Biotech companies and researchers walked away from the Maryland General Assembly this week having pocketed $50 million and seen old tax codes rewritten to fit the emerging
industry in Maryland.
The biggest chunk was $40.4 million to renovate a downtown Baltimore warehouse for basic academic research and small companies. But the General Assembly devoted about 15 percent of its 1994 capital budget to promote technology development.
Supporters of the legislation and the budget items said they represented legislators' view that technology, both information and biotech, would form the basis of the economy in the future.
"Our whole legislative agenda -- we got it all," said Walter Plosila, head of the Suburban Maryland Technology Council. "I think the legislature recognizes that [technology] is where the only growth has come during the recession."
The $40.4 million item will transform the old Hutzler Bros. warehouse on Lombard Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard into the new home of the Medical Biotechnology Center. By the spring of 1996, academic researchers and scientists at start-up biotech companies should be working in laboratories there. The companies will be offered space at a reduced rate as a way of giving them a boost.
That item met opposition among some biotech industry executives who believe that too much money is being allotted to academic research in the name of economic development.
The Maryland Biotechnology Institute -- which includes several separate biotech centers, including the medical biotech center -- had come under increasing criticism. It was designed to help develop the state's biotech industry, but some skeptics say the institute's centers have produced little of commercial value since they were founded in the mid-1980s.
Academics also saw the institute as a drain of tax dollars that they thought should be going to the state university system.
The state's commitment to the medical biotech center goes beyond the capital investment. Tax dollars for the center, to pay the salaries of researchers, will have to increase as well.
The center's supporters say it will enhance the academic research already going on at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and will allow closer collaboration between researchers and companies working in the same building.
