At Whitewater’s December 7th Common Council meeting, City Manager Kevin Brunner, near the beginning of the meeting, gave an update on Whitewater’s publicly-financed technology park. I have embedded the video of the session below. Brunner begins talking about the park at 2:14 into the video, and continues until around 4:40.
Below the video, I have transcribed a part of his remarks, on which I will comment.
Transcription:
We’re really excited about the building, I think once you see it, it’s a phenomenal building. We, the university just today committed to building labs, lab space at the building. It’s gonna take about two of the module spaces on the first floor, and we’re very close to announcing our first private firm that’s going to move into the building, and I’m hoping that they’re gonna take two or three suites on the second floor.
So if everything goes right, by the time we open the building, it will be close to 50% occupied, which is really phenomenal for a building of this nature. Typically, these incubators take three to four years to really get going, and to start creating opportunities, job opportunities, and business growth. So, I think that’s it.
This is simply defining waste as phenomenal success.
Most parks of this nature don’t succeed at all. See, Marc Levine, The False Promise of the Entrepreneurial University. Levine writes:
Notwithstanding tendentious accounts of “success stories” such as Silicon Valley or Boston’s Route 128, as if they represent the general historical pattern, these data as well as case studies such as Johns Hopkins University and Yale University reveal that even world-class research universities are neither necessary nor sufficient in promoting local economic development. University research parks are particularly oversold as engines of local economic growth.
While proponents of academic commercialism routinely overstate its economic benefits for cities and regions, they rarely mention the significant costs. These include potential undermining of the system of basic research and open science that has been the cornerstone of scientific discovery in the US, and, ironically, undercutting innovation.
Contrary to claims by many university leaders that research commercialization will generate revenues for their institutions, for most universities tech transfer is a money losing proposition. Tech transfer is a classic example of jackpot or casino economics, with very few big winners, and over half of US universities lose money in academic commercialization. Research funding and commercialization revenues are heavily skewed to the same “top 15” universities that have dominated these statistics for decades, and, as one expert has argued, outside of this top group most universities are getting nothing out of tech transfer “except a lot of economic development rhetoric.”
Candidly, the gentlemen of Whitewater who’ve pushed use of public money for this venture haven’t shown evidence that they’ve planned well enough even to be a failed project of the kind Levine mentions.
Beyond that (yes, beyond that!), the anchor tenant’s a large public entity relocating from one community to ours, the lion’s share of the initial occupied space will be for public employees working in public building, and the many thousands! of private jobs promised as a consequence of this project are simply nowhere to be found.
Brunner points to a glass half full and says: Look how far we’ve come! All these millions, to house already-employed public workers, demonstrates no success at all. (Whatever their worth, the employees from CESA 2 are not business-builders, but instead public educators providing existing services.)
Put one way, this is a glass half full, yet half full not of wine, but instead of water.
There’s no success in this, and the only phenomenal accomplishment is the ability to tout this project’s supposed success with a straight face.