Can a faith park enjoy state tax incentives?

Kentucky’s dry!

THE cubit is not merely an obsolete unit; it is also an imprecise one. One cubit is the length of a man’s arm from elbow to fingertips, but different people have different-sized arms, so cubits range from 17.5 to 20.6 inches (44.5 to 52.3cm). Whichever length one plumps for, however, a boat 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high is undeniably immense. Yet if all goes according to plan, some time in 2011 a team of Amish builders will begin constructing such a boat on an 800-acre (324-hectare) plot of land in Grant County, Kentucky.

A few millennia back, if you believe your Bible, another team of builders in the Middle East constructed a boat of that size. It held two of every kind of animal, survived a flood for a long time and was piloted by a righteous man named Noah. The Kentucky Ark, however, will anchor a $149.5m theme park called Ark Encounter, which will also feature a Tower of Babel, complete with a “500-seat 5-D special effects theatre”, a replica first-century village, a walled city, a children’s zoo and an aviary.

Some see a rising tide: the park hopes to employ 900 people and draw 1.6m visitors in its first year, which should be 2014. It is 45 miles from the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which has drawn more than 1.2m visitors since it opened in 2007. It will be difficult to visit both in a single day, so all those visitors will need to sleep and eat somewhere.

But some see stormier waters. The park will be managed by a subsidiary of Answers in Genesis (AiG), which owns and runs the Creation Museum and requires its employees to adhere to a statement of faith that the Bible is “inerrant” and its assertions “factually true”. Under Kentucky’s Tourism Development Act, Ark Encounter may recoup up to 25% of its costs over its first ten years from the sales tax generated on-site. Providing tax incentives to a religious theme park makes some secular people nervous.

Yet AiG is not in charge of hiring for Ark Encounter, and the park’s employees will not need to adhere to the statement of faith. Kentucky’s Tourism Development Act provides tax incentives for any qualified tourism project. A 2009 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which includes Kentucky, said that as long as such programmes endorse “all qualified applicants”, they endorse “none of them, and accordingly [do not] run afoul of the federal or state religion clauses.” Onward, Christian tourists.