You could almost hear James Carville whispering, ìItís the economy, stupid,î at last weekís zippy State of the County address. With all the recent talk of our limping local economy and budgets in crisis, itís no wonder County Executive Jack Doyle focused exclusively on jobs.

ìIt was more like a press conference,î says Sean T. Hanna, county legislator. ìJack was just talking about something we can do right now.î

The idea is that a gussied-up Rochester will entice businesses to expand or relocate here. The existing corporate tax-break and loan programs of the County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency (COMIDA) will be enhanced by high-tech job training programs and new intellectual-capital incentives geared to nurture home businesses, patents, and college grads.

COMIDA would help fund Doyleís new initiatives with fees it gets for brokering corporate loan deals. To attract even larger corporations to the community, the Agency is marketing the newly opened five-million-square-foot Rochester Technology Park on Elmgrove Road in Gates.

One past criticism of COMIDA is that it secured financial breaks for companies that relocated from the city to outlying suburbs, endangering an already fragile urban economy. Milwaukee and Indianapolis are among several US cities that offer corporate incentives but maintain regional non-aggression pacts: ìMoving a business 30 miles across an invisible county border is not our idea of economic development,î says William Ryan Drew, executive director of the Milwaukee County Research Park Corporation.

COMIDA takes a different approach, Rulison says. ìWe canít become protectionist about the city versus the county,î Rulison says. ìWe look at the community as a whole and work to attract new jobs to the entire region.î COMIDAís BorderNet initiative defines ìregionî as the Syracuse-Rochester-Buffalo-Ontario Province, which it markets nationally and internationally. City and county must work together to meet the needs of business, he says.

Doyleís plan looks good on the teleprompter, Hanna says, but ìmy concern is with implementation. We canít sit around waiting for the phone to ring. We need to knock on big company doors within a seven-hour drive from Rochester.î

The county will team up with the private sector to work out a county-wide business plan. ìWe want to make sure somebody is carrying the ball,î says Hanna, who has already initiated discussions between Doyle and Greater Rochester Enterprise (GRE), a collaborative of companies, institutions, and organizations that markets Rochester to the national business community.

GRE has a good grasp of the countyís assets, he says, but must tailor its pitch to each type of business it approaches.

The address wasnít conventional, and wasnít meant to be, but one constituency was noticeably missing from the table, says Bill Appel of Metro Justice. ìOf course itís important to keep graduates in the community,î he says, ìbut people in transition who are working themselves off welfare need economic support --- childcare, transportation, and healthcare. There are not enough subsidies, and that puts these people in a terrible position.î

Appel, who applauds Doyleís vision for small-business incubation, says the county could help the working poor by adopting living-wage legislation. Those who contract with the county would be required to pay their workers an hourly wage of $8.52 with health insurance or $9.52 without. The city already has living-wage legislation in place.