By LIZ FREEMAN
Naples Daily News
Posted June 21, 2010

NAPLES — Jackson Laboratory has the ability to attract hospitals and other medical entities and the Barron Collier Co. is pursuing private companies to come to eastern Collier County where a biomedical park is envisioned.

The effort won’t be easy and the process of building a biomedical park will likely take decades and has to start with community backing, according to panelists in a forum held Monday night on the proposed Jackson project.

“We attract collaborations today with the best teaching and research hospitals,” Chuck Hewett, chief operating officer for Jackson, said. “We have outstanding collaborations scattered around the world. It will absolutely take time. We believe it can be done.”

The Economic Development Council sponsored the forum, held at the Naples Daily News, to discuss the development of biomedical parks or “clusters” and for panelists to respond to questions from the audience. The EDC held an earlier forum last week that focused more on the Jackson plan specifically.

Besides Hewett, panelists were Collier County Commission chairman Fred Coyle and Blake Gable, president of real estate development for Barron Collier Co., which has agreed to donate 50 acres on Oil Well Road to Jackson.

Bio-tech representatives were Russell Allen, president and chief executive officer of BioFlorida, a state trade association for biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers; and Brian Kelsey, principal and founder of Civic Analytics, a consulting group for economic and workforce development interests.

Gable said Barron Collier has been a major landowner in Collier for 100 years and wants to do what is best for the community in the years to come, but he likewise acknowledged the company’s financial stake in what happens in the eastern part of the county.

He said when the opportunity arose with Jackson, company officials did their due diligence and talked to academics, research groups and others around the country to gauge Jackson’s reputation.

“We did our homework,” he said, adding that all the people he contacted said they would like Jackson to come to their community rather than Collier.

“That gave me the confidence this group, this institute with 81 years (history) is going to do what they say they will do,” Gable said.

Gable said he and other Barron Collier officials have been reaching out to commercial business about the concept of a biomedical park developing around Jackson’s proposed genetics research facility on Oil Well Road.

“We have been working with private firms, small and large,” he said, adding it will take a lot of work to recruit other companies. “Nothing about this is going to be easy.”

When asked about how the county would potentially raise the $130 million in local dollars to match the state, Coyle said no decision has been made.

One idea is a levy of less than $60 a year per household over 15 to 20 years, Coyle said. He talked about the pros and cons of a utility franchise fee, sales tax increase and property taxes.

“It is way, way too early for anyone to make a decision for or against the proposal because we don’t know what the proposal is going to be, we don’t know the costs,” Coyle said.

The bio-medical consultants spoke about the long-term commitment it takes to build a biomedical cluster and how the clusters can lead to spin-off companies taking root. The land where the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina now sits was a tobacco field in the 1950s, Kelsey said.

The city of Austin, where he lives, made the commitment to become a center for computer technology and electronics in the 1980s and since then experiences five to 10 percent job growth annually, he said.

“You have to build it around some core assets,” he said. “The reason that happened (in Austin) is we made the same bet in the 1980s. If Texas can be visionary, I’m pretty sure any state can be visionary.”

Connect with health-care reporter Liz Freeman at www.naplesnews.com/staff/liz_freeman.