How Bad Were the TEA Provisions
in the Grassley-Leahy Senate Bill?
A Call for a Fair
and Reasonable
Approach
By Elliot Winer
This past December, as the days led up to a decision on the Grassley-Leahy Senate bill with its latest iterations
and reauthorization of the EB-5 program, there was great angst within the EB-5 community. Urban vs. rural TEA
concerns, visa allocations, job creation methodologies, effective dates and minimum investment amounts were
among the many concerns within the industry and how it might all play out. As you all know by now, an agreement
could not be reached, in large part due to the opposing views on TEAs, and the program was temporarily extended
until Sept. 30, 2016, when hopefully agreement can be reached on a new, longer-term authorization. I will leave it
to others to comment and debate the many other aspects of this Senate Bill and other reauthorization proposals.
I am going to focus on the new TEA definitions put forward
in the Grassley-Leahy bill and why for the most part it was an
ill-conceived, poorly thought out approach to TEA revisions. I will
address four particularly egregious parts of the TEA definitions:
(1) The controversial aspect of the number of allowable
census tracts in TEA configurations; The potentially
devastating impact of two largely overlooked components of the bill, (2) the elimination of block groups and
other geographic and political subdivisions,
10
(3) the shifting of TEA designation authority from the
states to Homeland Security; and (4) how a virtually
ignored inclusion of ‘outlying counties’ into the bill
would have made a mockery of the program by allowing
for far more abuse of the TEA process than anything
currently possible through gerrymandering.
I will conclude by presenting what I think is a more
reasonable and comprehensive approach to TEA reform that
would be fair and beneficial to both urban and rural interests.
EB5 INVESTORS MAGAZINE