Frederick Co. seeks money for incubator

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), May 12, 2004 by Robyn Lamb

Frederick County officials believe opening a million-dollar technology incubator at Hood College is the first step in capitalizing on the recent influx of Washington-area employees.

With $500,000 in hand, the county Department of Economic Development is awaiting grants from two state agencies to open an incubator that could house as many as 11 startup high-tech and biotech companies.

The county's population grew 30 percent during the 1990s and a federal bio-defense campus is under discussion for nearby Fort Detrick, which is why Frederick officials say now is the time to encourage entrepreneurship.

It really is not a lot of hype to say Frederick is really uniquely positioned to begin the process of developing its life sciences community, said the incubator's project manager, Lisa Smith.

The county has requested $425,000 from the state Department of Business and Economic Development and Maryland Technology Development Corp. Decisions have not yet been rendered.

The money would be used to turn the 7,000-square-foot third floor of a Hood College building into six wet lab spaces and 11 offices for both high-tech and life sciences companies. If the funding requests are approved, renovations would be done throughout the summer and the incubator would open by year's end.

Economic development officials say the time is right to launch the incubator, given the growth that has brought tens of thousands of highly skilled workers into the county.

The county's population exploded from 150,208 in 1990 to an estimated 209,124 in 2002, according to the Census Bureau. More than half of the labor force has four years or more of college, yet some 40,000 workers commute outside of Frederick to work everyday.

The hope is that the incubator will help grow the businesses that will retain those workers.

With the activity at nearby Fort Detrick - where the Army, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Health plan to build a bio-defense campus - officials hope to transform the county into a hotbed of scientific research. The campus would bring hundreds of high-paying jobs and kick-start scientific research in the county.

Smith said the incubator is just the first phase in an incubator system.

We're hoping that it will lead to a multimillion dollar, multifloor incubator project at Fort Detrick.

In the meantime, she said, county officials should receive word on the funding by month's end.