Tuss pointed to some victories in the three-year effort. Beavercreek-based civil engineering firm Woolpert is competing for “fairly large” international contracts with two Israeli partners, for example, and the subsidiary of another company opened an office in Dayton nine months ago, he said.
But Tuss also said international business development “is way harder than I thought it would be.” The effort may have been stymied by a savage recession and a general lack of capital among some firms considering a partnership, he said.
From January 2009, the total investment in the effort was $300,000, with that funding coming primarily from private-sector sources, Tuss said. Delegations of local officials visited Israel at least twice in the past few years, while Kerry Taylor, director of the Ohio Aerospace Hub based in Dayton, also visited the nation. Officials from Haifa and Israeli defense and aerospace companies have come to Dayton as well.
Driving those interactions was the idea that having the nation’s largest Air Force base, Wright-Patterson, nearby would draw Israeli firms. And that’s still the case, Tuss told the CIC board. It was the base that drew Elbit Systems of America — a subsidiary of Israeli company Elbit Systems — to the area, he said.
“They know who we are,” Tuss said of Israeli companies. “They know what our strengths are.”
“Three years into this thing, I am more convinced than ever that this country has a lot of opportunities on both sides of the relationship,” Montgomery County Commissioner Dan Foley said.
Foley said the county wanted to learn of local firms who today have business relationships with partners in Israel.
Last April, Attir — former chief executive of Kolmir Water Technologies — met with the board and offered a review of his work, saying he had contacted 90 Israeli companies in two years. But he also pronounced himself unsatisfied with the results to that point.
“The bottom line is I am not satisfied with the deliverables,” he said at the time.
