At 8:41 a.m. Monday, six men and one woman walked across A Street and up the staircase leading to the lobby of Russell Investments – downtown Tacoma’s most prestigious corporate headquarters.

This Magnificent Seven, led by U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair, represented a new affiliation that calls itself the Tacoma Partnership. They arrived early on this crisp morning for a 9 a.m. meeting.

Each wore a dark power suit and clutched a personal copy of a white three-ring binder. Bruce Kendall, president and CEO of the Economic Development Board for Tacoma-Pierce County, carried a cardboard box with extra binders for Russell’s executive team.

The binders contained 158 pages with details of a mission – months in the planning – with a singular goal and an offer unprecedented in the history of Tacoma business and politics.

The goal? Keep Russell Investments in Tacoma.

The offer? A long list of promised local, state and federal government tax breaks and incentives, government-built parking, beefed-up utilities, a downtown makeover inspired by Chicago.

Most profound, Tacoma’s mayor and eight City Council members had privately agreed before the meeting to wipe out the city’s business and occupation tax on international financial services. Starting this year, the city will phase out the tax by 20 percent a year so that it disappears by 2013, the year Russell expects to move into a new headquarters.

The city might as well offer it. Because if Russell leaves town in 2013, the tax revenue will disappear anyway.

The estimated totals from The Tacoma Partnership?

 • Direct actions and investments that benefit Russell’s corporate bottom line, $39.7 million.

 • Deductions on construction of a corporate headquarters, $42.9 million.

 • Infrastructure in a new downtown district called the International Financial Services Area, $66 million.

The Magnificent Seven of the 1960 motion picture of the same name came together as underdog gunslingers aiming to save a poor Mexican farming village from 100 banditos who wanted to steal its food stocks.

Tacoma’s Magnificent Seven – Dicks; Kendall; Columbia Bank CEO Melanie Dressel; City Manager Eric Anderson; Ryan Petty, city director of Community and Economic Development; Angelos Angelou, veteran Texas economic development consultant; and Clark Mather, Dicks’ Tacoma representative – aimed to prevent other locales in the Puget Sound region from stealing the company Tacoma can least afford to lose.

But as the seven walked into the first-floor conference room next to the Russell cafeteria, they encountered an unexpected surprise – two hired guns, real estate power brokers with deep ties to the Seattle corporate and political elite.

On the Russell Investments side of the table sat Craig Kinzer, president of Kinzer Real Estate Services, and David Victor, co-founder and principal of The Seneca Group. Both companies share an office suite on the 15th floor of Safeco Center, an office tower at Second Avenue and Seneca Street in downtown Seattle.

Their presence didn’t look like a good sign for the future of Russell in Tacoma.

The two companies tout their real estate advisory services for confidential, complex corporate transactions as “relationship-driven.” And they have relationships and track records aplenty with developers almost exclusively in Seattle and none in Tacoma – except now for Russell.

Kinzer helped Starbucks land its corporate headquarters in the SoDo district near the playgrounds of the Seattle Mariners and Seattle Seahawks. He quietly assembled all the parcels necessary to build Safeco Field. He brokered a deal to land Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute in the burgeoning South Lake Union district. He helped the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation acquire a site for its new home in Seattle’s South Lake Union revival. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s development company, Vulcan, has financed a corporate redevelopment of South Lake Union.

Kinzer’s other company, Kinzer Capital, has provided venture capital to a host of successful Seattle start-ups. He once owned a minority share of the Seattle SuperSonics with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and he co-owns the Seattle company that released the DVD-based game “Scene It?”.

If left to speculate, the presence of Kinzer and Victor looked like Russell executives wanted the most prestigious and knowledgeable team to find a new corporate headquarters in the market it knows more intimately than any other – Seattle.

Late last week, however, Russell spokeswoman Jennifer Tice reiterated that the company with its 72-year history in downtown Tacoma had not made any decisions about its future. She declined to discuss the process the company will use to evaluate options or speak of Kinzer’s role, but acknowledged that executives would make a decision by the end of the year.

Then by Friday, representatives of two separate development teams that have presented proposals for Russell headquarters in Tacoma received calls from Kinzer saying their projects had made it to Russell’s short list of options.

Those two?

Nate Dreon, president of Ilahie Holdings, which owns Russell’s current headquarters at 909 A St. and controls most of the two blocks across A Street, has proposed a phased expansion.

John Barline, a Tacoma attorney who represents German billionaire Erivan Haub and his three sons, has proposed a series of towers on Haub’s property between A Street and Pacific Avenue at South 14th Street.

No one knows or will say how many potential sites in Tacoma, Seattle or elsewhere have made it to Russell’s short list. (Other development teams who made pitches to Russell haven’t heard from the company.) Maybe some history will help. When Kinzer’s company searched for a site for a research institute for Seattle Children’s Hospital, it looked at 1,600 options before settling on a short list of 15.

Kinzer did not return phone calls or respond to a visit to his office.

So today we know this much. A short list exists. Tacoma has a chance. Tacoma will get graded by a team from Seattle.

“I still feel really confident,” Dreon said. “But it’s not like we’ve clinked anything for downtown Tacoma. There are a lot of pieces outside of our control because of what Russell wants to do from a corporate culture standpoint. I know there are going to be some very compelling, very attractive sites outside of Tacoma. … We’re still in the fight of our lives.”

The Tacoma Partnership proposal then likely represents the civic equivalent of a Hail Mary in football – a long desperation pass thrown in the closing seconds in hopes of a miracle touchdown to win the game.

So no wonder that Congressman Dicks – a linebacker and offensive guard on the University of Washington’s 1961 Rose Bowl team – led the charge.

“This is my No. 1 priority,” Dicks told the Russell team, which included CEO Craig Ueland, CFO Hal Strong, Director of Corporate Services Gretchen Benzin and Government and Community Relations Director Pauline Akiyama.

Ending the war in Iraq? Solving the housing mortgage crisis? Saving The Boeing Co.’s bid for Air Force refueling tankers? No, Dicks most wants to keep Russell in Tacoma.

His promise included using his committee assignments, contacts and influence to secure between $15.9 million and $20.9 million from various federal agencies through 2012 to help build the transportation, parking, sustainable development and streetscape needs in Tacoma’s new International Financial Services Area.

But this decision looks as if it will hinge mostly on who Russell’s leaders value more – its current Tacoma work force of 1,100 associates, or its future work force.

Although Russell executives have not publicly cited any difficulty recruiting talent to Tacoma, officials in Tacoma and Federal Way have heard through their inquiries that a faction within Russell believes it could recruit better with an address in or closer to Seattle.

So the Tacoma Partnership’s pitch included an updated map – based on a 2007 state commute trip survey of Russell’s employees – that shows the bulk of them live in four places: North Tacoma, Gig Harbor, Lakewood and University Place.

If Russell chooses a new headquarters in or around Seattle, its current associates will spend an estimated $2.5 million a year more in commuter costs. Those who choose to move will find home prices in the King County market $180,000 more than what they can buy in the Tacoma area. And the cost of living in Seattle vs. Tacoma over a 10-year period totals more than $64 million – assuming 70 percent of the work force relocates.

Based on those numbers, plus cheaper utility rates the company would pay in Tacoma, the Tacoma Partnership estimates that over 10 years “The Russell Advantage in Tacoma” could save the company and its associates $133.5 million. Not counting inconvenience.

Russell associates get premium treatment, fully paid benefits, retirement plans and sabbaticals. Consequently, Fortune magazine perennially ranks Russell among the 100 Best Companies to Work For in the U.S. Russell ranked No. 65 in January.

So one question looms: Will Russell executives value the perceived cachet of the Seattle-area scene so highly that they force their prized associates to commute farther or move their families into a drastically more expensive market?

With a short list of options now identified, I don’t think CEO Ueland will need until the end of the year to make up his mind. We should find out much sooner whether the Hail Mary thrown by Tacoma’s Magnificent Seven results in a jubilant touchdown or falls agonizingly incomplete.

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com see offer online

What did the Tacoma Partnership offer Russell Investments to stay in Tacoma? See it for yourself. Go online to thenewstribune.com/business to download the entire 158-page document or specific sections, such as the executive summary, letters of support from local business and civic leaders and a map that shows where Russell’s employees live.