When you’re the president and CEO of a major national real estate development firm, it’s best to develop a thick skin. It’s also probably not a good idea to post public comments to a news website when you’re pissed off at 1 o’clock in the morning. Yet that’s exactly what Steve Marks, CEO of Tower Investments in California did upon reading my story Tuesday on the troubled Elk Run BioBusiness Park his company is developing in Pine Island, Minnesota.

“There are two things that we know about the universe,” Abraham Algadi said. “We can only control the things we can control. The rest, we leave to a higher power.” Algadi is not a priest or philosopher, at least professionally. Algadi, the city administrator for Pine Island, Minnesota, was referring to the fate of the much maligned, often delayed Elk Run BioBusiness Park.

The incoming Republican leadership in the Minnesota state legislature already is making good on its promises to streamline government. Last month, GOP officials unveiled a significantly slimmer committees structure, designed to eliminate redundancy and speed the notoriously slow business of making policy and passing laws. One casualty of the slimmer structure will be The House Committee on Biosciences and Workforce Development.

Can’t we just all get along?Tim Mahoney and Tim Mulcahy share a lot more than their first names and initials. The two men have been allies on everything from angel investment tax credits, the creation of the Minnesota Science & Technology Authority and the need for Minnesota to more fully convert its formidable research assets [...]

Tim Mulcahy’s eyes lit up as the thought suddenly seized him.“Here’s what we can propose,” said Mulcahy, vice president of research at the University of Minnesota. “Perhaps the university is too risk averse in our assessment” of potential startups.“We will make any of those technologies and potential companies that we pass on immediately available for [...]

Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-St. Paul) has good reason to feel a fresh spring in his step these days.He helped pass long overdue tax credits for angel investors and research and development spending, a feat that earned him a prime spot (second from the left) behind Gov. Tim Pawlenty when the presumed Republican presidential candidate signed [...]

One of the more intriguing races in Minnesota this fall concerns state District 40B in Bloomington, outside of the Twin Cities. There, Republican newbie Sanu Patel-Zellinger is challenging longtime Democrat incumbent Rep. Ann Lenczewski.Patel-Zellinger is unlikely to unseat Lenczewski- you don’t get re-elected five straight times without knowing what you’re doing. But Patel-Zellinger’s campaign could [...]

Rep. Ann Lenczweski, the powerful House Tax Committee chairwoman, has unexpectedly proposed a bill of her own. Instead of awarding tax credits to investors who fund early-stage, high tech start-ups, the bill provides grants directly to the companies.

For the past two years, the Minnesota House committee that oversees bioscience development held a special hearing on why Minnesota needs an angel investor tax credit to boost high tech companies. And for the past two years, nothing happened.