COLUMBUS, Ohio — Backers of the Ohio Third Frontier are mounting a campaign to market the state’s biggest-ever economic development program to voters who will be asked to renew and expand the program in May.
Still in its formative stage, the campaign already includes a bi-weekly electronic magazine called HiVelocity, which partly aims to demystify Third Frontier by telling its success stories through people and businesses.
It also includes a glossy annual report that focuses on job creation, two economic impact studies and word-of-mouth testimonials aimed at elected officials who are key to meeting a series of legislative deadlines to get the program on the May 4 ballot. A campaign committee is being formed.
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Though the program has been judged an economic success by two recent analyses, the average Ohio voter probably doesn’t know what Third Frontier is. This reality has weighed heavily on the nine commissioners and 16 advisers who sit on boards that govern the project, as well as on the researchers, economic development professionals and business people who have received millions of dollars in grants from the program scheduled to end in 2012.
Third Frontier leaders — hoping to keep the grant dollars flowing without interruption — started talking about renewing the program more than a year ago. At the Dec. 17 meeting of the commissioners and advisers, Eric Fingerhut, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents and a Third Frontier commissioner, summed up the results of the talks by asking and answering four questions:
- Should we renew Third Frontier? Yes.
- If the program is renewed, should we change its format? No.
- For how much should we renew it? $1 billion-worth of bonds awarded over five years.
- When should we renew it? May 2010.
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Third Frontier was started in 2002 by Gov. Bob Taft as a 10-year, $1.6 billion project to invest in technologies that would generate products, jobs and prosperity for state residents. Today, the program invests in five industry clusters: advanced and alternative energy, biomedical, advanced materials, instruments-controls-electronics and advanced propulsion.
Third Frontier does its investing through Wright Centers of Innovation — large, well-equipped research centers for technologies from stem cells to fuel cells, and their researchers, staff and suppliers. And it invests in entrepreneurial support programs and pre-seed investment funds.
About one-third of Third Frontier’s budget — $500 million — was raised through a bond issue approved by voters in 2005. That bond issue was rejected by voters in an earlier vote. The balance of Third Frontier money comes from the state’s general fund.
The Ohio Department of Development, which administers the project, has long struggled with measuring its impacts. Traditional measures like job and company creation don’t capture all of the program’s effects. So this summer, the department hired SRI International, a well-respected, independent research and development organization in Menlo Park, Calif., to do an economic impact study of the project.
SRI’s conclusion: In its first seven years, Third Frontier created $6.6 billion in economic impact and 41,300 jobs (pdf) by making grants of $681 million to research, development and commercialization projects at academic, research and development institutions and companies, entrepreneur-development organizations and venture capital funds.
In a separate study by business people who sit on the Third Frontier Commission and its board of advisers, and the Ohio Business Roundtable, the program has attracted $3.2 billion in grants and investments with $473 million in funded grants, created $440 million a year in product sales by funded companies and will have created 56,000 mostly high-technology jobs by the end of 2009.
One of the conclusions of the Roundtable report (pdf): Third Frontier is likely to pay for itself by 2014Â with income and sales taxes generated by organizations receiving its grants.
So proponents are beginning to use the economic impact reports, as well as the success stories and personal testimonies to get out the word on Third Frontier to average voters. In late November, Rep. Sandra Williams, a Democrat from Cleveland, and Rep. Jay Goyal, a Mansfield Democrat, got the legislative ball rolling with a plan to co-sponsor a joint resolution to place a renewal and expansion of the program on the May 2010 primary ballot.
Dorothy Baunach, special adviser on technology-based economic development for the Ohio Business Roundtable, has traveled around the state, getting resolutions of support for the renewal and expansion from major chambers of commerce.
Kristi Spears Tanner, brand manager at the Ohio Business Development Coalition, a nonprofit that markets Ohio for business and investment expansion, has been leading the effort to produce and distribute HiVelocity.
“How can we help?” asked Barbara Snyder, president of Case Western Reserve University and a Third Frontier adviser, during the group’s Dec. 17 meeting.
“Reach out to your legislators in December and January,” suggested Fingerhut, a former Ohio senator. That’s when public hearings on the renewal are being held. The Ohio General Assembly must pass joint legislative resolutions by Jan. 31 and file the resolution with the Ohio Secretary of State by Feb. 3.
