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Renton has a plan for when Boeing is gone shouldnt Snohomish County do the same?

TAKING STOCK

By Tim Raetzloff

For the Beacon

The Pontiac, Michigan, Silverdome recently sold for $583,000. Thats the same Silverdome that cost $55.7 million to build in 1975.

The Pope and Elvis both greeted huge crowds there. Super Bowl XVI was played in the Silverdome.

The site encompasses 127 acres, and it sold for half the price of some houses on my street in Edmonds. In Detroit, they held an auction to sell abandoned property. Many houses couldnt find a buyer at the $500 level.

Vast areas in and around Detroit are every bit as much a ghost town as Alpine, Washington, where I have spent much of the last two years exploring.

Parts of Detroit are ghost towns. What does that have to do with Snohomish County?

We have Boeing. Boeing is a dinosaur like the auto companies. All the dinosaurs are going to die. The industry of building commercial airplanes will be bigger 20 years from now than it is today, but Boeing wont be unless there is new management.

Boeing suffers from the same management ignorance that afflicted the Big Three automakers. The CEO of Boeing knows about post-it notes. He is proud of having moved the production of post-it notes offshore to save costs when he was at 3M, and he is doing the same with the newest Boeing airliner, the 787 Dreamliner.

It is probably nothing more than a dream. As originally planned, it will never fly. The plane and the production plan have both changed several times, and seem likely to be changed again.

Washington gave up $3 billion in tax breaks to get the 787 production line. What did we get? Very little and now Boeing has decided to move the second 787 production line to South Carolina.

The first production line doesnt work, so start a second line and get tax breaks there. Reasonable?

Enough Boeing bashing. The point is that Boeing will one day be gone. Snohomish County needs to begin preparation for that day now.

Thirty thousand Snohomish County residents work for Boeing. Twice that many work in jobs dependent on the Boeing jobs. Twice that many are dependents of those jobs. One quarter of the population of Snohomish County, 180,000 people, will no longer have income from Boeing.

What will Snohomish County do with Paine Field? What will Snohomish County do with the industrial land and buildings that will otherwise be vacant? Detroit again? I hope not.

My two television appearances about the 787 South Carolina move are at these sites:

http://www.kcts9.org/video/boeings-787-decision-done-deal-get-go

http://www.komonews.com/news/67386457.html

It gave me a chance to talk to other people about the Boeing situation. I learned that Renton has a plan in place for the day when Boeing is gone not if Boeing is gone, but when Boeing is gone.

Shouldnt Snohomish County do the same?

Snohomish County has spent a great deal of effort, and some money, to hijack Vancouver Olympic visitors between Seattle and Vancouver to stop and spend money here. Wouldnt it have been easier to hijack those visitors if they had flown into Paine Field instead of Sea-Tac?

Edmonds and Mukilteo are on record as opposing commercial flights at Paine Field because of a perceived impact on property values. The lack of livelihood for 180,000 Snohomish County residents will cause a much bigger loss in property values.

Paine Field is a hot button issue to many people, and it isnt and doesnt have to be the solution. But we had better start looking at possible solutions.

If you didnt believe it before, believe it now Boeing is going away, sooner or later.

(Tim Raetzloff operates Abarim Business Computers at Five Corners in Edmonds. He evaluates Puget Sound business activity for his newsletter, and his column appears regularly in the Beacon. In the interests of full disclosure he says, Neither I nor Abarim have any interest or conflict with any company mentioned in this column.)