EVERETT – Forty years is a long time to stay together.
Like an old married couple, the city of Everett and the Boeing Co. have stuck with one another through the good and the bad. They have seen each other through times of sickness and times of health.
Boeing officials and local government leaders haven’t always seen eye-to-eye. Certainly there have been growing pains. But neither has called it quits.
“We all mature,” said Dan Becker, who managed Boeing’s Everett factory from 2004 to 2005.
The courtship
Forty years ago, you could say that Boeing and Everett took quite a leap together. Naysayers warned that Boeing would change Everett forever and would bring too many people too quickly, creating too many problems.
In an unbylined article in The Herald on Dec. 30, 1966, a writer described as the Snohomish County historian warned of many headaches ahead, suggesting neither the city nor the county were ready for Boeing.
In its 1966 year-end review, Herald staff lambasted Snohomish County planners for “getting caught with their plans down.”
Unprepared in terms of long-term growth plans when Boeing first arrived, the county added staffing — jumping from eight to 17 people in the planning office from 1966 to 1967 — to study future roads, sewers and waterways needed to accommodate the 15,000 jobs that Boeing predicted its factory would create.
After requests for building permits more than doubled in a year, county leaders noted that their county was one of the fastest-growing in the nation and had a lot fewer home foreclosures.
Some of the opponents’ predictions came true. From 1966 to 1967, the county’s crime rate jumped 40 percent that one police chief blamed on the “influx of undesirables.” At the end of 1967, all city police departments in the county planned to hire more officers to counter the trend.
Shortly after Boeing announced its decision to locate in Everett in 1966, taxpayers rejected a levy for road upgrades.
Without street improvements, officials warned of four-hour commutes to Boeing. However, the federal government stepped in and funded several infrastructure projects that benefited both Boeing and Everett in the late 1960s and 1970s, said Bob Anderson, Everett’s mayor at the time.
The spat
Infrastructure again became a source of bitterness between Boeing and Everett roughly 20 years into their relationship.
“Were there issues? Sure, there were,” said Jim Johnson, who managed Boeing’s Everett factory from 1988 to 1993, during a tumultuous time for the company and city. In the end, though, the two resolved their differences.
In 1993, Boeing expanded its Everett facility 36 acres to accommodate production on its twin-engine 777, the third plane to be manufactured at the site. Thirteen years earlier, the company increased the factory’s size by about 20 acres for its 767.
But Boeing’s request for the 777 didn’t get the warm reception that several former site managers thought it might, considering that the expansion meant extra tax dollars and employment opportunities in Snohomish County. Instead, local officials shocked the company by handing it a $50 million bill for the costs of adding infrastructure to handle additional workers.
Looking back, Ron Ostrowski, also a former manager at the Everett site, can understand the city’s point of view to a certain extent. Boeing wasn’t collaborating much with community leaders, Ostrowski said. The lack of communication made it tough for both the city and the county to plan ahead for Boeing projects.
“We weren’t coming to the city or state with long-term plans,” he said.
On the other hand, John Quinlivan, another former site manager, pointed out, the city’s demand didn’t come at a good time for Boeing. The state of Utah all but gave Boeing’s competitor Douglas its new location, he said.
The reconciliation
Former Snohomish County Executive Bob Drewel remembers an economic development meeting when a former Boeing official gave the region a wake-up call. The message: the Boeing Co. wasn’t convinced that Everett was the right place to assemble its 787 Dreamliner.
“Boeing needed to change its business model to stay competitive,” Drewel said. “In some ways, we were responsible for changing ours.”
The contentiousness between Boeing and city officials during the 777 expansion faded by the time the bid for the 787 came up. However, Boeing officials were still wary from the experience.
“You’ve got to have a state that wants you,” Becker said.
And Boeing wanted a state, a community that was interested in keeping the company competitive, meaning willing to offer financial incentives. For the first time since Boeing decided to move to Everett, the city had to go back to the drawing board and figure out a way to keep Boeing interested.
The city and the region couldn’t take Boeing’s future here for granted any longer, Drewel said.
“We had to compete,” he said. “The state had to step forward, the county had to step forward, the city of Everett had to step forward.”
The future
Over the past four decades, the community and company have figured out how to work together, what each means to the other. Boeing has learned to be a better communicator, better neighbor, former site managers say. And Everett has learned not to take Boeing for granted.
There will be more decisions, more debates in the future, including whether Boeing opens a second assembly line for its 787 in Everett and if the company consolidates its operations and brings production here for its yet-to-be-launched replacement for the single-aisle plane.
Community leaders such as Drewel seemed poised keep Everett in good favor with Boeing in the future.
“We can’t lapse back to thinking ‘they’re always going to do it here,’” Drewel said.
As for the current manager of Boeing’s Everett operation, Ross Bogue doesn’t believe that the community has given the company a compelling reason to leave.
“It’s proven to be a place that knows how to find a way,” Bogue said.
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