From the United States Congress comes this good news for the University of Maine: The new Transportation Bill contains $1.2 million for wood-composites research, some of which may find its way to the school’s Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center.

From the state of Ohio comes this interesting news for the university and for all working to build a new Maine economy: Ohio lawmakers, researchers and businesses are working to turn the Dayton area into Composite Valley, the space-age material equivalent of California’s fabled Silicon Valley.

Kettering, a Dayton suburb, is the home of the National Composite Center. It’s a modest operation, located in a once-abandoned Defense Department warehouse. As in Maine, researchers are working to make this material ever stronger, lighter and cheaper. As in Maine, a primary initial focus is to use composites in big public-works projects. The Ohio Legislature has funded the construction of 100 composite bridges; each of the state’s 88 counties will get at least one.

Here’s where it gets interesting, here’s where the story is, for Maine, one of those glass half-full, half-empty affairs. The Ohio project is moving beyond researching the use of composites in large-scale projects to the creation of everyday consumer items, everything from automobile fenders and pickup-truck beds to furniture, house shingles, even fishing rods. It’s the development part of R&D.

For Maine, this project, along with the establishment of another major composites-research center in Oak Ridge, Tenn., confirms that composites are indeed a material with a virtually limitless future. Ohio is state with extensive experience in manufacturing — the participation of the steel and automobile industries only adds to the confirmation.

The half-empty part is that the market place likes size and speed. The innovator who gets a product out first and in sufficient numbers wins. The UMaine center has done extremely well in attracting federal grants — especially in transportation and defense. Maine voters and lawmakers should be proud of their recent investments in R&D. Now it’s time to start making stuff.

The driving force behind the Ohio project is the realization by lawmakers that employment in the state’s traditional heavy industries, particularly steel and automobiles, is in decline — even when more is being made, it’s being made with fewer workers. That’s why the Ohio project includes state-backed financing for composite-manufacturing business startups.

The parallel with Maine is unmistakable, especially Northern Maine, where the shoe industry has all but vanished and pulp and paper is downsizing. The region has experienced workers, available buildings, the raw materials. What it often doesn’t have is access to affordable capital.

It’s not hard to imagine dozens of small and medium manufacturing plants throughout northern Maine, turning out an endless variety of useful, highly value-added consumer products. As Maine lawmakers prepare for the upcoming session, they would do well to look at what’s happening in Ohio and imagining it happening here.