Spokane won’t get call center
Area business leaders Friday said Spokane’s loss of a new, 1,000-job call center to the city of Springfield, Ore, should rally the state and community to work harder to win future deals.
Springfield Mayor Sid Leiken confirmed that Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. has chosen that city for its new West Coast service center. Miami-based Royal Caribbean, which operates cruise ships and arranges tours, has said the West Coast call center eventually could create 1,000 or more jobs.
Two months ago Spokane officials learned the cruise line had narrowed its list of candidates to Spokane and Springfield.
Leiken said Springfield built its case around having a qualified work force, plus offering Royal Caribbean a significant economic incentive package.
That package includes a three-year waiver of local property taxes and a $250,000 investment by the state of Oregon for infrastructure costs related to the call center’s construction, Leiken said. The call center will be built on roughly 20 acres of undeveloped land near Interstate 5 inside the city limits, he said.
Springfield’s package is a much larger economic carrot than this area could offer, said Rich Hadley, president and CEO of the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce.
“This points out that the State of Washington is going to have to make some changes in order to be more competitive” in winning future deals, Hadley said.
State business leaders for many years have said Washington’s reliance on a business and occupation (B&O) tax, plus assorted regulations that limit plant location or expansion, make Washington less appealing to outside firms looking to relocate. Washington also has a constitutional rule that prevents the government from making direct gifts to private companies, such as grants for infrastructure.
The $3 billion in state incentives offered last year so Boeing would build its next-generation aircraft in Washington required a special legislative session to get around that restriction.
Spokane officials, trying to compete with Oregon, promised Royal Caribbean they’d lobby the state to offer sales tax breaks for the costs of building a facility here.
Despite the uneven playing field, Spokane EDC President Jon Eliassen said he felt Spokane was seriously in the running. But Royal Caribbean used a third-party site consultant, and in such cases, selection of a new plant typically favors the city offering the lowest start-up costs, Eliassen said.
“This will also be a good test case for us,” he added. “We should debrief Royal Caribbean at some point so we can learn what the differences are between our offer and Springfield’s.”
Lewis Rumpler, executive director of Spokane-based INTEC, said the decision also underlines the need to focus on helping regional companies grow.
“This gives us an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve been successful in recent years,” he said, citing strong Spokane-based companies such as Itron, Itronix and Avista Labs (now ReliON).
“It’s important and necessary that we try to recruit companies like (Royal Caribbean),” Rumpler said. “Yet it’s important we adjust our lenses on the idea of economic development,” placing less weight on recruiting big companies and more on helping area companies prosper, he said.