An update to my post from last week:
A public forum on a tax credit for assembling land in “distressed areas” will be August 30, not August 18. The forum will start at 6 p.m., most likely at Vashon High School, says Jeanette Mott Oxford, the state representative who is organizing the forum with alderwomen April Ford-Griffin and Marlene Davis.
The forum will come toward the end of a special legislative session that starts Monday.
The alderwomen, Mott Oxford and Representative Jamilah Nasheed are trying to prep the regional delegation for discussion about north St. Louis and the tax credit with a tour of properties owned by developer Paul McKee, Jr., Thursday morning.
Originally crafted by McKee and his advisers, the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit and about a dozen other provisions of House Bill 327, the economic development bill that Governor Matt Blunt vetoed, will go the House Job Creation and Economic Development Committee Tuesday and come up for a full floor vote Thursday. That’s according to the agenda that House Speaker Rod Jetton laid out for House members in a memo today. The Senate will take up the bill the following week, Jetton says.
Jetton forwarded House members a long list of things left out of the revised HB 327, everything from the Neighborhood Assistance Program to a sales tax exemption on aviation fuel, in order to trim the cost to taxpayers by $70 million.
The new cost is estimated at $51 million a year in the first two years and rises to $70 million thereafter.
Jetton writes, “As you can see we had to remove many programs to make this a bill that the Governor can sign. I am not happy about that but our state needs an economic development bill and so we have to live with this compromise.”
