Ritter Announces Economic Development Plan
This week Governor Bill Ritter introduced an economic development plan to aid small businesses and bolster the renewable energy industry and promote development in bioscience research.
Here are the major elements of the plan:
1. Simplify corporate income taxes by eliminating the complicated multiple factors that businesses must use to calculate their taxes and establishing a simple single-sales factor, as well as streamlining other aspects of corporate income taxes in a revenue-neutral fashion.
2. Cut taxes for 30,400 businesses by raising the Business Personal Property Tax exemption threshold from today’s $2,500 level to $7,000.
3. Establish a $3.5 million a year Bioscience and Life Science Fund. The fund will be administered by the Office of Economic Development to promote the growth and sustainability of the bioscience industry, provide Colorado research institutions with funding to commercialize viable technologies, and provide incentives to help attract new businesses and retain and expand existing companies.
4. Eliminate the so-called “fly-away” sales tax. Colorado is one of only a few states that charges a “fly-away” sales tax on planes manufactured in Colorado even if they are housed in another state. Eliminating the fly-away tax would match current practices in other states.
5. Make it easier for businesses – especially rural small businesses – to qualify for job-creation incentives by modifying Colorado’s Performance-Based Incentives Fund. This will help small, rural businesses grow.
6. Dedicate $3.5 million from the new Clean Energy Fund specifically for economic-development opportunities.
7. Analyze spending of Colorado’s tourism-promotion dollars, and work with industry partners to devise new strategies to better invest and leverage state funds.
Ritter said, “As Governor, I am committed to leading a state government that partners with businesses, listens to their concerns and comes up with ideas to help our businesses get ahead in this increasingly competitive global marketplace.”
In an editorial, the Denver post said “the Ritter plan is so logical — and overdue — that Capitol Republicans were reduced to recycling their dislike of Ritter’s property tax freeze to conceal the embarrassing fact that they failed to adopt the same affordable pro-business policies during the long years when they monopolized power in the statehouse.”