St. Louis seen as longshot for big Boeing plant

Just hours after Boeing Co.’s Seattle-area Machinists union Wednesday night voted down a contract to build the company’s next-generation 777X passenger jet, officials with the aerospace giant were reported to be fanning out around the country, scouting alternative sites to put up a massive plant.

And while the St. Louis area is the aircraft maker’s second-largest location after Seattle — headquarters of Boeing’s defense unit and location of several military assembly lines that are starting to wind down — few analysts put the region on the short list to win the factory. Most suggest the 777X will either be built ultimately in Seattle, or at a nonunion plant in the South.

Boeing itself was saying little on Thursday. A company spokesman declined to discuss its criteria for a plant site or give a specific timeline for a decision. He simply confirmed that the company is carrying out its pre-vote threat to look elsewhere if Seattle Machinists didn’t accept an eight-year contract with an estimated $2 billion in pension cuts and other savings.

“We’re exploring all of our options for locating the 777X,” said Boeing spokesman Doug Alder.

Wherever it chooses will land tens of thousands of jobs at Boeing and suppliers, likely for two decades or more, and it will become an instant player in a commercial aerospace industry that’s long been centered in Seattle. The competition is expected to be fierce.

“This is arguably the most significant prize in commercial aviation history,” said Alex Pietsch, who serves as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s leader on aerospace issues.

While Boeing has said it would prefer to stay in Seattle’s Puget Sound region, where it has employed 85,000 people in a web of vast facilities, the company began exploring its options well before Wednesday’s vote. And on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal and Seattle-area news outlets reported that Boeing already had “boots on the ground” in some of those places.

Earlier this week, Boeing sources told the Seattle Times that their top alternatives — if the Machinists rejected the contract — would be Long Beach, Calif., where the company’s C-17 assembly plant is due to close in 2015; Salt Lake City, where Boeing makes some large components of the 787 Dreamliner; and Huntsville, Ala., where Boeing’s space unit is located and rival Airbus is building a plant relatively close in Mobile.

Some analysts have pointed to Charleston, S.C., where Boeing has a 787 assembly plant, though that factory has had a bumpy start. Officials in a few other states, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry, were quick to throw their hat in the ring Thursday.

While St. Louis does not appear to be a front-runner, state and local economic development officials said that they’ll certainly take a shot.

“You bet we will,” said Gov. Jay Nixon during a stop in St. Louis on Thursday morning. The state, Nixon said, will “work with our great partners at Boeing to get as much of that done down here as possible.”

St. Louis has some points in its favor.

Plenty of land is available near Boeing’s campus north of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and around Mid-America Airport in Mascoutah, where Boeing has a small parts plant. The region has a large, experienced aerospace workforce and a broad supply chain that has increasingly shifted its focus toward commercial jets. It has lower costs than Seattle — earlier this year Boeing said it will move several hundred IT jobs here from the Puget Sound area. And St. Louis already been selected as one of several Boeing sites where engineering teams will do design work on the 777X.

But key drawbacks remain.

That veteran workforce is experienced mainly in building military aircraft — and an F-15 is quite a bit different from a 777X. And Boeing’s assembly line workers here are represented by the same International Association of Machinists that just rejected the company’s offer in Seattle, though IAM locals here work under different contracts. Gordon King, president of the IAM District 837, which represents Boeing workers in St. Louis, didn’t return a call Thursday.

Scott Hamilton, an aerospace consultant with the Leeham Co. in Seattle, predicted that if Boeing moves the 777X out of Puget Sound, the company will steer clear of unionized plants.

“They would prefer not to have to deal with unions any time, anywhere, any how,” he said. “For any place that’s heavily union, or even not ‘right-to-work,’ that would be a challenge.”

It will likely also take a massive incentive package to win the plant, Hamilton said. Just last week, Washington State lawmakers authorized nearly $9 billion in tax breaks over 15 years for the 777X factory, a sum that would dwarf anything Missouri has ever given a single company. That might favor a state such as Texas or California, which has deeper pockets for subsidies.

Boeing is “going to be looking for as big a check as they can get,” Hamilton said.

And, of course, the 777X could still wind up getting built in Seattle. That $9 billion is still on the table, and if Boeing decides it would prefer an experienced workforce while the union decides it can live with some cuts to save the jobs, both sides could still mend fences, some analysts said. That, too, would leave St. Louis on the outside looking in at one of the biggest deals aerospace has going right now.

Jim Gallagher of the Post-Dispatch and Associated Press contributed to this report.