Editorial
Looking back at the Boeing deal

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Our state constitution fairly screams: no favors! No company, it insists, may be given "privileges or immunities" different from any other company. No "private or special law" — that is, a law for a specific company — may be enacted "for assessment or collection of taxes." No state or local agency except a port district may "give any money, or property, or loan its money" to a private interest.

Among the things Washington offered to Boeing were a 40-percent reduction in gross-receipts tax and the construction of a $10 million training center built to Boeing specifications.

Bob Williams of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which has been demanding to see every page of the Boeing deal, says it "seems almost to shred the constitution."

David Walsh, the assistant attorney general who certified that the deal could be defended in court, replies the tax breaks are not just for Boeing but for any aerospace company, and therefore are not a special law. As for the training center, he says, the $10 million is not for Boeing, but for education of the people, and of course the state may do that.

"I think it is a defensible agreement," he says.

That is good, because this state deals here with a matter of its basic sustenance. It was not only a few thousand jobs on one assembly line, but a statement of whether this state would have an aerospace industry at all. It was also a broader statement about whether this state was, in Gov. Gary Locke's phrase, "open for business," and interested in its economic future.

Evergreen Freedom's point is that the state should make its rules for all business, not just one. The Legislature did it that way in its reform of the unemployment system. But in the late spring of 2003, there was no time to change all of Washington to Boeing's satisfaction. If the state had said no on principle, we would have lost.

Let's admit it: Our public officials made a special deal for Boeing. It is the biggest manufacturing company here. It has a promising future. It can pick up and leave, and it nearly did. And it is an export industry. Unlike many other industries — including the railroads, which our founders were thinking of in 1889 — if aerospace leaves, the demand that sustains it moves with it.

People should not be sorry we won Boeing. It's an exception, but a worthwhile one, easily defended as good for all the state.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company