President Receives Governor’s Stimulus Letter
Friday, March 6th, 2009On Monday, March 2, UT President Jacobs received a personally signed letter from Ohio governor Ted Strickland. Dr. Jacobs has received personally signed letters from the governor before. However, quite frankly, this one unlike the others was probably a form letter sent to the university presidents in Ohio and other state leaders. Nevertheless, it was a letter from the governor!
In the letter, the governor outlines the process of how Ohio is going to distribute funding from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The state has established a Web site and applications for state funding have to fill out a form on that Web site and submit it. These applications will be sorted and given to state agencies. Those agencies will then ask certain submitters to fill out project proposals. We don’t know how those certain submitters will be determined.
The Web site actually has been up for about three weeks and the UT Office of Government Relations along with the provosts, and various campus research offices have been promoting its existence. To date we estimate that UT has submitted more than 100 proposals to the Web site. This is only an estimate because the Web site does not restrict anyone from submitting. In other words, a person at UT does not have to go through one office to submit a proposal. However, to put that number in perspective, at this writing, the Web site has received exactly 16,716 submissions from all over the state!
UT’s direct submissions do not include submissions where the university might be a collaborator or partner and also do not include any submissions that go directly to the federal government in Washington such as submissions to the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes for Health.
In the last paragraph of his letter, Governor Strickland states that “It is our goal to assure that every eligible entity has the opportunity to apply for funds, and that all potential applicants are treated equally and fairly.” Of course, we applaud that goal. Nevertheless, it will be a mammoth task for state government to sort out more than 16,000 submissions. Stay tuned.
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Mascot Note: I hope everyone saw in a recent UT News the photo of Dr. Jacobs surrounded by university mascots from across Ohio. My name was actually under the photo because I took the photo with my I-Phone. Unfortunately, that nasty falcon from BGSU immediately snatched the phone out of my hand. But then Rocky Rocket sped after Freddie. There was a huge battle on the roof of the state capital between Rocky and Freddie. But Rocky prevailed and returned my I-Phone and that’s how the photo got in the paper. If you didn’t see the photo, here it is:
Bill is in charge of the university's political activities with the City of Toledo and Lucas County, the State of Ohio, and the federal government in his role as vice president for government relations. He was in charge of the legislation that merged The University of Toledo and the Medical University of Ohio. His main duties include coordinating activities with the Ohio Board of Regents and tracking budget and education legislation.