The people who live here call it simply “the valley,” a stretch of land along Interstate Highway 90 between the city and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, about 20 miles east.
For years, it was a valley with a few housing developments, the usual strip mall and a small manufacturing operation here and there.
The regional economy around Spokane, the largest city in Eastern Washington, saw most of its past growth in the extraction industries of the Old Economy — mining, forest products, aluminum mills and, to some extent, agriculture. That’s changing as those industries fall on hard times or slow markets.
The New Economy is coming to the Inland Empire and the valley is where the action is. While it is no Silicon Valley in California, this valley is alive with technology companies, office buildings and business parks and upscale housing projects.
Over the last five years, the Spokane area has experienced a renaissance as companies fled the high cost of living in California and long lines of traffic in Seattle. They found here that land was plentiful and cheap, the school systems were good, the work ethic strong.
BF Goodrich Aerospace built a $66 million plant to make aircraft carbon brakes here in 1998, citing several reasons for choosing Spokane: low costs for natural gas, electricity and water; a favorable business climate; and low humidity. The low humidity makes cooling towers more efficient.
Housing, a key drawing card for companies, is also a factor. The median home cost in Spokane County was $106,800 in 1999, compared with more than $400,000 in Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley.
New major employers are increasingly high-tech.
“The bulk of manufacturing in our area is now electronic or high-tech,” said Mark Turner, president of the Spokane Area Economic Development Council. “Of the top 12 manufacturers, eight are technology-based.”
The economic agency set a goal three years ago to attract 3,000 jobs in three years and it looks like it is going to make that goal easily. Turner said the group counted more than 1,000 new jobs in the past year. One key figure was average salary — $33,000 a year.
The development in the valley is also forcing a shift in thinking from a narrow city base to a regional one. If the population of Spokane County is combined with Kootenai County, the neighboring county in Idaho, the total rises to about 500,000. That’s enough to attract larger companies looking for a wider labor base.
The economic council also estimates that more than 40,000 students attend four-year higher-education institutions within a 50-mile radius of the city.
Spokane also is tapping into the New Economy on its own. When a historic building was about to be renovated, high-speed Internet access was built into it. Other projects followed so that Spokane now has a “terabyte triangle,” a sizeable area of downtown wired with high-speed Internet access and high-capacity fiber-optic cable.
With almost 40 flights a day between Spokane and Seattle, transportation is good. Southwest Airlines is the major carrier in the market, providing low-cost flights to several destinations.
“I can get to a meeting in downtown Seattle from here almost as fast as someone coming from Redmond,” said Peter Allison, CEO of BioGenetic Ventures. Allison worked in Seattle venture-capital circles for years before shifting to Spokane. “It’s a 40-minute flight and a 15-minute drive.”
And no bridge.
One of the stars of the region is Telect, a company that makes connection and power-distribution equipment. It is actually an old-timer for the valley, established about 18 years ago.
It is in its quiet period as it prepares for its initial public offering. The company hopes to raise $150 million when it goes public, probably by the end of the year.
A prospectus tells the story. Telect has added more than 700 workers in the past year, almost doubling its worldwide work force to 1,900. Its sales were up more than 47 percent last year to $168.3 million.
