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1/22/2016
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VOL. 37, NO. 4
JANUARY 25 - 31, 2016
Business of Life
FINANCE: Ancora adds on Big acquisition is Cleveland firm’s first
Different breed
P. 4
Reptile show brings wide variety of attractions
TECHNOLOGY: Still stalled Invacare inspection is problematic
P. 22-23
P. 6
CLEVELAND BUSINESS
FOCUS: RNC Could the city get lost in the shuffle? P. 15-21
The List Largest commercial property sales P. 27
Service cuts put Akron-Canton on an uneven flight path Airport sticks to renovation plans as officials still see positive future BY JAY MILLER
United Airlines’ decision to end its hub operation at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport may be hitting operations at Akron-Canton Airport nearly as hard as it has hit the Cleveland airport. United’s decision in February 2014 to steeply cut its service out of Cleveland Hopkins set off a chain of airline service decisions that has seen several carriers trim their offerings from CAK, as the city of Green airport is known in the industry. CAK management, though, remains upbeat. In a joint interview in a conference room overlooking the airfield, Richard McQueen, the airport’s president and CEO, and Kristie VanAuken, the airport’s senior vice president for marketing and communi-
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
SEE AIRPORT, PAGE 12
Bioscience loses luster Sector employment falls by 10%; industry groups still see promise BY CHUCK SODER csoder@crain.com @ChuckSoder
Northeast Ohio’s bioscience sector isn’t doing quite as well as you might think. Local employment in that sector dropped by 10% between 2011 and 2014. New company formation fell over the past few years, too. Investors are still pumping money into young biomedical companies in
Northeast Ohio, but that was probably the most positive piece of news about this region in a recent report from BioOhio, a membership organization that aims to grow the state’s bioscience industry. Granted, the “bioscience” category leaves out hospitals and doctors’ offices. It also doesn’t include the red-hot health care software industry — which includes fast-growing local companies like Explorys and OnShift. But the category does include a few high-tech industries that eco-
Entire contents © 2016 by Crain Communications Inc.
nomic development groups have long touted as key to the future of Northeast Ohio. Industries like medical devices, pharmaceuticals and research and development. Those industries held their own elsewhere in Ohio, but in this region they shrank during a period when the nation as a whole was emerging from a recession. Why? For one, a few large medical device companies in town have run into trouble with U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the past few years. FDA problems pushed one of those companies, Ben Venue Laboratories, to shut down a massive drug manufacturing complex in SEE BIOSCIENCE, PAGE 26
Hotel arrangements for RNC is tricky task NEO has been ‘welcoming’ to committee BY JAY MILLER jmiller@crain.com @MillerJH
Did you ever have to make hotel arrangements for a group traveling out of town and thought you had developed a plan that would satisfy every traveler who requested a bathroom that met the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act or who demanded that their room wasn’t too close to the elevator? But it didn’t, and you heard about it. Imagine, then, if you had been in charge of housing for the Republican presidential nominating convention in 2012 and you heard from Steve Munisteri, the Texas GOP chairman who found that his assigned hotel was 25 miles from the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the convention site. He didn’t just complain to the Republican Committee on Arrange-
ments, the organization with the hotel plan. He complained to every reporter who would listen, telling them that he would have preferred to be closer, as he had been since the days when Texans George H.W. and George W. Bush topped the ticket. “If I weren’t state chairman, if I were a delegate, I probably wouldn’t go,” Munisteri told the Dallas Morning News after the assignments were announced April 30, 2012. News reporter Christy Hoppe wrote about speculation that the demotion was a consequence of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s challenge to eventual nominee Mitt Romney. That’s one of the challenges the 2016 Republican Committee on Arrangements, or CoA, hopes to avoid. It has to juggle hotel rooms for 50,000 people who will be staying in 135 hotels. And every state delegation has its own preferences — being as close as possible to the convention site, of course, but also making SEE RNC, PAGE 24