Great news! 
(Sent by: Lea Girardin at the Maine Film Office)

The amendment to LD 1449,” An Act to Expand Tax Incentives for Visual Media Productions” passed.  The changes to the bill are highlighted below. The effective date for the amendment has not yet been signed into law but we hope it will be will be January 1, 2010.

What may be of special interest is the new qualifying spend of $75,000. (much easier to meet then the previous spend of $250,000)

Changes to L.D. 1449 to minimize the fiscal note.

The qualifying spend is $75,000.00 per project. (The existing incentive requires a $250,000.00 qualifying spend but allows companies to roll together projects within 12 consecutive months.) In the amended L.D. 1449 incentives will be awarded by single project basis only.

Amended L.D. 1449 will retain the wage based formula of the existing incentive: 12% of all resident production wages and 10% of all non resident production wages. Only the first $50,000 of the wages of both resident and non residents will be counted toward the incentive. (Existing incentive allowed the first $1,000,000.00 in wages)

Reimbursement will include certain production wages of leased employees

An extra 5% rebate incentive will be allowed on other production costs.

Visual media productions may be considered in the FAME seed grant program.