Jeff Buchholz

Hey, y'all are up there doing training camp.

You know what it's like when you come back here from practice.

It's a little hot out there.

And it's like, hey, hey, did we not know we were going to be in closed quarters today?

I'm good.

Layla, how's it going?

I miss you guys.

We haven't had a chance to talk in a while.

Yeah, that's true.

Since the last time we talked about this bill, it got a lot bigger.

It picked up a whole lot more stuff.

It kind of looks like a Christmas tree now, if you like.

There's a provision in there providing tourism assistance for Springfield, and there's incentives in there to develop old rail yards.

But the stuff that we really care about is, of course, the megaprojects part of it, which still provides for...

the opportunity for developers of a so-called mega project, and there are specific rules about what constitutes a mega project, to negotiate and set long-term property tax payments with local units of government and other taxing bodies like school districts and park districts.

in lieu of paying property taxes and having that property exposed to changes in assessed value over time.

The big change that was made to this legislation is a provision that those negotiated payments, the ones that the mega project developers make to those taxing bodies,

50% of those payments must now be set aside to provide property tax relief.

And the way that works is those payments, let's say a payment, let's take a payment of $1,000.

500 of that would go to property tax relief.