With the confidence borne of someone who won’t have to face the voters again until 2011 (assuming he even decides to run at that point), Port of Bremerton Commissioner Bill Mahan last week went to bat once more for his pet project, the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) business incubator he envisions being built in the South Kitsap Industrial Area.
Speaking at a luncheon event on Wednesday with the Kitsap County commissioners, Mahan lamented the lack of progress on SEED and blamed the gridlock on leaders who lack his vision.
“If people just sit back and say it’s a good idea, it will never happen,” Mahan said. “It’s not going to happen without leadership. It’s the difference between sitting back and watching, and actually getting out and pushing to make it happen.”
Left unsaid was whether those who consider SEED a good idea actually constitute a majority of Kitsap County residents.
We suspect not, but we also suspect it wouldn’t make much difference to Mahan and other SEED backers, who long ago drank the Kool-Aid and believe in their impossible dream passionately enough to fund it with our tax dollars.
To be specific, Mahan on Wednesday was angling for the $1 million that cash-strapped Kitsap County had pledged to the project but hasn’t as yet ponied up.
“What changed your mind?” Mahan demanded of South Kitsap Commissioner Jan Angel.
She responded, quite sensibly, “I just don’t believe you can build it and hope (tenants) will come.”
Port Commissioner Larry Stokes, likewise, characterized SEED as a “big, big gamble.”
Mahan agreed it is a gamble. “But it’s not a great, big one,” he said, insisting that, “It takes a public investment to get (such a project) off the ground.”
Indeed it does. And that should tell you something.
As a rule of thumb, it’s generally safe to assume that the prospects of any venture becoming financially successful are in direct proportion to the number of private investors willing to get on board — and inverse proportion to the amount of public money its principals have to finagle from gullible politicians.
The fact that SEED by definition is intended to lure the very sort of entrepreneurs that conventional financiers wouldn’t touch with a barge pole should set off loud warning bells. But for Mahan and other true believers, that just makes the risk more exhilarating.
So long as it’s someone else’s money they’re risking, that is.
Just to reassure skeptics, Mahan points to Tacoma’s William Factory Small Business Incubator as an example of the sort of success the port hopes to create with SEED.
But in so doing, Mahan and other SEED backers only demonstrate why they just don’t get it.
A quick look at the list of clients housed in the William Factory incubator, for example, reveals the normal assortment of telecommunications, landscaping, accounting, construction and similar concerns. In other words, companies competing against other companies in well-established fields — and against whose business models their own prospects for success can be fairly evaulated.
SEED enthusiasts, on the other hand, propose to recruit only companies specializing in cutting-edge “green” technologies — creating products that have never been produced elsewhere and whose potential excites idealistic environmentalists and politicians far more than it does investors who care about actually generating a return on their hard-earned money.
We’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it until SEED dies the death it richly deserves: If the port commissioners insist on pretending they’re business people instead of bureaucrats, they need to start treating SEED like a bona fide business and not just a way for tree-hugging politicians to funnel the taxpayers’ money to their tree-hugging cronies.
