Norm Dicks’ powerful finesse brought Boeing back to Pierce County

To lobby and lure Boeing to build a plant at Frederickson, Tacoma and Pierce County officials in 1990 prepared a presentation for Frank Shrontz, Boeing’s then-chairman.

The officials believed they had a perfect plan.

There would be sewers and water in Frederickson, they promised, and Canyon Road would be expanded. There were 12,000 Pierce County residents who worked for Boeing and commuted north, so a trained workforce was available to staff a Frederickson operation.

The meeting began with a movie, and the movie began with a shot of a beautiful airplane.

A McDonnell Douglas airplane.

At the time, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas were competitors.

Shrontz chuckled.

The officials squirmed.

The Frederickson plant opened 24 years ago and, according to former Congressman Norm Dicks, recently recalling the words of late News Tribune Publisher Kelso Gillenwater, “The fact that they’re in Pierce County changes the center of gravity.”

It was Dicks who made the difference.

DECISION BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

This year, Boeing turns 100. Recently, area leaders recalled the 1990 Frederickson deal.

“This was huge,” said Paul Miller, then a member of the Tacoma City Council and now president and CEO of America’s Car Museum.

Miller attended the March 1990 meeting, along with representatives and boosters from the Port of Tacoma, Pierce County, Puyallup and private enterprise.

“It was a sales pitch,” Miller said. “It was an opportunity for Pierce County to put its best foot forward and convince Boeing. I don’t think it was a done deal.”

The Economic Development Board for Tacoma-Pierce County had prepared a movie touting the amenities and possibilities available at the site. This was before the age of PowerPoint.

And the movie began with the image of a competitor’s aircraft.

“Shrontz laughed at it. He pointed it out,” Miller said.

Shrontz laughed and the officials continued to squirm, and then the movie was over.

Dicks announced that he and Shrontz would conduct a two-person meeting-within-the-meeting, and that private meeting lasted less than 30 minutes, according to persons who were present.

The pair then reappeared, smiling.

Dicks, then a major voice on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, announced that Shrontz had made a decision.

Boeing would return to Pierce County.

BRINGING BOEING BACK

The company had previously operated manufacturing facilities in the South Sound.

During World War II, Boeing occupied the former Tacoma Exposition Hall on East 26th Street near Portland Avenue. The circa-1940 Art Deco building for a handful of years housed a Boeing sub-assembly plant for B-17 bombers. Workers in Pierce County also helped with the Boeing B-29.

Meanwhile, the company sponsored wartime aircraft construction classes at Tacoma Vocational School, later renamed Bates Technical College.

In the 1960s, Boeing supported the construction of submarine-chasing hydrofoils at Tacoma’s Martinac Shipbuilding.

But the war ended, and the hydrofoils never quite lived up to their promise.

Boeing left town.

Dicks, along with local leaders, wanted Boeing back.

“We had been working on this for a long time,” Dicks said recently from his home on Hood Canal.

Shrontz, Dicks said, “had come at my request. It was good for Boeing and good for Pierce County and good for the Port of Tacoma. This is the most important company in the state of Washington, and having them come to Pierce County was important to me. It was politically important and economically important. The meeting was to cement the idea that they would come to Pierce County.”

“The meeting was the first step,” said Andrew Neiditz, then Pierce County deputy county executive and now executive director of South Sound 911.

A task force comprising planners, technicians and officials would follow, he said.

“The commitment to do the task force and to deliver on a promise that we would make it worthwhile was a part of that first meeting,” he said.

Neiditz knew speed was important.

“Boeing was in a hurry,” he said. “We said we could meet their timeline. We put on additional staff members who worked for the county in planning and development. We felt we were in competition with Snohomish County.”

But Norm Dicks did not represent Snohomish County.

“There’s no question that Norm spearheaded the formation of the meeting and the success of the relationship,” Neiditz said. “He was viewed as a heavyweight by Boeing. He made a big difference.”

REGIONAL IMPACT

Dicks made a difference, and so has Boeing in Frederickson.

The Frederickson plant is a major supplier of wing components and empennage structures for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, according to Boeing spokesman Tom Kim.

The Frederickson operation hosts two manufacturing units, Kim said, including the Composites Manufacturing Center and Skin and Spar. The former produces, assembles and delivers wing structures using “advanced composite materials,” and the latter produces aluminum wing components offering “unique capabilities found nowhere else in the world.”

“The work done in Frederickson is very important to Boeing,” Kim wrote.

The company counts 1,700 employees in Frederickson and more than 10,000 employees who live in Pierce County and work at Boeing facilities in the Puget Sound area. Add 8,000 retirees in Pierce County.

And then add 136 “production suppliers and other vendors in Pierce County,” Kim said.

Those suppliers include Toray Composites, a Japanese company that committed to purchase a site in Frederickson in 1992.

“I would call it a spinoff with a capital S,” said Neiditz at the time.

“All the spinoff businesses were a big part of the economic impact,” he said earlier this month. “I think it put Pierce County on the map as a significant player. I don’t know that before that a company like (Toray) would take Pierce County seriously.”

“It enriches our community but also positions us to have a strong role in aerospace in the future,” said Susan Suess, senior vice president for business recruitment at the Economic Development Board for Tacoma-Pierce County.

The Boeing presence offers “total credibility,” she said. “A number of states and areas that have some aerospace suppliers — sometimes those communities represent themselves as being an aerospace center. By having a Boeing facility here it established us as a major player.”

“The port struggled for a lot of years to sell property out there,” said Don Meyer, then a Port of Tacoma employee and now a member of the Port Commission. “For years we talked about trying to get Boeing out there, and once we did, it made a difference,” he said.

Said Norm Dicks, without surprise, “This thing has held together over all these years.”

This story was originally published July 9, 2016 at 4:55 PM with the headline "Norm Dicks’ powerful finesse brought Boeing back to Pierce County."