Ohio Third Frontier supporters hit the grassroots campaign trail

Supporters of the Ohio Third Frontier kicked off their campaign Tuesday morning to woo voters to renew the state’s largest economic development program by voting Yes on Issue 1 during the May primary election.

Third Frontier is the $1.35 billion, 10-year effort to rekindle Ohio’s economy by investing in technology research, development, commercialization and entrepreneurship in five industry clusters, including biomedical.

The program that had a $6.6 billion economic impact, created 41,300 jobs and returned $10 for every $1 invested by the state in its first seven years runs dry by mid-2012. People like Eric Fingerhut, Ohio Board of Regents chancellor and Third Frontier chairman, are trying to enlist people who have been touched by the program to join the campaign for its renewal. On Feb. 3, the Ohio General Assembly approved a $700 million bond issue to renew the program for four years — Issue 1 — for the May ballot.

Though United For Jobs and Ohio’s Future has recruited political heavy-hitters like co-chairs Jo Ann Davidson and David Wilhelm, hopes to raise $3.5 million for operations, and enjoys bipartisan support from elected officials, as well as economic development, academic and industry leaders statewide — not to mention passionate support from beneficiaries — it faces some hurdles.

Voter turnout for primary elections tends to be light. After doing a poll last summer, Ohio Business Roundtable leaders realized the average voter in the state has little awareness of the program. And supporters have a short window before absentee voting begins at the end of March to introduce voters to Third Frontier.

So the campaign is going grassroots. “I know a little about running campaigns and having been on the ballot,” Fingerhut, who served Cuyahoga County in both the Ohio  Senate and House during the 1990s through the mid-2000s, told an audience of about 200 at the campaign kick-off in Independence. “The single most important thing that happens in campaigns is word-of-mouth.

“We need the ads, we need the mailings,” he said. “But people talking to each other makes all the difference in the world. If this matters to you, and you tell your friends and neighbors, then they will go out and vote for it.”

Third Frontier has helped all of Ohio’s five regions by supporting technology entrepreneurship programs or industry clusters, said Dorothy Baunach, founding chief executive of NorTech, the technology economic development organization in Northeast Ohio, now a special advisor on Third Frontier to the Ohio Business Roundtable.

Baunach has criss-crossed Ohio since last summer to raise Third Frontier statements of support from most of the major business groups and chambers of commerce.

She pointed kick-off attendees to some of the statistics that emerged from a December analysis (pdf) led by Third Frontier Commissioner Rick Fearon, who is vice chairman, and chief financial and planning officer for Eaton Corp. in Cleveland. The program has:

• Returned an average 22 percent per year on the state’s investment
• Returned 9 percent per year in additional sales and income taxes generated by funded companies
• Could pay back the state’s investment with those tax receipts by 2014
• Created 571 companies
• Created 48,000 jobs
• Helped boost venture capital investments in Ohio companies an average 22 percent per year, versus the national average of 9 percent
• Helped to more than double Ohio university licensing revenues (a measure of technology transfer)

Taesun Cha, vice president of operations for Kent Displays, the developer of flexible, low-power liquid crystal displays, told the kick-off audience his company has received more than $13 million in Third Frontier grants. The program has had “a monumental impact on our company. It has helped us open new markets and transform our product.” The growth helped the company nearly double its employment to 75 in the the last two years, Cha said.

Jim Garrett, chief executive of Vadxx Energy in Cleveland, which is figuring out how to make synthetic crude oil from petroleum-based waste, said his company has been touched by many Third Frontier-supported organizations in Ohio.

Campaign co-chair Davidson, the first woman speaker of the Ohio House in the mid-1990s and c0-chair of the National Republican Committee, asked the audience for help in crafting the message for voters. “We want to empower you to be part of the campaign,” she said.

“This is a remarkable moment in Ohio’s history,” said Wilhelm, the other co-chair, who managed Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, is a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and has been a venture capitalist for two decades. While Washington is gridlocked over health care reform, “here in Ohio, we have come together behind a remarkable program called Third Frontier. Republicans and Democrats. Business and labor. Cleveland, and where I grew up, Athens,” he said.

“We need to tell our story. You are the faces of this campaign. You are the organization of this campaign,” Wilhelm said. “We are not going to wait for somebody else to come bail us out, we are going to build an economy worthy of the people of this state.”

Cleveland attorney and political campaign veteran Matthew Cox is managing the campaign. Cox pointed to the campaign’s Web site — launched at midnight Tuesday — as a clearinghouse for information about the campaign to pass Issue 1. He asked audience members for email address lists “so we can get the message out,” and plans to use social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to spread the campaign message.