Today’s What’s Working starts with a dive into incentives and the filmmaking industry in Colorado by Sun arts and culture reporter Parker Yamasaki.
Sheila Traister got her start acting in commercials in the late 1980s when, she said, Colorado was in the middle of a filmmaking boom. But by the late 1990s the local work started to dry up, and Traister started traveling more.
“For somebody like me, the majority of my work takes place out of state now,” Traister said. “So I will spend anywhere from 20% to 40% of what I make on a job to do the job.”
Last week Gov. Jared Polis signed House Bill 1358, which expands a tax incentive credit for film, TV and commercial productions that want to shoot in Colorado. The bill allocates $5 million per year over the next four years to spend on refundable tax credits for productions filming in Colorado.
A 2022 legislative task force study reported that since Colorado began offering film incentives in 2012 (which, before last year, were distributed as cash rebates), the state spent $30 million over the decade, or roughly $3 million annually. The Colorado Office of Film, TV and Media reported $182.8 million in actual and predicted production spending and 6,023 cast and crew hires during that time.
The assumption of the incentive is that film productions can be a huge financial boon for local businesses.
In 2022, New Mexico reported a 660% increase in direct spending from the film and television industry in their rural regions — up to nearly $50 million from $6.5 million in 2021. The state has since increased its tax incentive bump to 10% from 5% for productions that film outside of the Santa Fe-Albuquerque corridor.
Colorado is hoping to see similar gains, with additional incentives for productions that use local infrastructure, and film in rural regions or marginalized urban areas.
But bringing in more film productions can also benefit Colorado in a qualitative way, by creating clearer professional pathways for creatives who live, and hope to work, in the state.
“It’s harder to gain experience when you don’t have opportunities to mingle with people at a higher level than you are professionally, or be on their crew or shadow them,” said Micah Baird, an independent filmmaker based in Fort Collins.
“It’s the same thing even for people a level or two above me,” he said. “Like, there’s not a lot of people who start excelling here —they move to California or are constantly traveling to where there is another level of opportunity, and where the whole infrastructure is there already.”
So what does House Bill 1358 do?
In short, the bill lengthens the amount of time that refundable tax credits will be available — to four years from one — and removes a condition that states the credit was only available when state revenues exceed state spending by at least $50 million.
The extension of the credit helps in three major ways. First, it allows film production companies to plan out projects years in advance, which is common practice for bigger productions.
“We can’t just say here’s a ‘maybe’ for projects that want to come here. Productions shy away from Colorado because of that reason,” said Bryant Preston, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Local 7.
The multi-year guarantee will also help lure in episodic productions like TV shows, which distribute economic impact over multiple years, and won’t gobble up the $5 million credit in one fell swoop.
Finally, it creates a runway to build up Colorado’s film industry infrastructure. Some of that infrastructure is physical, like sound stages. But some of it is professional, like internships and shadowing opportunities.
“All the money and resources invested into state education, just to have those students graduate and leave the state. Or they leave right after high school because they know there are no internships of real consequence to be had in Colorado,” said Traister, who created an acting department at the Colorado Film School 25 years ago.
Baird, the filmmaker in Fort Collins, feels rooted in Colorado. “I think we just need infrastructure in general, like a path for people, and students, that gives them the opportunity to stay and work.”
38 states have incentives
The way that film locations are chosen has changed drastically over the past two decades.
“It used to be that if they needed the mountains like we have, films came here. If they needed the beach, they went to Florida or California. If they needed skyscrapers, they’d go to New York City. If they wanted plains and plateaus, they’d go to the Midwest,” Traister said.
But since roughly 2002, when Louisiana became the first state to aggressively ramp up its film tax incentive program, locations have been almost entirely incentive-driven. For example, as the New York Times quipped, when Michigan unwound its once-robust film incentives, it lost out on the filming of “Detroit,” which ended up being filmed in Boston.
Thirty-eight states now have allocated tax incentives for film productions; five states introduced those incentives in the past two years, and two states —Michigan and Wisconsin — are working to reinstate their abandoned programs.
The sign read “Welcome to Roswell, New Mexico.” But the real location was Las Vegas, N.M., where a film crew in the Spring of 2021 had turned the plaza neighborhood into the alien-spotting city featured in the Roswell TV series. Production crews paid attention to every detail, including fictional newspapers with a story of destroyed beehives. (Tamara Chuang, The Colorado Sun)
Georgia’s $5 billion in incentives
And then there’s Georgia.
Since Georgia started its film tax incentive program in 2005, the state has doled out nearly $5 billion in incentives. Those investments have proven fruitful, but they’ve also put a target on Atlanta’s back.
“I kept seeing films that said they were based in Colorado that weren’t. They had our mountain ranges wrong, and at the end of it, was that damn Georgia peach,” said Rep. Leslie Herod, one of the bill’s sponsors, at the bill’s signing event. “And if you guys have heard me speak about film, you know how much I can’t stand that peach. Because quite frankly it should be our beautiful Rockies.”
For what it’s worth, the Georgia film commission offers an additional 10% credit on the 20% base tax credit if films embed that ubiquitous peach logo in their end credits.
But Georgia’s program, successful as it has been, might be a little too pie-in-the-sky for Colorado’s current film industry. Even our neighbor New Mexico’s incentives, which will increase from $110 million in payouts to $160 million over the next four years, are hard to compete with at this time.
Preston said Colorado should be competing with our other neighbors —Utah, Wyoming and Oklahoma. (Two sources brought up the fact that the hit show “Yellowstone,” supposedly based on a ranch in Montana, was shot in Utah.)
Incentives success and skepticism
To be clear, film tax incentives have not proven to be cure-alls for ailing economies. Some states, like California, Pennsylvania and Virginia, have reported that their programs either didn’t make a huge difference for productions’ decisions to shoot there (California) or had a negligible impact compared to other industry-specific incentives.
But those states have kept their film tax incentives propped up one way or another, acknowledging that even if the return on investment wasn’t quite as stunning as they’d hoped — Pennsylvania reported a 13.1 cent return for each tax credit dollar spent —they all still created a net positive.
A 2023 audit of Georgia’s film tax credit addressed skepticism about whether the state was really seeing a substantial return on investment when comparing tax dollars in versus tax dollars out, but did conclude that the tax credit “induces substantial economic activity.”
“When you incentivize the film industry, that impact reaches just about every business you could possibly think of,” Traister said. “If you’ve got a three-week film shoot or a six-month TV series, those people are living here. They’re going to our theaters now, our museums, our restaurants, our zoos, our city parks. They’re gonna go to Garden of the Gods and Aspen and Snowmass, and it just goes on and on and on.”
Got an arts or culture-related story tip for Parker? Email her at parker@coloradosun.com
Gov. Polis, the entrepreneur
Long before Jared Polis became Colorado’s governor, he was an entrepreneur, having founded an online greeting card site, an ecommerce florist and other ventures in the 1990s. He also was a cofounder of Techstars, the business accelerator for tech startups that launched in Boulder more than 17 years ago and ended its era in the city Thursday.
Polis, who’s had a very busy few weeks signing and vetoing bills from the recent legislative session, still made time to speak at the last Techstars Boulder Demo Day. And while he was at it, he gave several nods to entrepreneurship in Colorado, like this:
“There’s so much more support for starting a company and getting the help and support you need here today in Colorado,” he said. “And we also are relatively unique in the country. I will be governor for two more years and when I’m done being governor, Colorado will have had 16 years of an entrepreneur as our chief executive officer.”
He was talking about himself has his two-term predecessor, Sen. John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper, before he became Denver’s mayor and then governor, opened Denver’s first craft brewery, the Wynkoop, which helped revitalize the city’s Lower Downtown neighborhood.
During his 5-minute speech to the Techstars audience, Polis pointed to one particular law he helped pass. Senate Bill 134 prohibits home owner associations from banning home-based businesses. While this hasn’t been a big issue, companies skirting HOA rules could be out of compliance with one’s bank and insurance. The new law protects those home-based startups running “reasonable” businesses. In other words, no running a retail store with cars pulling up.
“That’s one less legal threat hanging over the heads of entrepreneurs,” Polis said.
➔ Techstars Denver hosting workforce accelerator. Techstars still has a presence in Colorado. On Monday, the company said its new hybrid Workforce Development Accelerator will be based out of the Denver office. The startups have been chosen and the program begins June 10. The goal? Develop tech that helps companies attract and retain talent and create a pipeline of future employees. >> Check out the 12 startups
➔ Tax credits for employee-owned businesses. Polis also signed House Bill 1157 into law this week to provide a refundable income tax credit for tax years 2025 to 2029. The credit is up to 50% of costs incurred by new employee-owned businesses and not to exceed $50,000. Such companies must have been owned by employees for seven or fewer years. This also creates a new Employee Ownership Office within the state’s economic development department. >> Read law
Sun economy stories you may have missed
➔ Outside Festival deemed a success with 18,000 attendees helping forge a model for a new national outdoor recreation gathering. With business, concerts, films, panels and outdoor gear brands, organizers hope the inaugural Outside Festival becomes a must-attend event for the outdoor recreation industry >> Read story
➔ Estes Park has growing pains this summer. From construction to elk, here’s how to manage it. Understanding the downtown road re-construction mess, a still-shuttered national park campground and elk attacks are a few of the keys to the area >> Read story
➔ Colorado’s growing approach to solving chronic homelessness: Permanent housing with few rules. Jefferson Center and WellPower of Denver are building permanent supportive housing complexes modeled after a 2017 Denver building that still has a waitlist >> Read story
➔ Hope Springs in Greeley, the largest Habitat neighborhood in the West, gets a 3D twist and $100M to build 491 homes. As median home prices edge beyond $500,000 in Weld County, there’s new hope with this community of affordable housing options >> Read story
➔ Eldora Mountain Resort withdraws objections to ski patroller union vote. Eldora managers say the move is to promote “good faith” negotiations while patrollers suspect the decision was based on the legal cost “to argue challenges that were shaky at best” >> Read story
➔ A Colorado Supreme Court ruling poked a hole in ski resorts’ liability protections. What’s next? Ski resorts, summer camps and rafting companies warned prior to the ruling that it may force companies to get rid of many recreation options for kids >> Read story
Other working bits
➔ Colorado’s CLIMBER small business loans extended. Most of the $250 million Colorado set aside for small business loans is still untapped so the CLIMBER program was extended with House Bill 1453, which Polis signed this week. Short for Colorado Loans to Increase Mainstreet Business Economic Resiliency, CLIMBER loans were offered “as federal pandemic funds have dried up for small businesses,” said Sam Taylor, program director. But as of the end of March, just $24.5 million has been loaned out to 198 small businesses in Colorado. These working capital loans of $10,000 to $500,000 for up to 10 years are available to companies with up to 99 employees. >> More at climber-colorado.com
➔ The 4th annual hunt for tech to help Colorado communities begins. The Colorado Smart Cities Alliance just announced its fourth-annual C² Challenge, a competition to find technology that addresses this year’s priorities of affordable housing for the missing middle, crime prevention, infrastructure management and utilization of park space. Winners get to work with a local city to test out their tech on a larger scale. An information session is June 18 (register here). Submissions are due July 26. >> Submit
Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww
Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara
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