"Gulf Opportunity Zone" -- a Big EZ?

Scroll well down in this Reuters story for an interesting statement from White House economic adviser Allan Hubbard:

Hubbard said the administration will propose $2 billion to create a Gulf Opportunity Zone in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
The money would be used to spur investment and rebuilding by offering substantial tax write-offs for equipment and reconstruction costs.

Wondering if maybe a model for this might be the Bush Administration's changed approach to the HUD/USDA "Empowerment Zones": under the Clinton Administration, the EZs and similar smaller entities used a combination of cash grants, loan guarantees and tax breaks to encourage both public and private redevelopment in disadvantaged areas. Under the Bush Administration, later-designated EZs received tax breaks for private businesses along with big dollops of federal tax-exempt bond authority. Housing and New Markets Tax Credit financing deals could potentially benefit from such an approach, but not everyone has felt able to use the EZ type of incentives. For a quick summary of what Empowerment Zones offer, see IRS Publication 954 -- though of course we don't know yet if the new proposal will look anything like this.