in New York City, Westchester, Rockland, Suffolk and Nassau counties. They would have to spend at least $250,000 in the rest of the state, including Onondaga County.

The reduction would apply to both production and post-production credits.

The proposed changes to the law would also eliminate “variety shows” from the program in the future.

The state added variety shows, or talk shows, to the program in 2013 in an effort to subsidize “The Tonight Show,” which returned to New York after filming in California. Variety shows already in the program would be grandfathered in, a budget spokesman said.

The state budgets $420 million a year to subsidize movies and TV shows. The budget proposal would extend the program through 2025.

Critics have questioned the need to subsidize one industry so heavily and they dismiss the jobs as temporary. They also question the need to incentivize shows that would have been made in New York anyway.

Empire State Development, which administers the program, has not reported since June on the movies that claimed credits or the amounts they claimed. See the list below.

In the first half of 2019, 64 projects claimed $184.4 million in tax credits.

Onondaga County has had several projects in recent months. Only one has made the state’s list of films that claimed credits in the first half of last year.

The movie “Pottersville,” a Bigfoot movie filmed in Hamilton in 2016, spent about $1.4 million and claimed about $482,000 in tax credits, record show.

It can take years for a film that applies for tax credits to receive them and for the information to be released to the public. Credits are awarded after the production is filmed, post-production is done, a final application is submitted and an ESD audit is performed.

In 2013, the state changed the law to require the project names and tax credit amounts to be open to the public. Secrecy was the subject of a Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard investigation that year.

The following projects claimed tax credits in the first half of 2019, according to Empire State Development.

Read more:

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New York agrees to stop secrecy over tax breaks to movies, TV shows

Contact Michelle Breidenbach: mbreidenbach@syracuse.com | 315-470-3186.

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NY may cut movie, TV tax breaks. See who cashes in (there’s millions for ‘Billions’) - syracuse.com
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