, Good Jobs First’s database of company-specific info on economic development subsidies, has just greatly expanded its coverage of Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania. It wasn’t easy.
Each of those states has an online database with quite a bit of subsidy recipient info, but the data could not be easily captured for reuse in Tracker. Michigan’s site, for example, is in the form of a map that requires the user to click on each individual subsidized location to display details; some of the info requires clicking again to view individual PDF forms. None of the three states was willing to provide us with the underlying data in spreadsheet form.
We solved the problem with the help of consultant Skye Bender-deMoll, who wrote programs that scraped the data from the web or PDF pages and put it into spreadsheets that (after some reformatting) could be uploaded to Subsidy Tracker.
Skye also worked his magic on databases covering individual programs such as Ohio’s Community Reinvestment Areas and North Dakota’s Development Fund.
Thanks to these efforts, plus other non-scraping work, Subsidy Tracker now contains more than 80,000 entries on 216 programs in 39 states.
We are close to exhausting all the available online data from state subsidy programs and have begun focusing more on obtaining unpublished data from agencies.
New Additions
Kentucky
Bluegrass State Skills Corporation Grant-in-Aid Program
Bluegrass State Skills Corporation Skills Investment Credit
Department of Commercialization & Innovation Awards
Incentives for Energy Independence Act
Kentucky Business Investment Program
Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority Direct Loan
Kentucky Enterprise Initiative Act
Kentucky Environmental Stewardship Act
Kentucky Industrial Development Act
Kentucky Industrial Revitalization Act
Kentucky Jobs Development Act
Kentucky Jobs Retention Act
Kentucky Reinvestment Act
Kentucky Rural Economic Development Act
Maine
Pine Tree Development Zones
Michigan
21st Century Jobs Fund
Brownfield Tax Increment Financing
Centers of Energy Excellence
Commercial Personal Property Tax Relief
Economic Development Job Training
Industrial Personal Property Tax Credit
Industrial Personal Property Tax Relief
Investment Tax Credit
MEGA (Michigan Economic Growth Authority) Tax Credits
Michigan Business Tax Battery Credit
Michigan Business Tax Brownfield Credit
Michigan Business Tax Compensation Tax Credit
Research & Development Tax Credit
Sales & Use Tax Exemption
Single Business Tax Brownfield Credit
Special Tooling Property Tax Exemption
Transportation Economic Development Fund
Ohio
Community Reinvestment Areas
Pennsylvania
Customized Job Training
Film Production Grant Initiative
Film Tax Credit
Infrastructure Development Program Grant
Job Creation Tax Credit
Machinery & Equipment Loan Fund
Opportunity Grant Program
Pennsylvania Industrial Development Authority (PIDA) Loans
South Dakota
Revolving Economic Development and Initiative (REDI) Fund
Additional years of coverage added
Alaska – Film Tax Credit – now FY2010-2011
Arizona – Enterprise Zone Premium and Income Credit – now FY2006-2010
North Dakota – ND Development Fund – now 1990-Jun2011