A bill that would offer film companies millions of dollars in tax credits to shoot in Virginia has rolled through the House of Delegates, advancing a key plank of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s economic package.
The proposal aims to help the Old Dominion compete with other states in attracting large-scale film productions.
“It will make us competitive again,” said Terry Stroud, chairman of the Virginia Production Alliance, which supports the state’s film industry.
Virginia recently has been home to several major film and TV productions, including “The New World” and HBO’s “John Adams” miniseries. But officials say the state’s potential as a cinematic backdrop is woefully unrealized.
The loss of “Secretariat,” a movie based on the legendary Virginia-bred racehorse — filmed in Kentucky — is widely seen as a lost opportunity.
“I think ‘Secretariat’ is probably something that caught everybody’s attention, in other states as well as Virginia,” Stroud said. “There’s been a movie that really should have been shot in its native state, so to speak, and it goes somewhere else because of incentives. And that’s usually the flash point that makes everybody go, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t let this happen anymore.’ ”
The bill, sponsored by Del. Ben Cline, R-Amherst, would allow Virginia to offer $5 million in tax credits every two years, a figure that would be restricted to $2.5 million until mid-2012.
It is substantially pared back from the original legislation — which would have given movie producers tax credits of as much $10 million per biennium.
A company must have expenses of at least $250,000 to qualify for the tax credits, which would be equal 15 percent of those costs, or 20 percent “if the production is filmed in an economically distressed area of the commonwealth,” according to the text of the legislation.
The measure is one of several new spending items proposed by the Republican governor, who is pushing a $50 million economic development package with a much larger series of cuts.
A similar bill has passed the Senate.
