Elected Officials Concerned That Tax Breaks Benefiting Tisch Graduates Actually May Only Help A Select Few

First you give the film industry tax breaks to clog up your streets. Then you’ve got to start a city-funded program to help even the playing field for minorities and women because by giving tax breaks to studios, you’re supporting an industry in which minorities and women are underrepresented. The nerve of these people:

The Bloomberg administration is seeking to expand job and training opportunities for minorities and women in the off-screen crews that form the backbone of the thriving film and television production industry in New York City.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said that the effort is intended to continue the work of a City Council task force on diversity in the film industry, which Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn established early this year. She acted after some council members complained that minority groups and women were underrepresented in the often well-paying production jobs even as the film industry was being aided by city and state tax breaks.

Now the administration is putting together what it calls a working group that “will have a goal of developing specific recommendations in six months” for increasing job and training opportunities in the industry for minorities and women, said Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. The group is to include representatives from production companies and labor unions.

. . .

Mr. Doctoroff, in an interview, said the Bloomberg administration saw the planned group as a “joint effort with the Council.” But he and Councilwoman Letitia James of Brooklyn, the chairwoman of the Council’s task force, said it was not clear whether the task force would continue or would be subsumed by the new group. Like the administration’s planned group, the Council’s panel includes film company and union representatives.

. . .

Mr. Doctoroff said that given a lack of demographic data on the industry’s production ranks in the city, “I don’t think we know for sure” whether minority groups and women are seriously underrepresented. “But we believe we can do better,” he said, especially in relation to the higher-paying jobs in the industry.

But Ms. James, whose district includes Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, said she had often heard “complaints that when you go to film locations, you see a paucity of women and people of color” in the production ranks.

She said she and other council members had brought up the matter in 2004 at committee hearings on a bill, which later passed, to add city tax breaks to state tax incentives for movie and television companies to film in New York.

Ms. James recalled that at the hearings, she asked the companies’ representatives “what statistics they had on the employment of people of color and women” in production jobs.

“They said they didn’t know; that they don’t keep those numbers,” she recalled. Then early this year after hearings on another bill to extend the city tax incentives, she said, she expressed her concerns to Ms. Quinn, who then formed the task force.