EDITORIAL
Our View: Strickland has to own up to his plans
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Democrat Ted Strickland can't be allowed to ruin or compromise former Republican Gov. Bob Taft's Third Frontier program without somebody putting up a fight.
The Third Frontier is a 10-year $1.6 billion initiative aimed at creating new high-tech jobs and increasing the amount of sophisticated research that's occurring in the state and at its colleges.
Extras
For high-tech businesses, research projects are like magnets. Companies want to be near, and participate in, the research that relates to their fuel cells, their high-tech composites or their new drugs.
In the last state budget, Gov. Strickland — with the Republican Legislature going along — siphoned off 20 percent of the $379 million that is supposed to go into the Third Frontier initiative over the next two years. Most of the diverted money — $56 million — is slated to go to the Board of Regents to lure researchers and to support research projects that have been blessed by the regents.
Another $20 million is going to promote broadband access in rural areas, and $2 million is earmarked for an economic development initiative being promoted by the Dayton Development Coalition.
Earmarking this money for pet projects is wrong. When they were asked to approve selling bonds to help fund the Third Frontier program, voters were told repeatedly that the politicians were committed to doling it out in a competitive process. When former Gov. Taft was in charge, the National Academy of Sciences, or an independent third party, would vet grant requests; the politicians had to keep their grubby mitts off.
Gov. Strickland said during the campaign that he was going to make sure that all areas of the state got broadband, but he shouldn't be using Third Frontier money to do that, even in the name of promoting economic development.
He's bound by former Gov. Taft's commitment that Third Frontier dollars won't be turned into a slush fun for the politicians if only because of the mere sensibleness of that.
If universities and their business partners have to compete for this money, and if they know they're going to be judged by scientists not politicians, that increases the likelihood that their ideas will be good ones. The sharper their proposals, the more likely it is that they can attract federal or private research money, and ultimately create new jobs.
Moreover, once the politicians start tapping this money, they will not stop.
This isn't the only way that the governor is cutting into Ohio's commitment to research. At his instigation, elderly homeowners are soon going to get property tax relief that will be funded by selling off future proceeds from Ohio's share of the money that tobacco companies agreed to pay states for having poisoned people. Tens of millions had been set aside to support biomedical research.
In each of the three years between 2010 and 2012, between $30 million and $50 million won't be available any more and will instead go for the tax break. That trade-off hardly got any attention when everyone was hyping the tax cut earlier this spring.
New governors assuredly are entitled to have their own priorities. But if Gov. Strickland is going to reverse course on the principles and goals of the Third Frontier, he needs to come out and say that, so there can be a real debate about any big changes.
Raiding the program — and hoping people won't care — is not going to fly.
