Senator Kahn’s statement is as follows:
Senate Bill No. 358 will establish two new SmartZones. To become a SmartZone, a municipality has to meet certain qualifications such as having significant support from a higher education institution and possess property devoted to a high-tech activity.
SmartZones are also home to incubation facilities providing office and wet lab space to technology companies. Incubators are a critical part of a SmartZone because they increase access to early-stage capital, provide access to entrepreneurship education, offer other sources of help for young companies, and improve the local community image. SmartZones are designed to foster innovation that will drive Michigan’s economy and are necessary to pave a brighter future for our state in the 21st century and will hopefully create part of the brighter future we are looking for in our next century.
In so adding these two SmartZones, I look and hope for one of them to go to the Great Lakes Bay Area—Saginaw. It’s an area where we are in need of improvement to the quality of life—jobs, diversity, and hope; an area where our crime rate is the highest in the state and unemployment is 13 percent. Crime rate and unemployment are known to go hand in hand. So the location of a SmartZone there would be particularly advantageous to our state and the people in the Great Lakes Bay Region.
Most of the money that comes from and is used by a SmartZone is local money captured from local taxes. It is not funded with the refundable MBT credit, so local governments are part of the judges of the success of a SmartZone. I urge my colleagues to consider this as they consider this bill. However, it should be noted that there are questions, and questions have been raised by some of my colleagues, on reportability and demonstration of results. Those issues may be raised in the future in a separate bill to deal with whether or not the successes that I hope for and am claiming today are real or ephemeral.
So I urge your passage of this bill and consideration for evaluation in the future of SmartZones and results.