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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 > 2010 > August > 22
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Editorial: Austin exit built, now comes the hard part
The Austin Road interchange had a long history even before the day it officially opened last week. Meanwhile, its future is far from written.
Dayton’s first new interchange in decades has been talked about literally for decades. Before prominent office parks, corporate headquarters and hospitals were clustering on the I-75 corridor between southern Montgomery County and northern Hamilton County, some local leaders understood that the Austin Pike area was primo real estate.
It has highway visibility; it is a greenfield; it is close to places that were, or could be, idyllic bedroom communities; and it is within a manageable drive of workers who are scattered from the Kentucky border to Miami County.
Still, it has taken years to build the $20-million-plus exit that Montgomery County believes can compete with developments like Union Centre and Liberty Way and that simultaneously is the antidote to the maddening congestion in the Dayton Mall area.
To get to this day, a special entity — the Montgomery County Transportation Improvement District — had to be created as a work-around to the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission. It was long opposed to the exit and, at other times, unable to push the levers to get the necessary blessings or money.
So, yes, a celebration is called for. But to think of the completion — which did come in ahead of the actual construction schedule — as a fine hour is to forget the myriad stops and starts.
The next phase will be even more difficult. Though planners say that in the next 10 to 20 years, the development could be home to 28,000 workers, that is predicated on recruiting a bunch of businesses. (Does anyone know where people get these numbers and how they can talk confidently about a timeline that is so far out and that has a built-in, decade-long fudge factor?)
Under the best of circumstances, attracting that number of jobs will take time. And we’re not living in the best of circumstances.
Of course, it’s significant that Teradata, the NCR spinoff, has located at the interchange and has signed a long-term lease. Yes, it’s important that Motoman Robotics will be locating there and wants to expand. Both of those firms could have gone outside Montgomery County or outside of Ohio.
But they are not new businesses to the region, and, given the tens of millions of federal, state and local government dollars that have gone into the entire project (not just the interchange), the real measure of success will be how many truly new businesses are brought in. If jobs just move from one local spot to another, there’s no net gain.
RG Properties, the developer that owns or controls most of the land around the interchange, is a local company. People who’ve worked on the Austin project are quick to say that Dayton is fortunate to have a local person involved. They say Randy Gunlock is a “patient” developer, intent on building something that adds more to the communtiy than the jobs associated with a gas station or an economy hotel.
How long he’ll be patient remains to be seen. The recession has set back his plans, and he’s scaled down his expectations more than once. Initially, the goal was to attract a top-drawer hotel and build a mega-office complex. Then he floated the concept of an entertainment complex with a hockey arena. Neither proposal worked out.
Mr. Gunlock and the Montgomery County officials who have rustled up the money to make the interchange a reality are in this venture together. They both need it to be successful, and success will be defined by the quality of the development and the number of genuinely new jobs that are on the grounds in five and 10 years.
But there’s something important that differentiates Mr. Gunlock and the governments that put up the money. The investment Mr. Gunlock has made is his own. He’s not just a custodian of somebody else’s cash.
That financial pressure can help Montgomery County it its efforts to land new jobs, because it has a supremely motivated partner. But, at the same time, Mr. Gunlock will want to see that he’s not totally on his own in identifying and wooing the sorts of companies that all parties adamantly say they’re holding out for.
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