Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 21, 1994 TAG: 9412210092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But the director of the Blacksburg-based Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement said COTA is far different from the incubator-like Center for Innovative Technology in Reston.
"The governor felt he didn't want a mini-CIT in Western Virginia," said Rob Lockridge, manager of the state Department of Planning and Budget's Health Education and Human Resource Section. "We're spending $8 million a year at CIT. ... From a taxpayer's perspective, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a duplication of services."
COTA's mission is professional training, Executive Director Jim Buffer said. CIT's focus is research and development of new technologies and administrative support for emerging small and medium-size companies that use that technology, CIT President Robert Templin said.
"It's entirely two different products," Buffer said. "They're producing widgets. We're concerned with people, human education and corporate education."
COTA, which would lose all its $700,000 in state start-up funding under the Allen proposal, would install an academic smorgasbord of eminent professors as scholars-in-residence at the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center.
In theory, they would attract many business, industrial and government leaders to educational seminars at the high-technology conference center and the hotel. If that project succeeded, profits would be channeled back into COTA, and taxpayer funding would end.
COTA's training programs would focus on education, business management, government and nonprofit administration, engineering and physical sciences, and biotechnology and life sciences.
By contrast, CIT is focused on in-state development of emerging technology in the fields of the environment and energy, advanced manufacturing and electronics, biotechnology and medicine, aerospace, and telecommunications and information systems.
CIT also funds business incubators, most of them run by Virginia colleges, Templin said. It would lose $4 million of its usual $8 million state appropriation under the Allen plan.
Buffer said COTA could lure to Virginia businesses that want to be close to the kind of continuing education and training programs the conference center would provide.
Because of COTA, one large manufacturer already has put Virginia on its short list of possible expansion sites, Buffer said. He declined to name the company, but said it plans to build a 500,000-square-foot "light metal manufacturing" plant that would pay $25 million in wages annually.
The Allen proposals drew criticism from local political leaders and Democrats representing the Roanoke Valley in the state legislature.
If the General Assembly approves the COTA cut, it will represent a budgetary about-face that directly affects the economic development of Roanoke and its citizens, Mayor David Bowers said.
"The city of Roanoke has been committed to that hotel, to make it work. We thought that the commonwealth was committed as well. The governor's now decided he can shirk that commitment. We think he should hold to it," Bowers said.
"It's just absolutely beyond me," said Del. Chip Woodrum, D-Roanoke. "I cannot understand for the life of me how a governor in January and February can say, 'Spend $163 million of taxpayers' money on some kind of theme park in Northern Virginia,' and in December say 'We can't spend $700,000 on a high-tech conference center in a very important area of the state.'''
by CNB