Utah has fallen short in an attempt to nab millions of dollars in federal funds to boost economic development, but an official who helped prepare the state's application says it will move forward with its initiatives anyway.

The Department of Labor on Wednesday said 13 areas across the country will receive $195 million as part of the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development, or WIRED, initiative. It is part of President Bush's "Competitiveness Agenda," unveiled during Tuesday's State of the Union address.

WIRED is designed to encourage regional communities to use various stakeholders to research and produce long-term plans to develop a more skilled work force as a way to attract new economic development and employers.

After getting word of the new program during the week of Thanksgiving 2005, Utah put together proposals that would have helped the life sciences, aerospace, defense, composite and energy industries.

"We were not ever short of wonderful, creative ideas on what these grants could be," said Pat Vaughn, in charge of the talent acquisition program in the Governor's Office of Economic Development. "We were, however, short on time, because right after the new year was the deadline."

Each state's governor was able to submit up to three proposals, each with a budget of up to $15 million over a three-year period. Each had to feature a partnership with the state's public work force system plus civic, business, investor, academic, entrepreneurial and philanthropic leaders.

Vaughn said the department hopes to replicate the successes of Silicon Valley, the Research Triangle and Austin, Texas.

"This grant program is about the ability to develop new regional centers and look at workplace dynamics in a new, innovative way, because what we're recognizing is that economic development cannot occur separately from work force development," she said.

"And there is a need, because of a paradigm shift occurring worldwide about how we as a society will be able to continue to advance from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age to a new arena, and how the United States as a whole will stay competitive, not on a low-wage basis, but on an innovative basis."

Vaughn said she had been unsure if Utah would land a grant because she did not know the breadth and depth of the impacts that other proposals might have.

But she believes the state has bettered itself from being part of the application process because, in part, it brought together stakeholders to discuss possibilities for the future.

"We've already benefited. One is the validating of what our core economic development plan is, which is an integrated approach. And second of all is the fact that it's really helped us solidify these relationships so that we can simply move forward and execute," she said.

"The money would have been nice. It was enough to really rationalize putting the effort forth that we did, but in the end it's really much more about our ability to execute on the plan that we've developed, and I think we can do that."

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