FredCoBio @ Chamber of Commerce’s October Business Outlook Seminar

As I noted in a previous post, I attended the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce’s October Business Outlook Seminar on Friday morning. As reported by Ike Wilson in the Frederick News-Post on Saturday, the Commissioners were all quite optimistic about our future.  I wanted to highlight a couple of things from my notes that weren’t featured in FNP article.

I found it significant that while residential building (as measured by the number of building permits issued) was down by 20% over last year, commercial building continues to increase (up about 8%, I believe).  The theme seemed to be that a big reason for this is that Life Sciences and Biotech are drivers of growth in FredCo.

As examples, NBACC, FITCI, Lonza and the groundbreaking Nov 12th of the new NCI 340K sq. ft. facility were all sighted asexamples of this sucess.  Sadly, Invitrogen was left off the list.  They are expanding, although there may still be fewer people there today than when Invtirogen laid everyone off in 2000 and moved operations to San Diego.  They have since realized this was a big mistake and are back up and running.  And how about our friends a SABiosciences?  With their beautiful new facility at New Design & Excecutive Way (extended recently), they are worthy of note.

Many of these are examples of off shoots of Ft Detrick that are pollinating the County.