Funding Sought for County Branch of Technology Center

Proponents of a California Manufacturing Technology Center branch for Orange County have won state funding for a portion of the project and are waiting to hear about getting more.

They said that by early October, they hope to learn the fate of their pitch to get the rest of the start-up funding from the National Institute of Science and Technology.

The center would be an offshoot of the California Manufacturing Technology Center in Hawthorne, which says that Orange County companies already account for many of its 300-plus monthly requests for assistance with problems.

No surprise there: Orange County counts more than 10,000 small- and medium-sized manufacturers among its 70,000 businesses.

Business boosters see the center as powerful tool to help manufacturers already here to grow and prosper and to help recruit new ones to the county.

The Orange County center would be staffed by 24 consultants and would replace a small office with four consultants now operating in Anaheim.

State funding of $1.25 million for the first year of a six-year plan was included in the new budget recently signed by Gov. Pete Wilson. The money was authorized in a bill carried by Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblyman Jim Morrissey (R-Santa Ana), former owner of a small aerospace machine shop in Anaheim.

The federal funding proposal asks for $3.1 million a year for three years from NIST, and promises that fees for service would pay most of the bills from then on.

John O’Dell covers major Orange County corporations, manufacturing and economic issues for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-5831 and at john.odell@latimes.com