Staying focused was key

Thirty days ago, North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey was extremely optimistic about his city's chances of landing Boeing.

Months of negotiations had gone better than expected. During a lunch at Trident Technical College, the mayor had even given some of the Boeing execs a history lesson on the Charleston Naval Shipyard, where generations of local workers had turned out fleets of U.S. surface ships.

"I told them I didn't know of one that sank because it wasn't built strong enough," Summey told the group at his table, drawing smiles from the Boeing suits.

He seemingly had reinforced that their multibillion-dollar gamble on trusting a 787 jet assembly line to an unfamiliar workforce, across the continent, wasn't so risky.

Then early last week, the Boeing clouds turned dark.

Media reports from the West Coast said Boeing's powerful labor union representatives in Washington state were considering negotiating on its no-strike clause. In his office, Summey recalculated the odds of landing the expansion if the union troubles were settled. In his head, the numbers dropped from about 75 percent probable, to below 60 -- less than reassuring.

He started reasoning that finishing in second place could still be spun as a positive when it came time to pursue other recruitment efforts later.

It wasn't until late Wednesday that Summey's smile returned.

Now that North Charleston is pegged to become the center of South Carolina's aerospace industry, the mayor praised what he said was a multi-agency state and local effort where optimism was the order of the day, no matter how bad the news was out of Boeing's Washington home base.

While the state's $450 million incentive package sealed the deal, Summey said the recruiting formula was surprisingly simple: Nobody talked about the operation publicly, and everyone agreed they weren't going to win by tearing down the competition, something that news accounts and media blogs in the Northwest were doing almost daily. "We weren't going to do the same in retaliation," Summey said.

Still, there was no escaping the City Hall nerves that were triggered last week when chatter leaked of meetings between Boeing and its union over no-strike issues, or that Washington's congressional delegation was looking to take South Carolina out of contention.

"Every time that we read something or heard something that Boeing and the union were getting together, we always had fear or apprehension," said John Cawley, economic development coordinator for the city of North Charleston.

It was Cawley's job as Summey's point man on the project to provide Boeing and the state recruiters with whatever they needed.

Even as rumors in Washington were escalating last week, Cawley said he kept plugging away, arranging for permits for Boeing to clear trees at the expansion site near the Charleston International Airport so work could quickly begin.

"It didn't have any effect on us," Cawley said of the swirling Seattle media reports, or any other matter beyond South Carolina's control. "We proceeded as if Boeing were coming here."

Summey said that on Wednesday morning, he still didn't know for sure if South Carolina's package and strategy had worked. "It's not over till it's over," he said.