Meyer To Step Down As Momentum’s Top Executive Seven-Year Veteran Plans To Take New Post With Pacific Gas Transmission Co.

Susan Meyer, who directed Momentum ‘95 through more than seven years of change, will leave the powerful economic development group next month.

Meyer, Momentum’s 38-year-old executive director, leaves Nov. 17 to join the Spokane office of Pacific Gas Transmission Co. as community relations representative for Washington and Idaho.

Meyer is one of only two paid employees of Momentum, a largely volunteer association of 550 local businesses.

No successor has been chosen. Momentum President Gordon Budke said an executive committee will begin searching for a replacement next week.

“We’re going to miss her,” Budke said.

“She’s brought good balance to the organization.”

Meyer’s departure raises questions about the future of Momentum, whose members invest about $1 million a year to promote job growth, higher wages and quality of life. That five-year financial commitment expires Dec. 31, 1996.

Momentum members must decide soon whether to continue beyond 1996, disband, or create a new group with a different purpose.

“We still have 14 months-plus of life,” Budke said. “We’re in the planning phase right now, and we haven’t decided” on Momentum’s future.

Meyer said her decision to leave had nothing to do with Momentum approaching the end of its current phase. Pacific Gas approached her about the job, she said, which was particularly attractive because she could remain in Spokane.

“I’d always planned to make the transition to the private sector,” Meyer said. “This is the opportune time.”

Founded in 1987, Momentum is credited for jump-starting Spokane’s economy at a time when people were fleeing the city to find work. Momentum’s success story has been retold statewide, making it a model for other cities hoping to shore up their economy.

Meyer has been a sounding board for business leaders, some of whom have limited contact with neighborhood groups, civic activists and the middle class.

A single mother who earned an Eastern Washington University master’s of business administration degree, Meyer helped Momentum gain acceptance among groups suspicious of Momentum’s intentions.

“As my identity with the organization increased, perhaps that provided a somewhat less elitist view,” she said.

Meyer said her late November departure allows her to get Momentum through its campaign for voter approval of the county charter, and decisions about what agencies Momentum will fund in 1996.

Meyer joins Portland-based Pacific Gas, which employs 40 of its 300 people in Spokane to operate a pair of natural gas pipelines, running from British Columbia to California.

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