Carbondale Reporter

Carbondale Chamber of Commerce recently issued the following announcement.

The City of Carbondale now has a new incentive to attract commercial development to the area.

The U.S. Treasury Department officially certified Governor Bruce Rauner’s nomination of 327 low-income census tracts in Illinois to be designated as federal “Qualified Opportunity Zones,” including three in Carbondale.

Congress established the program in the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act to encourage long-term investments in low-income urban and rural communities nationwide. These incentives can be used to help finance commercial and industrial real estate, housing, infrastructure and current or start-up businesses.

The program uses low-income community census tracts as the basis for determining areas eligible for Qualified Opportunity Zone designation. Of the 1,305 qualifying low-income census tracts in Illinois, only 25 percent could be selected by law.

The three tracts selected in Carbondale are:

Tract 1: Covers the south side of Carbondale, including SIU and the Southern Illinois Research Park.

Tract 2: Covers southeastern Carbondale, bounded by Wall Street east to Giant City Road, and Grand Avenue south to Pleasant Hill Road.

Tract 3: Covers the eastern business district of Carbondale, bounded by the Canadian National tracks east to the county line, and East Main south to Grand Avenue. This tract also includes Business Park East.

Carbondale Economic Development Director Steven Mitchell said, “These incentives provide a tax benefit to the investor. This program will be able to draw investment funds from outside the area, and has the potential to become one of our most important economic development incentive programs.”

For information about the Carbondale Opportunity Zones, contact the Carbondale Economic Development Office at (618) 457-3286. To learn more about Illinois Opportunity Zones, visit www.illinois.gov/dceo/Pages/OppZn.aspx.

Contact:

Carbondale Economic Development Office

618-457-3286

Original source can be found here.