We’ve got to be the best to keep Boeing in our state
DAN VOELPEL; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Scott Carson scared me. The president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes dropped a verbal bomb on those of us at a November business luncheon in Seattle.
The gathering of the Puget Sound region’s Prosperity Partnership aimed to celebrate our anchor industries and successes amid the dark storm clouds of a national recession.
Carson, however, injected a dose of economic reality.
“We have all heard the cliché about real estate, but location is important for businesses as well,” Carson said. “For a global company in a highly competitive industry, a supportive business environment is critical to our success. (Dramatic pause.) And location is a choice.”
Five years after our state handed The Boeing Co. more than $3 billion in tax breaks and incentives over 20 years to locate its first 787 Dreamliner assembly line in Everett, the future of Boeing in Washington has entered tenuous territory again.
Carson must have scared some other folks, too. So much so that Gov. Chris Gregoire, at the behest of business and labor leaders, appointed a Boeing policy czar to save our state’s most important company.
The man who would save Boeing in Washington knows a bit about the company.
Bill McSherry, like many of us, grew up in a Boeing household. His mother, a Machinist, worked at both Plant 2 in South Seattle and in Renton. She retired after 20 years.
So when McSherry works the phones, as he has his first week, he can speak with informed passion about Boeing’s importance.
In fact, he has spent so much time working the phones, he hasn’t found time to hang a 787 banner on the wall of his office on the ground floor of the Insurance Building on the Capitol campus.
Forgive him if he’s distracted by the task at hand. McSherry has up to six months on loan from his job as economic development director for the Puget Sound Regional Council to get two things done:
• Position Washington as Boeing’s location of choice for its next airplane assembly line – whether that’s a second line for 787 production or a new-generation airplane.
• Help persuade the U.S. Air Force and Congress to choose Boeing’s bid as builders of the next Air Force refueling tankers.
The tanker contract will go to Boeing or its chief rival, Airbus.
“The governor wants to make sure the state is as active and productive as possible in winning that contract,” McSherry said. “In this job climate and economic climate, the governor feels a real sense of urgency working with our (congressional) delegation that we’re stressing the job growth components of Boeing’s proposal, the immediacy of that job growth if they pick a company (Boeing) already on the ground and ready to go rather than one (Airbus) that has to ramp up and build a facility.”
To borrow a term coined by President Barack Obama, Boeing is “shovel-ready.”
Meanwhile, for Boeing’s decision on its next airplane assembly line, McSherry must get himself deeply acquainted with Boeing’s location decision checklist and translate it into policy recommendations Gregoire can present to the Legislature and the region’s political and civic leaders.
Like what?
“Nothing’s on the table, and nothing’s off the table,” McSherry said. “We just want to make sure if Boeing makes its decision based on factors that are within our control, that we do everything we can to influence that decision.”
But the competition for Boeing isn’t just us against ourselves.
The Aerospace Futures Alliance, a consortium of interests aimed at protecting the aerospace industry in Washington, cites our competitive threats:
• A shortage of trained workers, despite the industry’s long-standing presence here.
• Competition from other states, such as North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, which have incorporated extensive aerospace worker training programs into their bids to woo Boeing and other companies away.
• Our state’s high rates for unemployment insurance (second among 50 states) and workers’ compensation (ninth).
You could excuse McSherry if he ran screaming from the room when his boss, regional council CEO Bob Drewel, called asking if McSherry would help the governor.
“Even if I wanted to say, ‘No,’ to the governor, the job is too important to say, ‘No,’” McSherry said.
“The one message we need to emphasize is that we’re never done. Just as Boeing and every company has to get better relative to its competition, so do we. All of our employers are constantly being recruited because we have great companies here.
“We want to show, in a compelling, fact-based way, that this is the best place to build airplanes in the world. … It could take some doing.”
As someone whose grandfather, parents, one brother, a sister-in-law and two college roommates all worked for Boeing, I hope McSherry can do it.
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com
