|
San Francisco’s Big Wins In This Issue
Gap Moving 130 Jobs From New York City to Mission Bay GAP announced last week that it will be moving up to 130 jobs from its Old Navy division in New York City operations here to San Francisco. Old Navy’s product development team will be moving here. GAP also announced that it intends to occupy its currently empty 280,000 square foot building at Mission Bay that it has leased from Catellus for the past several years. The Old Navy personnel are expected to move into the building. Independence Air Inaugurates Direct Service to Washington Dulles Airport Independence Air began non-stop service between San Francisco International Airport and Washington Dulles Airport on May 1, 2005. Independence Air is the sixth airline to announce new service at SFO in the just the past eighteen months (Air Tran, Air New Zealand, WestJet, Virgin America, and Icelandair are the other five.) Supervisor McGoldrick Weighs Tax Exclusion For Renewable Energy Companies In the late 1990s, the city sponsored a "New Jobs Tax Credit" for San Francisco in which all new jobs coming into the city were granted an exemption from the payroll tax. Recently the city has taken an approach that many economists would consider superior and more focused than the blanket jobs tax credit. It is the targeted tax exclusion. With the biotech payroll tax exclusion passed last year, for example, the city took away an important impediment to the arrival of new biotech firms that would otherwise go to Emeryville or San Francisco. The results have paid off with 3 or 4 biotech companies having announced their intention to come to San Francisco. Now Supervisor McGoldrick is reported to be considering a similar tax exclusion to induce businesses that produce energy-efficient technologies to come here. It is important to note that few, if any, such companies currently exist in San Francisco, so no taxes would be forfeited. By putting San Francisco on an equal footing with neighboring cities that don’t have such taxes, San Francisco loses nothing and only stands to gain jobs and other forms of tax from companies that decide to move here. Notes Dennis Conaghan, executive director of the San Francisco Center for Economic Development, "By targeting our efforts, we can attract companies in sectors that might not otherwise locate in San Francisco. The key is to target sectors we seek to encourage." For more details, see the following article from the Examiner Clean and green technologies are a sector that the San Francisco Center for Economic Development has targeted for growth. Stem Cell Institute Victory Promises Long-Term Benefit Though San Francisco’s long fight to host the administrative headquarters of the Stem Cell Research Institute was ultimately victorious, the longer term victory for the state will be the jobs created as the Institute pursues its mission. Some estimates put the job creation number at 29,000 over the coming ten years statewide. San Francisco can expect to see some portion of whatever jobs materialize - and perhaps a greater share than other cities in California because the Institute Headquarters is here. At this point, it is open to guesswork: 1,000? 3,000? 5,000? over the coming ten years. Like the biotech sectoral growth of which it will be part, the growth should be slow and steady, very unlike the "dot com" explosion that hit the city in the late 1990s. For those projecting a dramatic influx of jobs as a result, we should remember that the payoff will be long-term both in jobs and cures.
For more information on these and other stories, please contact SFCED managing director Todd Ewing at tewing@sfced.org or 415-352-8838.
|
