Budget Give Wine Science A Boost

Budget Give Wine Science A Boost. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Last week the State Legislature finally approved a budget and as part of that was a $5-million boost to the Tri-Cities Research District and will ultimately be used for the new Wine Science Center. Diahann Howard, Executive Director of the Tri-Cities Research District.

HOWARD: We’re really excited about the $5-million dollars from the state to support the Wine Science Center because it basically is a compliment to the dollars that’s already been pledged by the Wine Commission and the wine industry, the growers and the producers themselves have pledged $7.4-million to this project. In addition there’s been about $2-million dollars in private funds raised to date.

Howard says that this money will allow them to move forward with construction.

HOWARD: We’ve already got a scope and design work that’s going to be started here during the summer and so what this does it gives us the dollars to move into the construction phase and hopefully be under construction by late 2013.

She says they made a decision to help move the project along.

HOWARD: We did put this on Port of Benton property in order to basically move the project as fast as possible to meet the industry needs and really wanted to thank President Floyd at WSU and the regents for being supportive of basically the way we’ve creatively had to develop this project to kind of get it moving and moving at such a fast pace.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.