Edc Has Difficult Challenge For 1999 While 1998 Was Good, Job Pace Must Pick Up

Nice job, EDC.

Now do better next year.

That’s more or less the business community’s message for the Spokane Area Economic Development Council, which finished 1998 on track to create 5,000 jobs by the end of 2001 but with even higher goals to meet in 1999.

The EDC, which celebrated its 25th anniversary at an annual meeting at the downtown DoubleTree Thursday, lured nine companies and 698 jobs to Spokane in 1998.

The most prized catch was B.F. Goodrich, which is building a $66 million airplane brake factory on the West plains that is expected to employ 250 people.

“You’d always like to have more, but it keeps us right on the schedule for jobs per year,” said Sterling Haskins, chairman of the EDC Board of Trustees and co-owner of The Haskins Co. construction firm.

But while the EDC is on pace, the pace quickens in 1999.

The schedule devised by Focus 21, Spokane’s economic development funding agency, calls for successively more jobs to be created every year between 1997 and 2001. For 1999, the target is 1,000 jobs.

The idea is that the EDC’s legwork in the first few years of the five-year plan will result in more job creation toward the end, said EDC President Mark Turner.

“The real game here is for us to build a big backlog,” Turner said. “We have to play a volume game because of the goals we’ve set.”

While the EDC had its successes in 1998, which include adding 300 jobs from Travelers Property and Casualty Insurance and 90 jobs from the state Employment Security Division, there were disappointments as well.

Among the most visible was losing construction equipment manufacturer Genie Industries and its 1,300 jobs to Moses Lake because of its difficulty in finding a suitable parcel of available land.

And the EDC’s prized recruit, B.F. Goodrich, is facing regulatory hurdles in building its factory because of problems with disposing of groundwater at its construction site.

Turner said B.F. Goodrich’s struggles with the state Department of Ecology were not expected, but they are also a result of the unique factory design. It shouldn’t discourage other companies from locating to the West Plains, he said.

“I really don’t think it will have an adverse effect,” Turner said.

Matching a company with a community is a difficult process, and Spokane won’t get every company it pursues, he said.

There also is plenty of competition, Haskins said.

“We compete with 35,000 other EDC’s from around the country, from small ones to big ones, and some states can do things tax-wise that we can’t do here,” he said.

“It’s not an easy thing to attract a company. This can take a year, year and a half, two years, and you probably get one out of 15 or 20.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: AT A GLANCE JOB RECRUITS The nine companies the Economic Development Council recruited to Spokane in 1998 include: Apollo College B.F. Goodrich Borin-Halbich Inc. (consultants) DCI Engineers Employment Securities Department tele-center Global Tactics (consultants) Harmon Industries Nordan Distributors Travelers Property and Casualty