A failure.

Few other ways should describe the state’s investment into rural business incubators: Maine’s Applied Technology Development Centers are riddled with failure. Failure to create jobs, failure to deliver on gaudy political promises, failure to become even so marginally self-sustaining as to pay staffers.

Millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. Almost $4 million in Rumford, first to rehabilitate a vacant mill and then to keep it open as a precision manufacturing incubator. It’s created nine new jobs, two of which are housecleaners.

Fairfield is even worse. Its biotechnology center has received $4.5 million and created nothing.

That’s right. The Teague Biotechnology Center has created neither one new job, nor one new business.

Nothing can veil the transparent inability of these rural technology centers to accomplish their stated intention: jump-starting economies in depressed regions of Maine. As economic engines, they are barely turning over.

Not every center is sputtering, though. In Portland and Orono, this formula has achieved a modicum of success, thanks to ties with the University of Southern Maine and University of Maine. Sinking millions into such fertile ground, however, is not a genius economic development strategy.

The distress of the rural centers begs the question about what’s next, as without continued taxpayer support there’s little chance the centers in Rumford, Fairfield, Greenville and Limestone can continue to operate. (The Down East center is, at least, swimming with optimism about aquaculture’s potential.)

Economists say seven is twice as many technology centers than needed, an assertion supported by the skeleton crews currently stewarding many of the rural facilities. Yet John Richardson, the state’s new economic development chief, told the newspaper the problem the state’s finding with the centers is “a lack of capital.”

We vehemently disagree. The problem, in our estimation, is the fruitless tossing of funds into the inky blackness of an inept economic development project. How many more dollars should be sunk into these technology centers, when most have produced next to nothing?

The answer is apparent.

Maine’s economic development strategy already earned a black eye this week, when the tribal Internet pharmacy PIN Rx – the recipient of a $400,000 state grant – came under investigation for allegedly dealing illegal drugs. PIN Rx has struggled with finances and had layoffs even before this revelation.

Now the technology centers are showing their cracks. Something must give, and someone held accountable for the lost millions plummeted into inferior concepts. Jack Cashman, Maine’s former economy czar, at least has underwhelmingly admitted the technology center plan “was not a good move.”

Another bad move is keeping the flagging centers open, in stubborn insistence of unrealized potential against a mountain of historical and practical evidence. Richardson said the final decision is up to the Legislature.

Fine. Lawmakers’ first step should be realizing what the technology center concept has proven to be: A failure.