Enterprise Center sharpens tech focus
BYLINE: Mike Pare, Deputy Business Editor
Chattanooga's Enterprise Center, created to oversee about a dozen area job growth efforts, has sharpened its focus on technology and alternative transportation.
Jim Hall, who heads the center's board, said the nonprofit entity formed in 2004 has worked through its growing pains.
"It's on a solid course," said Mr. Hall, an attorney from Signal Mountain and former head of the National Transportation Safety Board.
The upshot of the shift is a hoped-for wave of tech jobs, according to Wayne Cropp, who succeeded Joe Ferguson at the center as chief executive in September.
Three years ago, then-Mayor Bob Corker, County Mayor Claude Ramsey and U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., put several mostly federally funded growth initiatives under the Enterprise Center umbrella to help promote and coordinate them. Center officials continue to meet with a group of managers involving those initiatives.
But Mr. Cropp, also an attorney and former head of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau, said he wants to concentrate on a technology bent that already was forming at the center.
"I've wanted to sharpen the point on that focus," he said.
The Enterprise Center remains at the forefront of linking Atlanta, Chattanooga and Nashville via high-speed train. Mr. Ferguson continues to oversee that initiative, which has about $10 million in mostly federal money.
A task force is close to signing a contract for a company to perform an environmental impact study of a route between Chattanooga and Atlanta, Mr. Cropp said.
However, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue said late last year he doesn't foresee a high-speed train running between the cities anytime soon, and he questioned the technology of magnetic levitation, which involves the use of powerful magnets for propulsion.
Meanwhile, the center has organized the testing of an innovative fuel cell at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's SimCenter. In 2004, Congress allocated $2.5 million for a California company to test its technology in Chattanooga. Last fall, the project received $1.65 million for more testing.
"The first phase was successful," Mr. Cropp said about the unit that produces not only electricity but hydrogen. Officials hope hydrogen someday could be used to power a fuel-cell vehicle. Mr. Cropp said an upgraded fuel cell unit is now operational and undergoing testing.
Also, a director to oversee technology transfer from federal facilities in Oak Ridge and Tullahoma, Tenn., and Huntsville, Ala., to the marketplace is to be hired soon by the center.
Mr. Hall said that effort will take advantage of the Tennessee Valley's assets, which include Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
"It's a good fit," he said.
Mr. Cropp said that once commercial opportunities are identified, it's a matter of matchmaking with businesses in the region.
E-mail Mike Pare at mpare@timesfreepress.com
Key Enterprise Center efforts
* Technology transfer from federal facilities in the region to local marketplace.
* Testing of a fuel cell developed by California-based Bloom Energy, formerly Ion America, involving co-generation of electricity and hydrogen.
* Bullet train between Atlanta and Chattanooga and eventually to Nashville.
* Renewal Community tax incentives for downtown area development.