Teamwork Will Fuel Our Future

A headline in Tuesday’s Spokesman-Review heralded a high-tech manufacturing opportunity that could electrify the Spokane area’s troubled, low-wage economy.

The U.S. Patent Office has granted Avista Corp. a series of patents for its fuel-cell technology. Fuel cells convert natural gas into electricity - without pollution and without need for power lines. Think about that. If this product evolves with a competitive price, and if Avista’s design wins the market’s favor, the company’s Spokane manufacturing operation will flourish, sending products around the world.

Avista could become Spokane’s Microsoft.

But I don’t want to write about fuel cells today.

I want to write about how Spokane became a place where this fuel cell technology changed from an idea into a patented product with a future.

Most important, I want to write about the possibility Spokane could encourage fresh economic vitality in all of its business sectors, and in all of its neighborhoods. The people of Spokane, who suffer now from a lack of family-wage jobs, need this to happen. The spirit of Spokane needs this as well.

We have spent long enough hunkered down in our little camps, throwing rocks at one another while outsiders wonder why the inhabitants of such a beautiful area would compete with each other instead of working as partners to compete in the larger world economy.

Avista’s fuel cell hatched here partly because local residents worked in unison, for years, to create an incubator. It’s known as SIRTI, the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute. Government subsidies - millions of state and federal dollars, appropriated specifically to boost our economy - built this facility and funded its early operation. It was at SIRTI’s labs that Avista’s fuel cell became viable.

Today, local leaders such as developer John Stone, founder of the Spokane Area Symposium Series, contend high technology has not ranked high enough on Spokane’s economic development goals. He is right that technology should be a top priority, and the fuel cell story proves the point. Yet in fairness it should be acknowledged that it was the Chamber of Commerce and the local business establishment - an establishment criticized by Stone and his allies on the City Council - that fought for two decades to create SIRTI and the surrounding higher education park at Riverpoint. Technology was central to this project’s mission from the start.

Even this newspaper got into the act. It has published scores of editorials agitating for the Riverpoint project. I know. I wrote them. I don’t say this to quibble with Stone’s view of Spokane priorities. I say it to underscore the fact he and I stand on common ground, though many would say we reside in different political camps.

It’s time to make those separate camps disappear, and unify Spokane.

Now there is a truly electrifying thought.

And I am not the only one who shares it.

JoAnn Matthiesen has been working, quietly, to begin a dialogue between the rival camps in Spokane politics. Matthiesen is a vice president at Avista. She chairs the Spokane Area Chamber of Commerce. Most important, she comes to the task with an attitude that assumes the best of those she meets. She long has known and respected Paul Sandifur, a powerful financier who backs the City Council’s new majority. She also knows and has spoken with Sandifur’s allies on the council and in the business community.

She respects their intentions: “I have not spoken with one single person who has not said `I’m doing this because I love this community and we need to thrive and grow and we need to change.”’ “But,” she adds, “let’s not destroy each other in the process.”

Matthiesen’s focus is to seek clarification of mission, and friendly coordination, among the different groups working for local economic advancement: The area chamber. The symposium. The Valley chamber. The Economic Development Council. The new commission being organized by Mayor John Talbott. Matthiesen hopes everyone’s energy can be well used, and welcomed, for the good of the community we share.

“I’m no Pollyanna,” Matthiesen said, “but I feel chaos can be positive. If there is a lot of change going on, it provides a wonderful opportunity for leadership to step up and get everybody aligned and all of our financial and human resources going in one direction. I think we are all saying the same thing. We’re coming at it in different ways.”

Looking forward at the economic development tools favored by City Council member Steve Eugster and others associated with the Symposium movement, I think Matthiesen might be right. Consider some of the tools they support:

Formation of a port district that would help our community provide a supply of ready-to-go industrial sites.

A new property tax exemption for redevelopment of multifamily dwellings that could help renew neighborhoods like West Central.

Empowerment zones that could offer state tax incentives for business investment in troubled parts of the city.

Mixed-use zoning that can make developments friendlier to resident pedestrians and more attractive to developers.

Tax increment financing that can provide basic infrastructure for new projects by leveraging the property tax revenue they will generate.

These are proven ideas. They show how government policy and subsidies can encourage the private-sector investment Spokane needs.

Not every investment will be as dramatic as a high-tech fuel cell, a riverbank housing project like the one Sandifur seeks, or my employer’s River Park Square project. A good economy, like a healthy city, is built of many interlocking parts. In unity there is power.