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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > December > 22
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Editorial: Area lawmakers sit out budget balancing effort
They’ll be home for Christmas. Ohio lawmakers, that is.
Last week, they voted to suspend the fifth installment of a previously passed income tax cut. Had they not come to some agreement — which required five Republicans in the Senate to side with Democrats — they might still be in Columbus.
The suspension of the tax cut is occurring because the budget is $851 million out of balance. Gov. Ted Strickland was counting on raising just about that amount from taxes on slot machines at race tracks. But the Ohio Supreme Court said the machines couldn’t be installed without a vote of the people.
Five Republican senators and two Republican House members voted for the suspension. State Rep. Ross McGregor of Springfield was the only one from the Miami Valley among them.
State Sens. Jon Husted, of Kettering, Shannon Jones, of Springboro, and Chris Widener, of Springfield voted no.
So did state Reps. Peggy Lehner, of Kettering; Terry Blair, of Washington Twp; Seth Morgan, of Huber Heights; Jarrod Martin, of Beavercreek; and Richard Adams, of Concord Twp. in Miami County.
In the House, Democrats have a majority. No Republican votes were needed.
In the Senate, Republican leaders were not going to supply one more vote than the minimum that was needed, even though they — and specifically Sen. Husted, who was a player in the pivotal discussions — knew the tax decrease had to be delayed.
They wanted this decision to belong to the Democrats, even as they had no better idea. Sen. Husted was not going to be asked — nor was he going to volunteer — to be one of the people who made a tough call. He will likely face a strident conservative next spring in his bid to be the Republican candidate for secretary of state. Better to be politically safe than politically brave.
Sen Husted explained his vote thus:
“It wasn’t a very good bill. I tried to be constructive, to get us to work on the short- and the long-term problems in the state. I couldn’t get the governor — or, more so, the House Democrats — to focus on that.”
Sen Husted said he objected to the fact that public construction reform and sentencing reform — both of which would save the state money in the long run — were not part of the package. (Both of those ideas have been pending for years, including when Republicans controlled Columbus).
He is not critical of the Republicans who broke ranks, saying said he understand the needs of the Senate leadership to resolve the stalemate.
Acknowledging a problem, while taking a pass on voting for the solution, does not count for much.
Sen. Husted notes that he “did not grandstand,” pointing out that he did not make a floor speech or send out a press release decrying the decision.
That stands in stark contrast to former U.S. Rep. John Kasich, who is expected to be Gov. Strickland’s opponent next year.
He pronounced that “after nearly a year of budget blunders, broken promises, erroneous revenue projections, flip flops, and timid leadership, Ted Strickland increased taxes on Ohio families and businesses.”
Furthermore, Mr. Kasich said Ohio is consumed by a “toxic culture of tax and spending.”
Wow.
Makes you wonder where he’s been for the last two years while the budget was being cut repeatedly and deeply.
Gov. Strickland is no hero in the settlement. Even when he knew he was probably going to have to take this route, he kept pretending otherwise, which gave permission to Republicans to bury their heads in the sand and stick their feet in cement with regard to a tax cut delay.
Meanwhile, the problem is fixed only temporarily. Ohio’s current two-year budget has something like $6 billion in one-time money in it; in 18 months, the state could be looking at a $8 billion hole in a $50 billion spending plan.
The state remains in trouble. Willingness to work together to confront the problem is hard to see.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetTed Strickland: Federal money needed to spur business lending
This commentary is written by Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.
When you’re in a race, you go as fast as you can to try to win. That’s how we understand competition. But it doesn’t always work that way.
There are several tracks in the NASCAR circuit where competitors are required to use restrictor plates, a device that limits the maximum speed of all cars. You can see that the horsepower is there, the skill is there, the potential is there.
But the cars are slowed because an impediment holds them back.
When you have a superior product, you make as much of it as you can and serve as many customers as you can to try to maximize your profit. That’s how we understand the business world. But it doesn’t always work that way.
Lines of credit are the restrictor plates on our businesses, especially small and medium-sized manufacturers. You can see that the facilities are there, the know-how is there, and the leadership is there.
But our companies are slowed because of an impediment.
Across Ohio, business people have told me time and again that lack of capital impedes them from expanding and competing. According to The Manufacturing Council, its member businesses are echoing those concerns in every corner of the nation as sound companies face this credit crunch.
Credit is drying up because a sour economy has made bankers leery of being bankers. In Tuscarawas County, SUPERB Industries grew out of a family business started in a two-car garage 23 years ago. Today it offers precision stampings and injection molding for customers across the globe.
Sales for 2009 are up 15 percent, and orders for 2010 are up 45 percent. SUPERB has increased its workforce by 25 percent.
But company officials say they’re not sure they can secure enough working capital to sustain this rate of growth and job creation.
When U.S. companies cannot afford to grow, we have a problem. And if we don’t fix this problem, we might as well ask China how many more of our jobs it would like. Powered by relatively modest loans, we can strengthen industries in Ohio and across the country.
According to the Motor and Equipment Manufacturer’s Association, an auto supply manufacturer doing $100 million in sales annually needs about $5 million in flexible capital to cover costs.
Recently, President Barack Obama has spoken out on the need for banks to make capital available for small businesses. He has articulated a framework to revitalize American manufacturing.
Now we need to put a program in place to see that funds actually flow to job-creating manufacturers.
That’s why I’m calling on the federal government to dedicate funds from the TARP, or in the jobs bill being considered by Congress, to stimulate capital lending to small and medium-sized manufacturers. They need working capital to meet existing orders and to pay for the retooling and retrofitting necessary to increase efficiency and pursue new markets, technologies and products.
States would serve as the intermediary, identifying a network of banks and community lenders that wish to participate and assuring that federal funds quickly find their way to manufacturers ready to retain and create jobs.
Because they would be allocating federal funds alongside their own funds, banks and credit unions could make lending decisions without the overwhelming reluctance that guides many of their decisions now.
And as businesses repay these loans, the funds would be rolled back to provide capital to others to create even more jobs.
In Ohio and across the nation, more than nine out of 10 manufacturers are small and medium-sized businesses employing fewer than 500 people. These manufacturing positions pay 20 percent more than service-sector employment. And, each manufacturing job indirectly supports four to five additional jobs.
By taking these simple, but essential, steps, we will put capital in the hands of people who can use it to create jobs.
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.
That’s not just folk wisdom; it’s the essence of how the economy should work. But today, if you don’t have access to capital, you can build a better mousetrap and still not be able to bring it to market.
In a federal and state commitment to lending capital to small manufacturers, there’s logic, there’s efficiency, and there are jobs.
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TweetMartin Gottlieb: ‘90-minute market’s’ day comes 25 years later?
When I got to Dayton in 1984, the first piece of vocabulary I picked up was “90-minute market.” Somebody mentioned it to me in describing the town. And it was splashed all over the cover of a phone book, something incoming journalists turn to often. It seemed to be important.
My first reaction was that these people have a strange way of using the language. First you have to understand the word “market.” It’s the capitalist’s word for place; as in city or metropolitan area. That much I knew.
A 90-minute market is not a place that’s within 90 minutes of an international airport or interstate crossroads. It’s not a place that takes 90 minutes to drive across.
Every place is a 90-minute market. The term doesn’t really take on meaning until you put an adjective in front of it.
A good 90-minute market is a place that is within a 90-minute drive of lots and lots of people. A bad 90-minute market is one that isn’t.
If this way of using the language had caught on, you would today be a three-octave singer and four-sport athlete, just not necessarily a very good one.
The reason the 90-minute-market thing was on the local phone book was that Dayton was a surprisingly good 90-minute market. It was the ninth best in the country. You wouldn’t expect that of a city so small and separate from other metropolitan areas. Dayton is not, after all, a high-ranking 30-minute market.
Particularly striking was this: of the 15 best 90-minute markets, only two did not have a Major League Baseball team. Having such a team is, of course, the official definition of “big city.”
The two were Dayton and Columbus.
The designation seemed like a great selling point for Dayton, at least when aimed at people who understood the concept:
Locate your business in a great 90-minute market which also happens to have interstates going every which way, but doesn’t have the regular 30-minute traffic gridlocks associated with bigger cities.
But the pitch never seemed to do much for Dayton, did it?
I used to wonder if maybe 90 minutes wasn’t the number that businesses wanted. Was the country full of 30-minute businesses and two-and-a-half-hour businesses? The governor at the time, Dick Celeste, thought in the same terms as those promoting the 90-minute-market idea. He declared Ohio to be “The Heart of It All.” He threw around some stunning numbers about what percentage of Americans were within 500 miles of Ohio.
He didn’t, however, call Ohio a 500-mile state. Maybe that was the problem: No coordination of slogans.
Or maybe the country’s businesses were looking for 200-mile states, or 750-mile states?
What we know is that being an excellent 90-minute market in an excellent 500-mile state didn’t keep Dayton from becoming a terrific “1,000-mile job market” (a possible designation for a place that seems like it’s 1,000 miles from the good jobs).
Now, however, there are signs that Dayton’s failure to thrive was all some sort of misunderstanding, and that location, location, location really does matter.
There’s the new Caterpillar deal in Clayton, involving a distribution center. There’s the Collective Brands (Payless and Stride Rite) distribution center that moved into Brookville last year after the company decided to close distribution centers in Canada and Indiana.
There’s the new GM warehouse in Trotwood, and a growing Honda warehouse presence in Troy.
Officials who are focused on economic development say this is the local future, or a big part.
Some of us might be destined to remain a little confused: why now?
Maybe the people who were pushing in the same direction in the early 1980s had something, but missed something else.
Dayton was a good 90-minute market back then, just not a good 5-year or 15-year market? That must be it.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Local Business, Martin Gottlieb
TweetUDRI gets new space, recognition it deserves
A half-century ago, a college math professor who saw an opportunity for research won a $10,200 contract to take raw military data and convert it to readable graphs.
The money supported the work of Charles Collins, who was a Marianist priest, paid a few student stipends and bought some magnifying glasses. It was the start of a research partnership between the University of Dayton and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that led to the creation in 1956 of the University of Dayton Research Institute.
Today the institute has 1,400 contracts, 414 employees and $96 million in sponsored research. Soon, it will move to the former NCR world headquarters. UD announced Monday that it has bought the complex for $18 million to house the institute and accommodate its continuing growth.
That news comes on the heels of UDRI landing a six-year Air Force grant worth $49.5 million. The money will support more study toward the goal of some day producing more efficient, heat-resistant and less polluting jet fuel.
The new grant, which builds on a similar 2003 grant for $31.5 million, is a big win for UDRI and for Dayton. Of course, it’s good news that the new money will be spent here, not somewhere else. But the community’s gain goes beyond today’s economic impact. The growth of UDRI is a model for long-term incubation of idea centers that could be the basis of Dayton’s future economy. If a breakthrough comes in an important area like greener jet fuel, the benefits of making that discovery here can ripple.
Meanwhile, being in the NCR building will give the research institute more visibility and cachet. Locating in this first-class environment is a statement about its role at UD and in the community.
The inventors who established Dayton’s reputation for innovation in the last century — the Wright brothers, Charles Kettering, John Patterson — started small the way the Rev. Collins did with UDRI. In time, industry giants like the Wright Airplane Company, Delco and National Cash Register emerged.
Now they are gone and Dayton is looking for its next generation of employers. Starting small still works, as UDRI’s growth demonstrates. The process can be repeated. The key is capitalizing on local assets like a workforce with high-tech expertise and a proximity to Wright-Patterson.
Consider the fuel contract. UDRI Director John Leland said the institute’s first government fuel contract primarily resulted from one person’s proposal 25 years ago. Now more than 35 people work on the project at least half-time. More will be added when the new money arrives.
Down the line, if the institute continues to beat a path forward in fuel technology, Mr. Leland said he could envision new companies sprouting, or established firms opening offices here, to be involved in the research.
In jet fuel, that day is still probably a decade or more away. But Mr. Leland said he meets smart innovators in high-tech fields every day who remind him of the Wrights, Pattersons and Ketterings. They’re dreamers with big ideas who need to try, to fail and to try again. UDRI gives them a chance to partner so they can chase those dreams by leveraging government money and the institute’s independent resources.
Success might not come in the form of the next high-tech giant like Google or Microsoft. Instead, it might look more like a collection of small and medium-sized companies that grow and expand.
A thriving local economy can be built that way, too.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Education, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
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