Wednesday, June 20, 2012
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
It didn’t take long for local economic- development officials to home in on the part of Mark Kvamme’s job as head of JobsOhio that they believe will have the greatest impact in the Mahoning Valley: the Clean Ohio Fund.
JobsOhio is the nonprofit agency Gov. John Kasich created last year to replace the Ohio Department of Development. Clean Ohio is a long-standing program run by the state that funds land preservation and clean-up of old factory sites.
Kvamme, who came to the Trumbull Country Club on Tuesday at the invitation of state Sen. Capri Cafaro of Hubbard, D-32nd, had lunch with local business and government officials, talked about JobsOhio and then took questions.
Former Struthers mayor Dan Mamula, manager of the Mahoning River Corridor Initiative, which uses Clean Ohio money to clean up old manufacturing sites, joined Sarah Lown of the Western Reserve Port Authority and Mike Keys of the city of Warren in asking for clarification of how Clean Ohio was going to change under the Kasich administration.
Kvamme, whose background is in business, said there will be some new criteria: The state will insist that money go only to projects that have a company waiting in the wings, ready to make use of that land when it is cleaned up and ready.
“We really want to make sure it creates jobs or development opportunities in the near term, probably three to five years or whatever. We want to see that there’s a customer there,” Kvamme said.
Because Ohio has been a manufacturing state for a long time, it has a lot of former factory sites to clean up — too many to clean them all, he said, so the money must go to projects that will lead to jobs.
Too many times, Clean Ohio money was awarded for “political reasons” instead of business ones, Kvamme said.
Keys pointed out that the cleanup of the former Mahoningside power plant at Mahoning Avenue and Summit Street Northwest in Warren took 13 years. He wondered how it would be possible to find a company willing to wait that long to acquire a site for its operations.
“I think for communities like Warren and Youngstown, we have no green space to attract industry,” Keys said, wondering how these cities will meet the criteria for future funding.
Kvamme said it’s clear to him that communities with no green space for development should be considered “more favorably” for Clean Ohio money to clean up formerly used sites.
“If I have a situation where you’re going to develop 200 jobs in the city of Warren at a site that’s going to be cleaned up in two years, and down in Cincinnati they might have something in 10 years, of course you’re going to want me to do that [fund the Warren project], and vice versa,” Kvamme said.
Mamula said it would be difficult to get a commitment from a company to move onto a site in three to five years.
“It’s not a commitment,” Kvamme said. “You just sit down and say we all feel very comfortable that there is an end user for this.
“What we want to do is talk to the developer. We want to know how they’re going to use this. We want to look in the whites of their eyes,” Kvamme said.
He said the funding for JobsOhio is expected to be about $100 million per year as soon as a lawsuit regarding JobsOhio is resolved. Of that, $43 million is likely to be used for Clean Ohio.