through the reporting of Chris Knight at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise<\/a> that Trudeau Institute is considering relocating away from Saranac Lake, a move that would devastate that village’s economy.<\/p>\nIf not for Knight’s aggressive pursuit of this story, we might have been taken by surprise once again.<\/p>\n
It is, in a word, unacceptable.<\/p>\n
And there is a way to prevent the continued erosion of the North Country’s biggest private-sector engine.<\/p>\n
We need to create an ambitious and well-funded North Country Biomedical Association, one which ties together all the biotech, research and medical facilities in the region.<\/p>\n
This group should include state and Federal lawmakers, industry leaders, Chambers of Commerce, college presidents, and regional economic development groups.<\/p>\n
They should move quickly to develop a needs-assessment for the industry:\u00a0 What do bio-medical companies need to survive and thrive in our rural area?\u00a0 What can we do to bring more companies here?<\/p>\n
Do we need regulatory reform?\u00a0 Subsidies?\u00a0 Better or different kinds of government support?\u00a0 Start-up capital?\u00a0 Better or different kinds of broadband access?<\/p>\n
Right now, we don’t know.<\/p>\n
Once we understand our deficits, the NCBA should work to eliminate them.<\/p>\n
Trudeau, to cite one example, has indicated that it needs a wide array of additional facilities and programs in order to remain anchored in the North Country.<\/p>\n
The Association should help to develop those resources, including partnerships with area hospitals and clinics that might allow Trudeau to do research trials with human patients right here.<\/p>\n
The organization should also begin rebranding the North Country as a bio-medical hotspot, a place that combines high quality of life, affordability, and a welcoming business climate.<\/p>\n
It should build partnerships with regional universities and hospitals to make sure we have a ready workforce that is well-trained and well-supported.<\/p>\n
They should cultivate a social atmosphere, so that the young, highly trained workers who come here don’t feel isolated.<\/p>\n
The NCBA should then begin recruiting aggressively, using our current robust industry to leverage more companies, more start-ups, and more innovation.<\/p>\n
Perhaps most importantly, this Association should act as an early-warning system, identifying and reacting early to potential problems with anchor companies such as Wyeth, Biotech, Pfizer, and Trudeau.<\/p>\n
To begin this process, state and local leaders need to reassess their priorities quickly.<\/p>\n
Franklin County currently spends more than $400,000 a year promoting tourism.\u00a0 That’s what it looks like when you care about an industry.<\/p>\n
How much does the county spend to support Trudeau, and Alice Hyde, and Adirondack Medical Center, and Bionique Testing Laboratories, and the nursing program at North Country Community College?<\/p>\n
The state of New York spends millions of dollars a year on the Olympic Regional Development Authority.\u00a0 Again, that’s what caring looks like.<\/p>\n
And those may be reasonable investments.<\/p>\n
But the truth is that much of the tourism industry provides jobs that are seasonal, with low-end wages.\u00a0 What’s more, much of that employment winds up going to foreign workers.<\/p>\n
Imagine, by way of contrast, if we were spending comparable dollars to support our biomedical industry, working to support private sector companies that offer real jobs and real economic opportunity.<\/p>\n
What if the North Country’s biomedical companies knew that a central organization would be spending a million dollars a year supporting them, helping them with marketing, with infrastructure development and other needs?<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the current panic over Trudeau misses the larger point.<\/p>\n
Unless we begin to nurture this industry as a whole, we will see more and more of these crucial assets slip through our fingers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here’s a fact you may not know:\u00a0 The bio-medical industry is, far and away, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3165,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164\/revisions\/3165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}