MONTGOMERY — The sponsor of a sin-tax bill that the Alabama Education Association wanted to pay for entertainment industry tax incentives said the bill will not come up this session.
“That bill is dead. I withdrew it,” said Rep. Jack Williams, R-Birmingham [pictured]. Williams said he felt he lost control of the sin-tax bill after AEA Executive Secretary Paul Hubbert insisted on linking projected revenue from it to tax incentives for the entertainment industry.
Williams said he wanted his sin-tax bill to make up revenue lost to property tax exemptions he has proposed for low-income senior citizens. He also wanted to help owners of new homes, who he said sometimes pay taxes both on a home under construction and also on their current home.
Williams estimated his sin tax could bring in as much as $30 million per year to state coffers.
Background: MONTGOMERY – The House sponsor of a bill that would tax pornography said Thursday he’s pulling the bill because it was linked to another bill offering incentives to the film industry to do more work in Alabama.
Rep. Jack Williams, R-Birmingham, said he’s pulling his bill, which would have levied taxes on various forms of pornographic material, from contention because linking it to the film industry bill created a potential conflict of interest. Williams’ wife, a film professor at the University of Alabama, supports the film industry bill.
The Alabama Education Association had linked passage of the film bill, which offers incentives to movie and television producers to shoot in Alabama, to passage of the pornography tax bill. The AEA said the tax breaks offered to filmmakers would mean a loss in school funding, and wanted that loss to be offset by another tax.
“It’s not the obligation of schoolchildren in the classrooms of Alabama to take money to start their industry,” AEA head Paul Hubbert said.
Williams said some of his wife’s film students had testified before a legislative committee about the incentive legislation sponsored by Sen. Tom Butler, D-Madison, saying they would probably have to leave the state to find work because Alabama’s film industry is so lackluster.
“Regardless of how tenuous the connection, I think it didn’t look good and it put me in a spot,” he said. “I talked to the Ethics Commission and [officials] said to find someone else to handle the bill.”
Instead, he said, he’ll just drop it.
Unlinking the legislation still leaves Butler’s bill without a source of revenue that would satisfy Hubbert.
Butler said film industry spending would overcome any potential tax loss to the Education Trust Fund. He said filmmakers should get tax incentives similar to those given other industries because filmmaking has the potential to grow and add to Alabama’s economic health.