My take on S 1501, the American Job Creation and Investment Promotion Reform Act of 2015

When it was SB 774, it was a good EB-5 improvement bill. With Sen. Grassley's participation, the bill has become an unmitigated nightmare!  I cannot support this bill, as written, and cannot encourage my congressional leadership in the five states where ACFI operates, support it.

Summary by Boyd F. Campbell, 2015-07-15, please take note:

The bill provides for a five-year extension of the regional center program.  I would rather see Congress make this oldest "pilot" program permanent.
It reworkes TEA classifications to encourage more rural (towns under 20,000 population) development and not allow aggregation of census tract or commuting pattern configurations. OMB has cautioned Congress for years not to rely upon Metropolitan Statistical Areas, which is uses for statistical purposes only.  There are many rural areas within MSAs.
It increases investment amounts to $800,000 for TEA projects and $1.2M for non TEA projects. These increases are unnecessary and create confusion in the EB-5 marketplace.
The bill creates an extra-judicial framework so that DHS may, allegedly, have better oversight of regional centers. This extra-judicial framework does not affect independent EB-5 projects unrelated to regional centers, which are usually far more risky.  Finally, the bill requires regional centers to pay for this extra-judicial framework with a mandatory assessment of $20,000 per year.  This is disgusting and is beneath Congress's role. The federal laws we already have on the books today are more than sufficient to police the EB-5 Program.
The bill changes job creation calculations, requiring direct employees for a new commercial enterprise, only 30 percent of jobs may be created by non EB-5 capital.  This will make many EB-5 projects unattractive.
It would make improvements in reliability of processing times.  It would establish a 120-day processing time, on average, for exemplars, a imit of 150 days for I-526 petitions and 180 days for I-924s. This is a nice idea, but it won't happen. As more and more USCIS employees are hired for the EB-5 Program, processing times become longer and longer. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it's true.
The bill would introduce a premium-processing fee to expedite petitions and areduce processing times. This won't happen either.
It removes TEA determinations from the states and puts USCIS in charge of TEA determinations.  This is a
REALLY bad idea.  Do the senators know how long it will take USCIS to make TEA determinations?  Months. Many months.  I get them done in my states (five in the Southeast) in less than a week.
Unless SB 1501 is heavily revised in accordance with my comments above, I must urge the senators in the five states in which my regional center operates to vote no on this bill.