The pending relocation of Blue Sky Studios Inc. from White Plains to Greenwich, Conn., has bigger implications for the Golden Apple”™s moviemaking business than just one studio”™s move.
Iris Stevens, director of Westchester County”™s film office, said New York has the lowest tax-break incentives for the industry north of the Mason-Dixon line, at 10 percent.
The digital animation production company and wholly owned subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment is relocating from Westchester One at 44 South Broadway in White Plains to the Greenwich American Center in Greenwich, Conn., where the company will occupy a single floor of about 105,000 square feet.
“The picture is very grim for 2008 unless we get this incentive package through,” Stevens said of a nascent legislative push to have New York match Connecticut”™s film industry incentives. “This is a very, very urgent matter. When you are running the risk of chipping away at a $5 billion dollar industry in the southern part of the state, you”™d better sit up and pay attention. We should be leading in incentives not falling so far behind.”
Bill Ryan, chairman of the Westchester County Board of Legislators, said the film and television industry”™s economic benefit to the state is eroded by its failure to keep pace with the incentive programs in neighboring states.
Ryan said within the last couple of years, other states in the Northeast have offered industry incentives. He said although New York has an incentive program “it hasn”™t kept pace at all with neighboring states and the result has been a tremendous shift in film and TV action out of New York and into states like Connecticut and Massachusetts.”
“We have talked to Blue Sky over the years, but could not offer anything of substance as the company is exempt from payment of sales taxes per an existing New York state program,” said Teri Waivada, executive director of the Westchester Industrial Development Agency. “Another issue is that we provide benefits on the retention and creation of jobs and Blue Sky’s jobs ebb and grow based on their production activity.”
Connecticut”™s allure for Blue Sky was abetted by a digital animation tax credit, which applies to companies that maintain a studio within the state and have at least 200 employees. It can amount to a 30 percent credit. A second major incentive is a one-time 20 percent tax credit associated with the construction of a new facility. Blue Sky will be building out a single floor in the building in Greenwich.
“I think Connecticut has been aggressively courting all kinds of businesses in this industry over the last two or three years,” said Rich Harris, spokesman for Conn. Gov. M. Jodi Rell. “The state has really beefed up its incentives for film and TV production. There has been a little boom in the number of films and TV shows that are being shot in Connecticut. But what we were seeing up until recently was production companies that would come in, make a TV show or film and then go back to New York or L.A., or wherever, to finish their shows. We”™d love to keep that business here in Connecticut.”
