New Markets Tax Credits

Niemann’s CountyMarket

April 25, 2014 by

Niemann Foods, Inc. (“NFI”) is an employee-owned, family-run company headquartered in Quincy, Illinois. Brothers Ferd and Steve Niemann opened their first grocery store in 1917, and within a decade, the brothers had opened 10 more. In 1940, they launched their first ever full-service supermarket in Quincy, IL.

Today, NFI is run by Rich Niemann, employing around 4,000 people in more than 100 supermarkets, pharmacies, gas stations, convenience, pet and hardware stores in Illinois, Iowa and Missouri under a variety of banners: the County Market, County Market Express, Cub Foods, ACE Hardware, Pet Supplies Plus, Pick-A-Dilly and Save-A-Lot.

For nearly 100 years, NFI has focused on providing its customers with healthy and affordable food options. That focus on healthy living is now embodied by NFI’s new Health & Wellness Team, which operates a blog forum and two Twitter handles to quickly respond to customer questions about healthy eating and living.

In April, 2014, Crescent Growth Capital worked with Niemann Foods, Marine Bank, Hampton Roads Ventures, and PNC Bank to close a combined $8,000,000 Federal QEI to finance the construction of a new full-service CountyMarket grocery store, convenience store and gas station in Decatur, IL.

The project is expected to create approximately 75 full-time jobs, and provide a full-service grocery store, offering affordable, healthy options to a neighborhood that is a USDA-designated Food Desert (low income and few healthy and affordable food options).

Brunswick Landing

March 10, 2014 by

16 Burbank Avenue, Brunswick, ME

In 2005, the federal government initiated its most recent round of military base closures under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Congress have used this process five times over the last two decades to reduce and realign the nation’s military installations.

During the 2005 BRAC round, three Maine military installations were targeted for closure or realignment: Naval Air Station Brunswick, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and the Defense Finance and Accounting Services Center in Limestone. In August of 2005, the federal BRAC Commission saved two of those installations, but voted to close Naval Air Station Brunswick (NASB) after 68 years of operations. The closure resulted in 6,500 jobs lost within the immediate community and far reaching economic impact.

In August, 2013, Priority Real Estate Group completed Phase I of the renovation of 16 Burbank Avenue and 62 Pegasus Street – two properties at the former Naval Air Station known as Brunswick Landing. 16 Burbank Avenue is the former Navy Lodge, a 15,000 square foot building converted to accommodate 28 classrooms and a life skills room on the main floor and professional offices on the second floor. 62 Pegasus Street, the 26,000 square foot former Navy Recreational Building and Bowling Alley, was converted to classrooms, a day care, an indoor recreational room, occupational therapy room and professional offices. Both of these properties are leased to Providence Services Corporation – the largest provider of services to children with Autism and developmental disabilities in Maine.

In March, 2014, Crescent Growth Capital helped Priority Real Estate Group (“PREG”) close and fund a $10.2mm Maine State NMTC QEI to consolidate Phases I & II and complete the construction of Brunswick Landing Phase II. These two Phases represent much needed job creation and an economic stimulus to an otherwise blighted area: Phase I of the Brunswick Landing created a combined 142 new jobs for Providence Services and Coastal Ortho & Sports Medicine, with annual salaries ranging from $28,000 to $650,000. Phase II will allow Providence to combine two more regions at the Brunswick Landing location, relocating 60 staff members to the area and setting the stage for future growth.

There are over 10,000 veterans in Midcoast Maine, many of whom had a connection to Brunswick Naval Air Station. With the base closure, the veterans did not have a presence in the community to offer services nor the financial means of establishing one. As part of Phase II, Priority Real Estate Group renovated 2,000 square feet of the 62 Pegasus Street property at a cost of $200,000 and leased the space to the Midcoast Veterans Council of Maine for $1 per year. This donation allowed the Council to set up a Midcoast Veterans Resource Center aptly located on the former Naval Air Station Property where they can service the many veterans in our community.

16 Burbank AveBrunswick, ME 04011

Vowell’s Marketplace

December 27, 2013 by

Vowell’s Marketplace is a Louisville, Mississippi based supermarket chain with 19 locations across Mississippi and Alabama. Since its first store in 1945, Vowell’s has remained committed to providing great food and a great shopping experience. Under the leadership Todd Vowell, the third generation of the Vowell family to run the business, Vowell’s Marketplace has spent the past five years upgrading current stores as well as branching out into new markets.

In December 2013, Crescent Growth Capital worked with Vowell’s Marketplace and Enhanced Capital to close and fund a $6MM Alabama State QEI to fund the acquisition and construction of a new grocery store on East South Boulevard in Montgomery, AL. The new Vowell’s Marketplace store will not only bring back to commerce a long-vacant building, but it will also provide a first-rate grocery option in a USDA-designated Food Desert. Food Deserts are defined by a combination of low median family income and little or no access to fresh, healthy and affordable food. These areas typically offer only fast food chains and convenience stores and are therefore in desperate need of healthier alternatives.

The new Vowell’s Marketplace will offer a full-service grocery store that has long been missing from this neighborhood. This store will offer customers the “destination” meat department Vowell’s has become known for, as well as full produce, dairy-deli, frozen and seafood departments, with competitive prices and superior customer service.

New Orleans Center for Creative Arts

December 19, 2013 by

New Orleans Center for Creative Arts is a regional, pre-professional arts training center that offers students intensive instruction in culinary arts, dance, media arts: filmmaking & audio production, music (classical, jazz, vocal), theatre arts (drama, musical theatre, theatre design), visual arts, and creative writing, while demanding simultaneous academic excellence.

NOCCA was founded in 1973 by a diverse coalition of artists, educators, business leaders, and community activists who saw the need for an institution devoted to our region’s burgeoning young talent. Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Harry Connick, Jr., Terence Blanchard, Jeanne-Michele Charbonnet, Wendell Pierce, Anthony Mackie, Mary Catherine Garrison and Gary Solomon Jr. are only a few NOCCA graduates who can attest to the extraordinary educational opportunity the Center represents to the children of Louisiana.

NOCCA was operated for its first quarter-century by the Orleans Parish School Board; students were required to be residents of New Orleans. In 2000, the school relocated to its present campus, on the banks of the Mississippi River in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, and its governance was revised to provide for direct administration by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. At this time NOCCA began accepting students residing anywhere in Louisiana, in service of its broadened role as the premier performing and visual arts high school for the state.

In the ensuing years, NOCCA’s curriculum matured to encompass concentrations in eleven disciplines, including jazz, classical instrumental music, drama and the visual arts. The events of 2005 tested the institution, scattering its faculty and student body across the country, but NOCCA’s stakeholders responded by embracing a bold plan for growth.

Additional concentrations, in the digital media and culinary arts were launched, and, in 2011, a longstanding dream to offer at NOCCA a full school day of instruction came to fruition with the debut of the Academic Studio. For the first time, curricula in math, science and the humanities were taught on campus, making it possible for NOCCA students to acquire an innovative, fully comprehensive, arts-centered secondary education without having to leave the site. NOCCA’s progress has come in the face of ten budget cuts, some occurring mid-year, over the last four years; the school’s state funding has decreased by 25% during this period.

Responding to these challenges with characteristic boldness, the NOCCA Institute – NOCCA’s community support and advocacy organization – developed a plan for the NOCCA Forum, a dramatic $26.4MM proposal to lay the foundation for the school’s future. The Forum will incorporate cutting-edge facilities and include revenue-generating elements to provide independent means to the institution’s endeavors. In early 2013, NOCCA contacted Crescent Growth Capital (“CGC”) to assist them in bringing together financing for the Forum.

On December 19th, 2013, CGC helped NOCCA close and fund a $12.5MM Qualified Equity Investment (“QEI”), using New Markets Tax Credits allocations of $6.5MM and $6MM provided by First NBC Bank and Whitney Bank, respectively, and leveraging an estimated $7.8MM in Federal and State Historic Tax Credit equity, and $14MM of Qualified Zone Academy Bonds (“QZABs”). The Federal and State New Markets and Historic Tax Credit equity, combined with $14MM of QZABs provided the NOCCA Institute with nearly $12.5MM in combined subsidy, which amounts to nearly half of the project budget.

Children’s Medical Center – Heart Center Interventional Suites

October 31, 2013 by

Tracing its origins to the creation in 1913 of a pediatric dysentery clinic established on the lawn of Parkland Hospital, Children’s Medical Center Dallas has grown to the fifth largest pediatric healthcare organization in the nation. In 1967, the present facility opened within the nascent Dallas Medical District. In the past 45 years Children’s has developed numerous centers of excellence, among them pediatric cardiovascular care. The Comprehensive Center for Heart Care at Children’s Medical Center today attracts referrals from throughout the region, the nation, and internationally.

The Heart Center’s units have always been spread out across different floors of the hospital, scattered throughout the campus. To increase patient capacity, improve care outcomes, and provide additional research opportunities, Children’s developed a Master Design Plan for a state-of-the-art centralized Heart Center. In 2010, after three years of planning, Children’s launched a $77 million, multi-phase initiative that would result in the consolidation of every functional unit of the Heart Center onto one floor of Children’s main hospital. Children’s anticipates that its plan, once fully realized, will meaningfully improve collaboration among specialists, streamline administration by locating back offices adjacent to care administration areas, and promote improved cooperation from the families of the children receiving care, an essential component of pediatric medicine.

In late 2012, Children’s brought Crescent Growth Capital (“CGC”) in to help them secure New Markets Tax Credits to help finance the fourth phase of this plan: a new $11.1 million Interventional Suite. The fourth and most expensive phase of Children’s Master Design Plan, the Interventional Suite project will include new, state-of-the-art operating rooms and catheter labs, MRI facilities, a multi-purpose procedures room, and a relocated cardiac prep & recovery unit. On October 31, 2013, CGC helped Children’s close and fund a $10.5MM Federal Qualified Equity Investment to finance the construction of the Interventional Suite, using a $10.5MM allocation of Federal New Markets Tax Credits provided by Hampton Roads Ventures, and NMTC equity provided by AT&T Corp.

Not only will this subsidy consolidate and significantly upgrade Children’s ability to provide state-of-the-art patient care, but it will also free up hospital funds to open 5 additional pediatric primary care clinics in distressed neighborhoods, locating non-emergency care within communities of need and freeing up valuable ER space within the main hospital for emergency cases.

Vulcan, Inc.

September 6, 2013 by

Vulcan, Inc. is an employee-owned company located on the Alabama Gulf Coast in Foley. The firm operates one of the only completely vertically-integrated aluminum processing plants in the country, in which raw aluminum bars are heated into a molten form, and then rolled into coils. Vulcan cuts the product to the specified length, and manufactures a variety of finished goods. Notably, the Foley plant produces fully 60% of the street signs installed annually in the United States.

Vulcan was founded in 1966 as a traffic sign and metal stampings company in Birmingham, Alabama. The company grew steadily in the ensuing decades, ultimately relocating its entire production operation and corporate headquarters to Foley. In 1986, the company constructed a state-of-the-art aluminum rolling mill, enabling it to produce aluminum coil and sheet for the signage industry, among other customers. A facility expansion was completed in 1997, doubling the size of the sign manufacturing plant. The late 1990s also witnessed the dedication of a new Technology Center to house employee training facilities, as well as Vulcan Traffic Management Services, the firm’s in-house software development division. Another expansion resulted in the addition of slitting, annealing and processing capabilities to the aluminum rolling mill. Most recently, Vulcan completed a multi-million dollar upgrade and modernization of the rolling mill, to incorporate new technology permitting the electromagnetic pumping of molten aluminum.

The region surrounding the location of the Foley, Alabama plant struggles with a 20.9% poverty rate, with correspondingly high rates of unemployment and underemployment. However, the state’s leadership has in recent decades succeeded in attracting more and more high profile industrial investment, bringing for the first time living wage manufacturing jobs to corners of Alabama that have long struggled with severe disinvestment and little opportunity.

The state has lavished incentives upon multinational companies like Mercedes Benz, Hyundai, Airbus, and ThyssenKrupp, betting that their attention-grabbing investments will attract smaller, yet far more numerous investments in industries located upstream and downstream from the goods produced by these companies. It is understood that these big-name investments, while attention-grabbing, cannot on their own break the cycle of poverty and remedy the longstanding deficit of opportunity experienced by so many Alabamans.

Vulcan Inc., located within a rural, low income census tract, successfully weathered the Great Recession and is now in growth mode, undertaking a $17 million expansion to its manufacturing plant. In September, 2013, Crescent Growth Capital worked with Vulcan, Capital One Bank, Hampton Roads Ventures and MuniStrategies to structure and close a “stacked” $22.5 million Federal/$10 million Alabama State QEI to fund the continued expansion of its Plant 6, effectively doubling the company’s hot-rolled aluminum manufacturing.

The Vulcan plant expansion epitomizes the ancillary investment that Alabama seeks. Thanks to the $5.66 million in net Federal and State subsidies, Vulcan is able to expand and refine its operations to maintain its position as the Nation’s largest producer of aluminum street signs, while adding quality jobs in a high poverty, high unemployment region. At least 200 construction workers will be employed in the course of this expansion. When completed, the expanded Plant 6 will employ an additional 60 full-time employees, the majority of whom will be new production line workers with an average wage of $15.00 per hour. Vulcan will also be adding employees to its sales and supervisory staff.

New Markets Tax Credits

Contact Us

Footer