From R to D

A bond to strengthen Maine’s nascent research industry needs crucial support today from the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee. The bond includes money for established programs that provide low-interest loans to qualified businesses and promote job growth in rural areas, and it supports two new university facilities that would move research from the good-idea stage into development and commercialization. It’s the next step for getting back far more than the state’s investment in R&D.

If approved by legislators and, next November, by voters, LD 2190 would spend $25.4 million for economic development. The money breaks down as follows: $5 million for economic investment through low-interest loans to develop and redevelop commercial facilities; $5 million to improve access to credit for businesses that “demonstrate the ability to survive, preserve and create jobs and repay obligations;” $5 million to recapitalize a revolving loan fund that provides region development money; $400,000 to leverage $4 million in federal funding to redevelop the naval base in Winter Harbor and Gouldsboro into an education and research center; and $10 million for the development facilities at the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine. The bill is similar in some ways to the King administration’s $31 million development proposal but the governor’s plan does not include the funding – which would be matched by other sources – for the universities.

Lawmakers for years have urged these two institutions of higher education to work together. Here is an example of them doing that for the benefit of the entire state. Their Advanced Manufacturing Assistance Initiative would test and analyze product ideas from Maine businesses, proving the production space, technology, faculty expertise and student labor to give start-up or expanding businesses an affordable place to experiment. The two schools have approximately 1,500 engineering students biological, civil, chemical, computer, mechanical, spatial and electrical engineering and physics. Like UMaine’s pulp and paper testing lab, these facilities would tell Maine manufacturers whether their ideas had promise or how to improve them.

The plan doesn’t originate with the universities but with the business community. A survey of 70 manufacturers not long ago listed the lack of a product-development site, commonly present in other states, as a significant inhibitor to economic development here. LD 2190 would provide a place unique in Maine to apply the tens of millions of dollars of research now being done to see what specific products could be marketed from the work. It takes the investment out of the lab and into the plant, and is essential if Maine is not merely going to develop these ideas but also profit from the production of their result.

The Legislature’s Business and Economic Development Committee has unanimously supported this approach, but the Appropriations Committee is decisive in shaping the final bond package. Its members are well aware of the growing importance R&D to Maine and have taken the lead before in supporting bond questions to encourage it. Their leadership is needed again today.