This is what I said yesterday in the Tribune when asked about the greatest challenge the city faces.

It’s a generic answer, but it’s the right answer for me – it really is Russell leaving, in terms of the people that live here, the people that eat lunch downtown, the amount of Class A commercial space it opens up. But at the same time I feel like we could bounce back. The main reason I work with the technology groups as much as I do is that I really feel like they can drive some of those tech jobs for area. We do have a lot of things we can build on and I’m hoping we can start calling those out.

One of the comments on my interview in the Tribune yesterday suggested that Russell was only a downtown Tacoma issue and that I was forgetting about the rest of Tacoma by focusing on them. He also suggested that potholes were a much bigger deal.

Potholes, while important, can't be measured against Russell's departure because potholes can be fixed (of course the difference between can and will is often vast). We can't as easily fix 900 or so employees who don't work in our city, not to mention the hundreds of them who live in our city.

The immediate city-wide downsides I see to Russell leaving are:

• the tax base drops, both in terms of the business leaving and possibly in terms of people moving.
• if people move, it's a double-whammy because we lose relatively high-income earners who spend in Tacoma, own homes in Tacoma, etc.
• a loss of credibility as a place worth moving a business or starting a business. This might be the most nebulous downside, but also the biggest. Cities, even mid-sized cities like ours, should have a few corporate headquarters in them.

Not everything gets immediately bad. For example, I doubt the Russell Family Foundation will leave, which means charitable giving shouldn't be such a huge hit to the community. And not everyone who currently works at Russell will want to move. Some might stay in Tacoma to start their own businesses. Perhaps in one or two of those employees there's a "new Russell" going to be founded.

And that gets back to my point above.

We can bounce back from this. But it's certainly not going to be easy. I do believe technology can play a role. Not a lot of people know we have a cluster of data security businesses here, and maybe it's time to really start promoting that. The Institute of Technology at UWT is matriculating dozens if not hundreds of computer science students a year. That's not even mentioning the talent that graduates from UPS and PLU, that we often have a hard time keeping.

Anyone want to sound off here?