Bar Harbor-based Jackson Lab is the kind of business that other states would — and have — drooled over the prospect of landing. The lab raises genetically specific strains of mice for medical research, which it exports to labs around the world. The lab also conducts its own medical research.
Though rural Maine would welcome most any business that employs 1,200 people, Jackson Lab is the archetype for a 21st century economy. Biomedical research will remain an integral part of the academic and health care worlds for decades, if not longer. The jobs the lab creates include highly specific research positions for which doctoral degrees are required, administrative and clerical positions and lower-skilled jobs that come with the sometimes dirty business of keeping thousands of mice alive and well.
The buildings are attractive and clean and do not detract from the area’s substantial tourism, though further building expansion might have created friction with Acadia National Park and town officials. And there is no smokestack or waste pipe pollution.
So in light of this understanding of Jackson Lab, the fact that it wants to purchase the former Lowe’s store in Ellsworth underscores in dramatic fashion a challenge Maine faces in keeping businesses like Jackson Lab and attracting or helping grow others. That challenge is connecting a reliable, appropriately educated work force to the workplace.
The lab’s Chief Operating Officer explained the planned purchase citing the “unique opportunity for the laboratory to grow at a site that’s closer to much of our work force.” So many lab employees commute to Mount Desert Island from coastal Hancock County towns and beyond that van pools have formed to help make the math work for employees weighing gas prices and paychecks.
A very 20th century business, Bath Iron Works, also draws workers from a large geographic area, although it is based closer to Maine’s population epicenter.
That Jackson Lab is making this move now may not be coincidental. The company’s planned expansion was courted by Florida with a sizable tax incentive. The incentive plan was given a chilly reception by local voters and the state’s governor, though, causing the deal to die on the vine. The lab also has expanded in Connecticut.
Maine could not offer the scale of tax breaks the lab sought, nor should it have. And expanding to Ellsworth may not fill the needs the organization had that drove it to consider such moves. But bringing the jobs closer to the work force underscores the state’s need to think geographically in its economic development strategy.
The tie between a facility like Jackson Lab and institutions of higher learning which themselves have research elements could be replicated elsewhere. Communities in Maine that host universities or colleges that do not conduct research still have the potential to produce job-ready graduates or spin-off work that supplements economic development. These opportunities should be explored.
Ellsworth municipal leaders understand and welcome the paychecks that will be spent in the city, even though Jackson Lab as a nonprofit does not pay property tax. In short, the move to Ellsworth is smart for the lab and provides a boost for the local economy. State economic development officials should do more than cheer this development; they should sit down privately with lab management and understand just what it needs to thrive, and consider how that dynamic can be replicated elsewhere.
Curious absence of right winger comments regarding the gummint funding of Jackson Labs.
Especially because Jackson Labs specializes in the mass production of cloned mice used to advance methadone technologies.
The mice even get a free ride to the facility. And back.
Wow. Simplistic.
A non-profit, huh. And we’re going to pretend that they’re not getting corporate welfare?
Your never happy are you.
The difference being the word profit.
I wouldn’t say a research grant given by the NIH to a University or Jackson is corporate welfare. Taxpayers get something in return — basic research whose results are published and shared with the research community so that other researchers can build upon it and even so companies can perform applied research to bring drugs to market. Basic biomedical research is risky with a long payoff (if there is a monetary payoff) and is never done by the private sector.
Far fewer Federal dollars flow through Jackson Lab than, let’s say, Bath Iron Works, which was mentioned in the article.
Could someone please explain why we could spend 25 million dollars plus tax breaks trying to keep a paper mill open whose owners were openly hostile to the state of Maine, used the bribery money to pay off debts in Georgia and destroyed machinery in the mill when they left but we can’t come up with money to support the expansion of an industry that wants to stay in Maine.
Kickbacks?
answer: Baldacci
The cures for cancer and other genetically based diseases aren’t likely going to be found by someone dabbling around in their back yard frog pond. They are going to be found at places like Jackson Lab. Until Jackson personnel start embezzling or otherwise mis-allocating funds, especially gov’t funds, we should all be VERY supportive of Jackson Lab, and as this excellent editorial suggests, the State of Maine should meet and learn from Jackson officials what a model of an important 21st century enterprise looks like.
For more info: http://www.jax.org (no, I am not an employee of Jackson or Ellsworth, nor are any of my family members or friends, like me, connected in any way with Jackson.)
How could this be anything but good news? If I had to nit-pick it would be with the City of Ellsworth and their disastrous traffic plan that will have trouble handling the additional traffic that this will create.