City’s new Enterprise Zone includes Pratt St.

State officials this week released a new map of the Baltimore‘s Enterprise Zone.

The new map has added Pratt Street and eliminated Harbor East. That detail added a postscript to an often nasty debate over the past year that pitted advocates of downtown development against developers on the city’s waterfront who have cashed in on tax breaks for more than a decade as they rebuilt what is now known as the city’s gold coast.

In general, the Enterprise Zones help spark development because commercial projects undertaken within them are eligible for a 10-year property tax credit in which 80 percent of taxes are waived in the first five years, with a sliding scale of lesser reductions for the following five years. The state has five zones.

In addition, an employment tax credit is also available to businesses that hire in the zones, totaling about $1,000 for each new hire.

Over the past year, there has been drama and friction over use of zone credits at Harbor East by representatives of John Paterakis, the bakery mogul who has also developed Harbor East. Paterakis won the right to develop a new headquarter building for Exelon Corp. at Harbor Point and did so using the Enterprise Zone as part of a large carrot (read: multiple tax breaks). J. Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, cried foul because other sites in center city not in the zone were passed over.

Now all that has changed.

Harbor Point and Harbor East have been eliminated from the zone, replaced by the addition of Pratt Street by the state Department of Business and Economic Development. The Exelon project is still eligible for the zone credits, officials say.

The move, though, will likely increase development along Pratt Street and into center city, officials of the downtown partnership said, adding they had lobbied Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and officials of the Baltimore Development Corp. for the change.

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