Burnham Institute Selects Orlando
The nonprofit institute, which seeks to cure diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes, announced Wednesday that it will bring at least 300 scientists and support staff here over the next 10 years, hopefully seeding a cluster of life-science companies that will ripple outward.
Landing Burnham took a level of cooperation among state, county and city officials that's often lacking. It also took a lot of money: Government and business leaders promised Burnham more than $310 million in cash, land, infrastructure and other perks -- at $1 million per new job, the biggest incentive package in Central Florida history.
Gov. Jeb Bush said it's worth every penny: "Let's be clear, this is not a traditional strategy. . . . It goes way beyond looking at this as 'jobs created divided by amount invested.' It doesn't fit that profile at all. What it will do is draw private-sector investment. It will draw the creative class. It will draw the dreamers and doers, the kind of people we need to sustain our communities."
The deal, announced to cheers and high-fives in Orlando and Tallahassee, was seen as vindication for a region that for years always has seemed to come in second, from its flirtation with luring a Major League Baseball team to Orlando to its failed 2003 courting of the Scripps Research Institute, another biomedical firm that chose Palm Beach County instead. Burnham will be neighbors to the area's other recent victories: a new medical school for the University of Central Florida and, likely, a Veterans Affairs hospital.
"You're talking about the remaking of Orange County," Orange Commissioner Homer Hartage said. Following Disney's opening in 1971, "we transformed from agricultural jobs to service-industry jobs, and now we're transforming into biotech. It's huge."
(Orlando Sentinel Article - August 24, 2006)
