Another one bites the dust: Cessna announced yesterday that it’s laying off the last 200 workers at its Bend manufacturing plant and closing the operation for good.
Ever determined to put the most positive possible spin on things, The Bulletin headlined its story this morning: “Area aviation officials say they’ll survive Cessna’s departure.” Roger Lee, executive director of Economic Development for Central Oregon, conceded that the loss of Cessna is a “big hit” but said he already is shopping the Cessna plant around to other potential aircraft-related occupants.
Lance Neibauer, the founder of Cessna’s predecessor, Columbia Aircraft, shrugged off the closing of the Bend plant. “Granted, jobs are being lost, of course, but as far as the long-term outlook for general aviation in Central Oregon, I don’t think it will have any particular impact other than the fact there’s one less manufacturer,” he was quoted as saying.
One less, true – but the biggest, and the one that local boosters were most hopeful about growing into a major employer.
In January 2008, The Bulletin published a glowing story under the headline “Bend confident in airport growth.”
“There are big changes in the works at Bend Municipal Airport, already one of the biggest economic forces in Deschutes County,” wrote reporter Peter Sachs. “An expansion at one manufacturer, dozens of new hangars and the prospect of other companies moving or growing at the airport mean the potential for at least 1,200 new jobs. That would double the airport’s economic contribution to the region to more than $1 billion per year, according to city of Bend projections.”
Those rosy visions prompted the city to commit $1.5 million to airport expansion. But, Sachs wrote, those were “dollars that officials are confident will come back many times over in the next five years.”
Uh-huh.
Just a year ago, Cessna executives were talking about a big expansion of their Bend operation and demanding that the city provide a control tower at the Bend Airport by the end of 2009.
“We’ve got some huge growth numbers in 2010 that will be stymied if we don’t have a control tower,” Mark Withrow, general manager of Cessna’s Bend plant, told the city council.
Uh-huh, again.
Don’t expect the calls for airport expansion to cease now that Cessna has flown the coop, though. Just as kids dream about pitching for the Yankees or quarterbacking the Pittsburgh Steelers, the business and political leaders of Bend dream about attracting major-league manufacturers and transforming Bend into a major-league city.
Maybe it’s time to grow up and ask whether that dream is realistic – or even worth pursuing.
Let’s look at history. The only big manufacturing employers that survived here for any length of time were the Shevlin Hixon and Brooks Scanlon timber mills. They and their successors endured from the early 1900s to the early 1990s. When the supply of high-value timber was exhausted, the mills folded.
Now that the timber is gone, Central Oregon really has no other marketable natural resources to offer the world – unless there’s a huge hidden demand out there for juniper trees, sagebrush and lava rocks. That means raw materials for manufacturing have to be brought here from elsewhere.
And that’s a problem. Bend is isolated, a three-hour (or more) drive over mountain passes from any metropolitan center. It’s not situated on a major waterway. Raw materials would have to be transported here by truck or train. Finished products would have to be transported out the same way. All that runs up costs.
This isn’t saying that bringing major manufacturers to Bend is impossible, but bringing them – and keeping them – has always been a tough challenge. Now that the timber is gone, the only big private-sector employers that seem to thrive here are call centers, exploiting a different “natural resource” – a large supply of low-cost, unskilled labor.
Maybe it’s time for local business and political leaders to stop chasing the chimera of turning Bend into a big, booming metropolis and focus instead on making it into what it realistically can be – a nice, livable small town.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.
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HBM,
Seems like the concentration of trying to secure “big manufacturing employers” misses the point. I see nowhere any attempts by City, County or State officials to attract clean, knowledge based employers, i.e. software, health, education, (insurance and banking back office jobs) to name a few that do not need to import/export raw materials into the area. Bend will never be a hub for mfg. but has tremendous upside in many other areas. Bruce please let us know where could a company place 150 -250 well paying jobs in Deschutes county? The problem here is NO INFASTRUCTURE. Bend is exactly as you describe – a nice, livable small town with no jobs and no place to put those jobs even if they wanted to relocate to Bend.
Remember that one crazy newspaper that cautioned against a huge urban renewal subsidy for the airport only to be subsequently skewered as a nattering naysayer that just didn’t understand economic development. What was the name of that paper?
I think it will take quite some time to turn Bend back into a nice, livable small town. It’s still small, and maybe even nice depending on who you ask. For it to be livable may well require even further contraction of housing prices (Deschutes County is still more-or-less tied with Ashland-Medford for least-affordable in the Northwest) coupled with some semblance of decent wages.
Cessna actually was a light in the dark for people who have to work for a living (even those not employed directly by the airplane maker); there’s a very real place and very real potential for similar manufacturers. Without more of their kind, the Bend area will never again be livable.
Bend (and all of Central Oregon) IS “trying to attract clean, knowledge based employers”. The problem is so are dozens if not hundreds of other communities, who also have lots of “lifestyle” attractions going for them and either are a major metropolitan area or lots closer one than Bend. Bend is a nice, small-town pig. In the long run, putting lipstick on it won’t change that.
We have a City Council that envisions themnselvs as astute businessmen playing with monopoly money as they have for years.
Now they plan to pour another 13 M into the folly at Juniper Ridge to make certain that this project will never dig out of masssive debt.
Bat drags on despite votes of the people to kill it because the Council knows best.
Fees are going up to support an inept Development Bureaucracy.
While the airport is a mess, Juniper Ridge could easily bury this town thanks to Councilors like Clinton, Capell, and Mayor Eckman.
Keep doing what you’ve always done, and citizens will get what they’ve always gotten – THE SHAFT!
Thanks Council; Maybe the folks at OWED AND PAID
are pleased with their investment.
SRS