[CPEO-BIF] New York subsidies

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Builders clean up in brownfield program
Luxury project heads list of state tax breaks from $362M effort

By BRIAN NEARING
Albany Times-Union (NY)
February 5, 2010

ALBANY -- A state program intended to clean and rebuild on polluted land 
has cost taxpayers more than $362 million during the past two years, 
with the vast majority of the money going to subsidize developers' 
buildings rather than cleanups.

For every dollar handed out in state tax credits for the brownfield 
cleanup program, about 90 cents supported building costs, according to a 
Times Union analysis of annual 2008 and 2009 reports issued by the state 
Department of Taxation and Finance. The remaining dime went to cover 
cleanups.

The reports include only projects that claimed tax breaks prior to June 
2008, when the state Legislature reformed rules to limit payouts out of 
concerns that the five-year-old program was a windfall for developers 
that fostered too few cleanups -- particularly in poor neighborhoods.

While 52 projects statewide got tax breaks, the lion's share of savings 
went to just a handful of big-ticket developments, with 10 projects 
accounting for 80 percent of the total.


...

For the entire article, see
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=897292

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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