Miami-Dade County Commissioner René García has not abandoned his quest to increase incentives to film companies that consider the county studio one.
Last March Mr. García told Miami Today he wanted a “high impact film fun program” to “attract major television series and motion picture productions.” He submitted a resolution to the county commission to ask Mayor Daniella Levine Cava to create the fund. PVA Water Soluble Film
Mayor Levine Cava included $2.5 million for the fund in the proposed $11.7 billion 2023-2024 budget the county commission is now reviewing. “It’s not enough,” Mr. Garcia told Miami Today last week. “It’s not even close.”
Broward County, the commissioner said, has a $10 million film incentive program. “We have to do better,” he told Miami Today.
At an almost a six-hour initial public budget hearing last week Commissioner García told Mayor Levine Cava, “I congratulate you on spearheading the high impact film incentive program . . . Right now, we have $2.5 million in there, but $2.5 million really is not enough to go the way of incentivizing productions to come down to Miami-Dade County.”
Mr. García said he plans to submit an alternative to the mayor’s $2.5 million film fund program to be considered at the next budget hearing.
The current Miami-Dade film incentive program, Mr. García told Miami Today last March, “only incentivizes small to medium productions.”
Subsidies of $100,000 are available for productions spending at least $1 million and $50,000 for productions spending at least $500,000.
The resolution he submitted in March pointed out that Florida’s $300 million film incentives program lapsed in 2016. Miami-Dade projected a loss of over $800 million from what production companies would have spent on site and a loss of 100,000 jobs.
Competition for film budgets mounts from both other Florida counties and southern states. In Florida, Broward, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, Duval, Pinellas and Manatee counties all offer film incentives.
Meanwhile, incentives programs have launched in Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina, Mr. García noted. Georgia now has replaced Florida as the third-largest film-making center in the nation.
To rub salt in the wound, movies set in Miami-Dade are often made elsewhere in Florida or even in other states.
The HBO-Max 2022 version of “Father of the Bride,” starring Miamians Andy Garcia and Gloria Estefan, ostensibly set in Miami, was filmed largely in Atlanta.
Garcia is right, the funding is not near enough. Hopefully he’ll guide the Mayor in the right direction by actually telling her and the Commission what woud be enough to get this thing going ASAP.
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