Region's manufacturing centers can become focal points for green-collar jobs

Entrepreneurs quickly learn to search for new opportunities to create a better product or service. The recent crisis on Wall Street and Main Street is no exception. This crisis has sent a shock wave of realization through our country: too much debt, too little investment.

Infrastructure investment and research and development (R&D) must be the focus of our economy over the next decade, if the United States is to regain its competitiveness and create a solid base for growth and employment.

One of the ways this can be accomplished locally is through using our existing industrially zoned business centers throughout the Puget Sound area, in concert with the renewable-energy-production tax credit extended by Congress in October and more comprehensive Washington State renewable-energy tax credits.

One of the best kept secrets of Washington's Growth Management Act was establishing manufacturing industrial centers (MICs) throughout Washington State. These MICs are industrially zoned properties that were historically and are currently used by manufacturing and industrial businesses.

In the Puget Sound, there are eight MICs:

• Paine Field in Snohomish County;

• Ballard-Interbay, Duwamish, Overlake, North Tukwila and Kent in King County;

• Port of Tacoma and Fredrickson in Pierce County.

These areas are rich with opportunities for investment and development. In particular, the Ballard-Interbay Northend Manufacturing and Industrial Center (BINMIC) in Seattle contains a mix of maritime, fishing, manufacturing and research-and-development uses that is a microcosm of our county and state economy and can help spearhead significant regional growth.

The BINMIC Committee is a group of dedicated individuals who represent various maritime and manufacturing/industrial businesses in the BINMIC. As a volunteer stakeholders group, our primary mission is to retain all businesses in the center. However, with this new crisis at hand, we also see a great opportunity for the center to attract and develop renewable-energy manufacturing businesses.

The state of Oregon currently competes with Washington state by having in place a business energy tax credit (http://www.oregon.gov/ENERGY/RENEW) along with other renewable-energy tax incentives.

The application for this manufacturing tax credit states that business owners of facilities used to manufacture equipment, machinery or other products for renewable energy may be eligible for a tax credit of 50 percent over five years (10 percent per year). The facility owner must be a trade, business or property owner of a site in Oregon or be the owner or buyer of the facility, and use it to manufacture renewable-energy equipment or materials.

If Washington state can offer better incentives for our current companies to compete with other states and also attract new businesses to our state (instead of moving to Oregon), we can create a "green-collar economy." The BINMIC Committee believes the opportunity is now, because its center already contains the buildings and infrastructure to support manufacturing and connect the technology transfer from R&D to manufacturing and services for these emerging renewable technologies.

Products such as solar panels, wind turbines, new green building products, tidal-powered generators and photovoltaic cells can be made in Seattle, and made by our existing trades and engineering work force. The center is close to the University of Washington Center for Nanotechnology and South Lake Union Biotechnology businesses, with other support services, including accounting firms, law firms and the like, that provide the connection between all the parts needed to attract renewable-energy manufacturing. The next step is not easy, but it is doable.

For example, the energy-equipment maker SolarWorld is about to open a $440 million manufacturing plant in Hillsboro, Ore., with 250 employees and a planned increase to 1,000 employees by 2011. The plant will be North America's largest solar-cell plant. By 2011, it is expected to manufacture sufficient material to generate 500 megawatts of electricity.

The Hillsboro factory is one of six solar-manufacturing projects that have come to Oregon in the past 18 months. Sanyo recently broke ground on a solar-energy-product plant in Salem. This is all owing to Oregon's business energy tax credit.

Our political, community and business groups, and our local institutional and private investors, need to work together with our Legislature to promote local R&D and growth in renewable-energy businesses. We have the talent and the industrial-property infrastructure to create the next green-collar jobs, but Washington state will need to adopt a more-comprehensive business energy tax credit similar to Oregon's to compete in the regional and the global market for renewable-energy manufacturing.

John Kane is president of Kane Environmental, Inc. of Seattle and chairman of the Ballard Interbay Northend Manufacturing Industrial Center Action Committee.