Cuccinelli, Goldman team up to renew school tax credit push

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Strategist Paul Goldman today held a press-conference call to discuss the necessity of a federal rehabilitation tax credit to renovate old schools – particularly in lower-income areas of the Commonwealth – and create a better learning environment for our children. The attorney general explained the importance of the legislation in a POLITICO op-ed published today.

CUCCINELLI: “Many of you were in Richmond a couple of days ago on Tuesday for our K-12 education policy rollout at Maggie Walker Governor’s School, which is a great school… and it probably wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for the federal rehabilitation tax credit. It was used very creatively there. It’s a twenty percent tax credit for the rehabilitation cost and it’s saved Virginia taxpayers millions of dollars more than a decade ago when this was done. And normally a project like that wouldn’t be possible…. Under current federal law, there is a clause called the prior use rule, where private investors can’t apply for the historic tax credit to renovate an old school and turn it into a better school…. This is a spectacular opportunity, if Congress would make the slight change that we are requesting and supporting here that we can really move forward dramatically to rehabilitate some of our oldest schools in Virginia and also to have some job creation surrounding it. We want our students and our teachers in the best, safest schools we can get and this a cost effective way to move forward.”

GOLDMAN: “The average school in Virginia is 46 years old. A school at 40 years is considered obsolete, which means the average child, particularly the poor and middle class kids, are going to schools which the government concedes are incapable of teaching a 21st century education…This is really a no brainer as far as I’m concerned… The issue then to me is simple: as Dr. King would have said: ‘When a thing is right the time is always right’… I don’t care who gets the credit, I don’t think the attorney general cares who gets the credit. This is something we are going to need… The issue here is a bipartisan effort. As the attorney general said, we got some success in the previous session in the General Assembly to move this forward. I think if we do it in a bi-partisan way, we can get Washington to do it.”