Gregoire urges state to think big

It’s time to start thinking of Washington as its own small nation, rather than just one of 50 states, Gov. Chris Gregoire told business leaders in Spokane on Wednesday.

Don’t look at Washington as east and west, divided by mountains, she said during a speech at the Prosperity Partnership luncheon. Look at it as one place that makes things sold all over the world.

Don’t compete with the other 49 states to move to the top in mediocre education standards, she said. Compete with the best students that Ireland, Germany, Japan or India have to offer.

“We need a challenge … someone out there to compete with,” Gregoire told a group of visiting business leaders from western Washington and their hosts from the Spokane area.

The governor suggested that the people who have the most trouble thinking of Washington as a small nation are some of its own residents.

“All too often in the western part of the state, there’s an attitude that ‘This is where it’s all happening,’” she said. But visiting heads of state, like Chinese President Hu Jintao or Mexican President Vicente Fox, see the state as a whole.

In Yakima, where Fox visited during his May trip to the state, “they all get it,” Gregoire said. So do the people who live in communities along the Canadian border.

Western Washington business leaders in the Prosperity Partnership are touring East Side communities by bus and discussing common goals in job growth and educational development. Their stop in Spokane included a visit to the Riverpoint Higher Education Campus area and lunch at the Davenport Hotel.

The governor said she supported the partnership’s goal of increasing the number of college graduates as a way to improve the economy. The business group believes the state needs to increase slots for specialties that will have critical shortages in the coming years, in such fields as computer sciences, engineering, life sciences and medical research.

“The cornerstone to our success – it’s all about education,” she said. In a later interview, however, she added that she’s waiting to see how much of the projected revenue surplus the Legislature is willing to invest in education, and whether the state colleges can provide the “absolute accountability” for that extra money.

Gregoire also used the “small nation” theme at Spokane International Airport earlier in the day, at the dedication of the new XN Aircraft maintenance and avionics facility, which got some of the money for its $1.58 million expansion from state Community Economic Revitalization Board and from airport revenues. The new maintenance facility, which is so busy it operates two shifts, precedes an estimated $83 million in capital improvement projects at the airport over the next three years. Included in that is a $26 million runway expansion and another $9 million for improvements to the taxiway.

Those projects show the world that the Spokane airport is truly international, and that aviation in Washington state is more than just the Boeing Co., Gregoire said.

“Our entire state is home to the aerospace industry,” said Gregoire as she stood at a podium in the front of a hangar where eight private planes were in varying stages of being taken apart, upgraded and put back together.