Ohio tax-credit program isn’t broken, so don’t fix it

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. So goes the tired yet decidedly true cliche.

By extension, even the threat of absence can make one value and appreciate an object of affection even more.

And so it goes in the state Senate, where leaders this week wisely saved the Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit program – the object of affection of many developers and community leaders – from the chopping block in that chamber’s $71 billion state budget bill for the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years.

Instead of pulling the plug on the program over the next two years, the tax credits will continue to flow with an eye toward reinventing the program or recycling it into a grants program. We, however, argue that the program need not be reinvented, and the moratorium on the existing program’s demise ought to be made permanent.

The value of the 8-year-old tax credit designed to stimulate renovation, restoration and urban renewal cannot be overstated.

Across Ohio, more than 238 significant development-boosting restorations have been executed using more than $482 million in tax credits.

IMPACT ON YOUNGSTOWN

In Youngstown alone, one can reasonably argue that the tax credit has served as the single most important cog in setting in motion the downtown’s amazing transformation over the past decade. As Vindicator Business Writer Kalea Hall reported Wednesday, the tax credits acted as an impetus to the best and biggest pieces of the downtown’s ongoing renaissance. More than $15 million in credits have been awarded toward such projects as the Erie Terminal, Realty Building, Wick Building and Wells Building apartment complexes and for the transformation of the largely vacant Stambaugh Building into a bustling DoubleTree full-service hotel.

Without those tax credits, some of the valuable projects would have sputtered or run out of gas completely. Needless to say, countless other aging but potentially salvageable structures in downtown Youngstown, Warren and elsewhere in the Mahoning Valley similarly could profit from the tax credit.

To those legislators who see the need to change the tax credit program into a grant program, we simply ask why? Some developers argue that funding from a grant program would not be as secure or as appealing as tax credits. More importantly, why waste time and money tinkering with a proven winner for economic development in the Valley and throughout the state?

To borrow from yet another tired but often truthful cliche, here’s some advice to those who seek to revamp the Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit program: “It ain’t broke, so don’t fix it.”