PORT ANGELES — The aim of the game: forge a strategic plan for Washington’s economy.
The real deal: make sure Clallam County gets a fair share of the pot.
Even as Colleen McAleer of Sequim, president of the Washington Business Alliance, works to accomplish a long list of strategies to improve the state’s business climate, she said she pitches the county as a great place to set up an enterprise.
McAleer also serves as one of three commissioners of the Port of Port Angeles.
She spoke about the business alliance at Tuesday’s weekly breakfast meeting of the Port Angeles Business Association in Joshua’s Restaurant, 113 DelGuzzi Drive.
Rural regions
Because the alliance targets rural regions and disadvantaged areas as well as urban centers, “I’m telling them Clallam County’s story,” said McAleer, who spends four days a week at the group’s Seattle headquarters traveling around the state.
The alliance, according to its board chairman, Alan Crain of Kitsap Bank, Port Orchard, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization of entrepreneurs who want the state Legislature to adopt an economic strategy.
‘Almost criminal’
That the state has no long-range plan, said Crain — who also addressed PABA — “to me seems almost criminal.”
The group was formed in 2011 by business leaders dissatisfied with how the state’s business-and-occupation tax was being collected and administered.
But they shifted gears “to get to what do we want the state to achieve, get past the partisan fighting, use data as our basis and chart an outcome that we can all be satisfied with,” Crain said.
Alliance goals
According to McAleer, the alliance focuses on these six broad goals:
■ Economic development, to reduce the number of impoverished people, cut unemployment rates and boost household incomes.
■ Education, to raise high school graduation rates and to direct more graduates into technical and apprenticeship programs that lead to family-wage employment.
■ Environment, to strengthen forestry as a strategy for “sequestering” carbon emissions into timber, to promote electric cars and trucks and to phase out coal as a source for generating electricity.
■ Governance, to comply with state performance audits and to establish budget transparency.
■ Health, to improve the supply of primary care doctors and to reduce health care spending.
■ Transportation, to improve bridges, roads and rail lines, and to reduce per capita petroleum consumption.
Legislation aimed at one goal — to provide tax incentives to businesses in economically distressed areas, similar to how tax breaks are given to certain industries — is being drafted, McAleer said.
The idea was the brainchild of Bill Greenwood, executive director of the Clallam County Economic Development Corp.
“It’s something we’ve already been able to effect,” McAleer said.
For more information about the alliance, visit www.wabusinessalliance.org, call 206-441-5101 or write to 2401 Elliott Ave., No. 375, Seattle, WA 98121.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
