Zack Space's Renew Ohio Summit A Success

As I've already mentioned, I headed up to Zanesville yesterday to attend Rep. Zack Space's 6th and final Renew Ohio summit.

For those who aren't familiar with Renew Ohio, it consisted of a series of 6 summits. An initial breakfast in Zanesville kicked things off by laying out the plan for the rest of the summits. This was followed by four "work group" summits designated to look into certain topic (agriculture, alternative energy, rural broadband, and health care). The meeting yesterday was the climax of all of that, the place where all the work groups submitted their findings.

Things started out yesterday with a presentation by Steve Stokey (Executive VP of Allied Machine & Engineering Corp.) on an interesting program called "Project Lead the Way", which he's trying to bring to Southeastern Ohio. The program hopes to increase the number of college graduates in science and math related fields by introducing elementary school students to the basics of engineering.

Before I get into the presentations I want to make a brief disclaimer. All of the groups prepared a white paper on their findings (which was the basis of their presentations) and drafts were given to all those in attendance. Space plans on compiling these papers into a sort of "blueprint" for the district to be released in August. The things I mention may be changed in that time. I'm also not even going to try to cover everything in the drafts.

More after the break.

Health Care

All of the presentations were given by the person who was selected to lead the work group summit on the topic, and first up was the health care presentation led by Ralph Metzger (Executive Director of Medina Health Foundation). Most of the groups findings point towards a serious lack of health care professionals in the region. Recommendations for fixing this included such things as increasing the regional capacity of professional health care learning centers, encouraging partnerships among regional hospitals and local primary schools.

Agriculture

This presentation was given by Adam Sharp, the Director of National Affairs for the Ohio Farm Bureau. A note of interest was that most of the group members weren't there as they were actually out farming. Of primary concern to the group (which met on March 21st) was the passage of a new Farm Bill, which should be taken care of in the next two weeks despite a presidential veto. Other concerns the group had can be found here (PDF), though that's just raw data.

Advanced Energy

After a break for lunch, the advanced energy presentation was given by Jerrorld L. Hutton, Dean of the Hocking College Energy Institute. This white paper has a huge list of recommendations covering:

• Education
• conservation education
• internships to students from existing companies
• Waste, wastewater and recycling
• utilizing waste products such as plastics and tires as energy sources
• requiring water treatment facilities to participate in bio gas generation (harnessing power from the gasses emitted by waste, extremely gross, but it sounded promising)
• mandated recycling
• Incentives
• creating incentives for homes and businesses using green energy, such as the ability to sell excess energy generated on site back to the power companies
• Coal
• carbon capture and sequestration
• coal to gas conversion
  

And that's hardly scratching the surface.

Broadband and Technology

I really wanted to attend this group, but wasn't able to make it.The presentation for this group was given by Dr. Stan Ahalt, the Executive Director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center. The white paper this group presented was very thorough, with a page count of 35 (including appendices). It's difficult to provide a brief summary of theirrecommendations, but they involve:

• organizing at the community level to attract broadband providers
• engaging in broadband deployment programs such as Connect Ohio
• seeking the government money that is available
• lobbying to remove government roadblocks to rural broadband (most of which weren't intended to be)
• and educating residents on the benefits that broadband connections can provide
  

Conclusion

I often joke about being the president and founding member of the Zack Space fan club, but I assure you that my respect for Space is genuine. Let's completely forget about elections and partisan issues for a second, and just focus on what Space did here. I can't even begin to estimate how much work it took to hold these summits, but they gave his constituents a way to seriously impact his legislative work. Whether or not you agree with his positions, this is the way that the government should work.