Measure Designed to Create Jobs; Spark Economic Development
(TRENTON) — Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee Chair Albert Coutinho (D-Essex) issued a multimedia package Friday on his legislation to boost New Jersey’s job creation efforts by revamping and streamlining the state’s economic development tax incentives.
The bill (A-3680), entitled the “New Jersey Economic Opportunity Act of 2013,” would merge five state tax-incentive programs into two, with one focused on job creation and the other on economic development.
The multimedia package consists of a video of Coutinho discussing his legislation and audio and a transcript of same.
The video can be accessed directly via our website — www.assemblydems.com — or by clicking here.
The audio file is available upon request.
A transcript of comments from Assemblyman Coutinho is appended below:
Assemblyman Albert Coutinho (D-Essex), Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee Chair:
“The ‘New Jersey Economic Opportunity Act of 2013’ is an attempt to do everything we can to put New Jerseyans back to work.
“While this legislature has worked on a bipartisan basis to do everything possible to improve our economy, the reality is that unemployment is too high. So what we’ve done, is we’ve looked at the state’s main incentive programs and we’re going to try to focus more on job creation. We are merging the five largest tax incentive programs in the State of New Jersey, we’re going to simplify it into two [programs] so it’s easier for businesses to use. We’re lowering the capital requirements, so that medium and small businesses that previously did not have access to state incentives can now do so and put more New Jerseyans to work.
“We’ve worked for the last nine months with a broad range of stakeholders to see what we could do to make these programs more effective so that we can create more jobs. This bill is all about creating jobs in every single community throughout the State of New Jersey. We’ve been working as hard as we can to look at these programs, how we can make it better.
“We have to do better. Too many people are unemployed and this bill will try to affect that reality.”