With Russell's departure, it's time to get to work to lure other businesses

The announcement came as a shock, although in retrospect all the warning signs were there. Civic leaders tried to put a brave face on the news, although privately (and sometimes not so quietly) they muttered dark thoughts about a company and its executives who would abandon a community.

That community, meanwhile, fretted about the impact of the news on everything from other businesses to the office market, residential real-estate prices, charitable, civic and philanthropic support, the city’s image in the rest of the world and its ability to recruit or retain companies and their employees.

Talking about Russell and Tacoma, right? Well, yes. But we’re also talking about Dayton and NCR, Seattle and Boeing, Portland and forest-products companies, Los Angeles and San Francisco and the banks that used to be located there, and dozens of other towns where the headquarters of high-profile, economy-anchoring, community-foundation companies were yanked away.

Losing a major employer, whether it’s a mine, mill, factory or office, hurts at any time, the level of pain increasing in inverse relation to the size of the community. It particularly hurts now with the economy, if not in free fall, still threatening to fall down a few more flights of stairs. You can’t afford to lose what you’ve got, because something to replace it is so hard to come by.

And the economic pain is near excruciating levels when it involves a headquarters, a phenomenon your columnist has witnessed not only in his time at a Seattle newspaper during Boeing’s defection and the Washington Mutual meltdown but from working in towns that suffered because they had few or no corporate headquarters to lose.

Headquarters matter. They’re where the best-paying jobs are. They’re where purchasing of financial, accounting, legal and marketing services gets done. They’re where the top executives join the boards of local arts, educational, social and health nonprofits – and write the checks to keep them going. They’re the most likely locales for the next generation of ideas, innovations, technologies and entrepreneurs to take root in the form of spin-off or start-up companies. They’re where those top executives make decisions about where, and how, the company will grow.

Or leave. No matter what people said at the time about Boeing’s move to Chicago (“it’s not that many people, the real heart of the company, commercial airplanes, is still here”) or will tell you now, Seattle is still paying for the loss of that headquarters. It’s still paying for WaMu’s self-immolation.

And now Tacoma pays for it too, if only indirectly, through the abrupt opening of acres of downtown office space made vacant by WaMu’s demise.

It’s not as though Tacoma hasn’t been through this before, with other company headquarters departing town for various reasons – Weyerhaeuser, Puget Sound Bancorp, Hillhaven.

But this one is particularly galling, for reasons starting with the fact that it’s Seattle. Beyond the tussle between the two towns that dates back to the transcontinental railroad era, there’s a practical reason why the fact that Russell is moving up I-5, rather than to another state or across the country, is annoying. For all its headquarters losses of late Seattle and environs always had a much deeper of reservoir of major companies to rely on and absorb the blow of departures.

Also irritating are the economic-development admonition that the best strategy is to nurture home-grown companies rather than steal them from somewhere else. Never mind, for the moment, that the Port of Tacoma has over the years gotten fat on shipping lines enticed from the Port of Seattle.

So now what?

Endlessly dissecting the Russell decision is not a useful allocation of time. Who knows what gets into the pretty little heads of company executives dazzled by the bright lights of the big city, be it Seattle or Chicago? Who knows why, in a global economy operating around the clock, in an era of unceasing, instantaneous and universal hyperconnectivity, Tacoma doesn’t work as well as any other city as a place to do business? For that matter, who knows why the head of an airplane manufacturer said a reason to move was the time he spent on airplanes getting to other places – and then moved from a location with no state or local income tax to one with both.

Go poach some company that Seattle isn’t using? Tacoma is finding out what Dayton learned with NCR, what much of the Rust Belt learned with the Sun Belt: Even if the decision comes down to purely financial considerations (and it rarely does), someone can always write a larger check or offer a sweeter deal than you. So Tacoma will be able to offer plentiful office space and affordable housing prices? What metro area of America can’t boast those these days?

What Tacoma is left to rely on is the standard list of dull, earnest and often vague bromides for economic development, stuff that may not show a payoff for years, if ever, but without which success isn’t possible.

Stuff like: Making sure the community – schools, parks, roads and transit, public safety, cultural amenities, neighborhoods – is a place people here want to live in, because if they don’t, no one from outside will either. Making sure the business climate – from basic services to the minimization of hassles to starting or expanding a company – is conducive to keeping people already here (the “grow your own” philosophy, even though recent history would argue against its benefits). Making sure it’s a town that encourages people to start ventures here (starting with, as was recently suggested in this column, any Russellites not interested in relocating).

Don’t attend to those items, and no image campaign, no matter how slick and expensive, will make up for this town’s deficiencies.

Of course, if you’d like to occupy your time with some municipal grumbling and cursing of the Russell name, that’s perfectly understandable and perhaps even therapeutic. Just don’t make it your entire agenda. There’s work to be done.

Bill Virgin writes on business and economic issues. He can be reached at bill.virgin@yahoo.com.