Thursday, January 5, 2012

Boeing leaving Wichita is leaving all of us with perhaps more questions than answers.

How could this happen?

For one, Boeing cites lower costs of doing business in places other than Wichita as a reason for leaving the Air Capital.

Often Wichtia's biggest competitors for local jobs are not from other countries; they're other states and cities. They want Wichita's aerospace jobs and are finding ways to attract them.

Incentives are creating thousands of jobs for Oklahoma. That includes hundreds of engineering jobs now filling Boeing offices in Oklahoma City and those which will be added when Boeing starts transferring Wichita engineers there.

The head of Oklahoma City's Chamber of Commerce tells KAKE News Oklahoma's success at attracting Boeing to expand there is a result of a positive experience when Boeing relocated engineers to the city from Long Beach a few years ago.

"I think Boeing was, and I hate to use the term, blown away, by how the state and how the city responded to them," said chamber President and CEO Roy Williams.

Boeing learned what incentives Oklahoma has.

"The aerospace engineering tax credit," Williams said. "Aerospace is one of our targeted economic sectors, and so we have a specific tax credit for aerospace engineering jobs."

That credit is worth $12,000 per engineering job. Half is for the company, the other half is for the employee. Williams says the incentives have been in place since the mid-1990s and have enticed many companies to relocate there.

There's also San Antonio.

Maintenance work now done in Wichita, including work on Air Force One, will go there. San Antonio's chamber president says the city attracts companies like Boeing with not only incentives, but also with lower utility rates.

Boeing continues to say that neither city came to Boeing with a pile of money to recruit the company there. However, Boeing already knows what incentives are available and will apply for them at the appropriate time.