December 16, 2007

Editorial: 'U' bioscience plan deserves state support
The future of an important Minnesota industry is at stake.

Governors and legislators are often faulted for not seeing, or thinking, past the next election. Next session, the University of Minnesota will give this state's political leaders a great opportunity to prove that accusation wrong.

Back for a third time will be a proposal to give the university preliminary approval and create a greased-skids bonding process for the construction of four major bioscience research buildings, to be built in a cluster near the new Gophers football stadium over the next decade. The total price tag: $233 million, over eight to 10 years.

In that proposal lies Minnesota's best hope to preserve and expand on the biosciences industry that emerged in the late 20th century as an economic powerhouse for this state. The industry's future is highly dependent on a steady output of discovery by University of Minnesota researchers. Without that intellectual fuel, Minnesota's medical alley could become a back alley; with it, Minnesota can be a winner in the 21st century's global economic competition.

Why create a separate bond authorization process to fund the buildings that would house biosciences research? For two good reasons:

• Hiring the dozens of research superstars the university hopes to attract with new facilities takes more time than recruiting other faculty -- often three to five years. Being able to say now that the state is committed to building a new laboratory in 2012 or 2014 is an important recruiting tool.
• It's difficult for a large commitment of this sort to be accommodated in the Legislature's typical every-other-year bonding exercise. That process is prone to partisan hitches (witness 2004 and 2007, in which no bonding bill passed) and parochial calculations. Legislators generally aim to spread bonding money far and wide to maximize its political impact, and tend to resent and resist large requests.

The university's original proposal departed from the usual bonding process by creating a separate governing panel empowered to issue bonds from a large, pre-authorized pool. That idea was embraced by the Senate, resisted in the House and tepidly received in the governor's office.

A variation on that idea has been floated in recent weeks. Rather than creating a separate panel to issue bonds as needed for each building, it would allow the Legislature itself to play that role. A simple majority vote would be required. The initial bond authorization, still sought in 2008, requires a two-thirds vote.

That change ought to appeal to the senior House members who were wary of giving a new governing entity too much power. It also ought to give Gov. Tim Pawlenty reason to back the university's effort with more vigor and visibility. There likely will be no better opportunity next session for today's political leaders to set the table for tomorrow's Minnesota.