You could almost hear James Carville whispering, ìItís
the economy, stupid,î at last weekís zippy State of the County address. With
all the recent talk of our limping local economy and budgets in crisis, itís no
wonder County Executive Jack Doyle focused exclusively on jobs.

ìIt was
more like a press conference,î says Sean T. Hanna, county legislator. ìJack was
just talking about something we can do right now.î

The idea is
that a gussied-up Rochester will entice businesses to expand or relocate here.
The existing corporate tax-break and loan programs of the County of Monroe
Industrial Development Agency (COMIDA) will be enhanced by high-tech job
training programs and new intellectual-capital incentives geared to nurture
home businesses, patents, and college grads.

COMIDA
would help fund Doyleís new initiatives with fees it gets for brokering
corporate loan deals. To attract even larger corporations to the community, the
Agency is marketing the newly opened five-million-square-foot Rochester
Technology Park on Elmgrove Road in Gates.

One past
criticism of COMIDA is that it secured financial breaks for companies that
relocated from the city to outlying suburbs, endangering an already fragile
urban economy. Milwaukee and Indianapolis are among several US cities that
offer corporate incentives but maintain regional non-aggression pacts: ìMoving
a business 30 miles across an invisible county border is not our idea of
economic development,î says William Ryan Drew, executive director of the
Milwaukee County Research Park Corporation.

COMIDA
takes a different approach, Rulison says. ìWe canít become protectionist about
the city versus the county,î Rulison says. ìWe look at the community as a whole
and work to attract new jobs to the entire region.î COMIDAís BorderNet
initiative defines ìregionî as the Syracuse-Rochester-Buffalo-Ontario Province,
which it markets nationally and internationally. City and county must work
together to meet the needs of business, he says.

Doyleís
plan looks good on the teleprompter, Hanna says, but ìmy concern is with
implementation. We canít sit around waiting for the phone to ring. We need to
knock on big company doors within a seven-hour drive from Rochester.î

The county
will team up with the private sector to work out a county-wide business plan.
ìWe want to make sure somebody is carrying the ball,î says Hanna, who has
already initiated discussions between Doyle and Greater Rochester Enterprise
(GRE), a collaborative of companies, institutions, and organizations that
markets Rochester to the national business community.

GRE has a
good grasp of the countyís assets, he says, but must tailor its pitch to each
type of business it approaches.

style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>The
address wasnít conventional, and wasnít meant to
be, but one constituency was noticeably missing from the table, says Bill Appel
of Metro Justice. ìOf course itís important to keep graduates in the
community,î he says, ìbut people in transition who are working themselves off
welfare need economic support --- childcare, transportation, and healthcare.
There are not enough subsidies, and that puts these people in a terrible
position.î

Appel, who
applauds Doyleís vision for small-business incubation, says the county could
help the working poor by adopting living-wage
legislation. Those who contract with the county would be required to pay their
workers an hourly wage of $8.52 with health insurance or $9.52 without. The
city already has living-wage legislation in place.