Boeing's man behind secretive 7E7 search
Boeing would prefer you not know his name.
But Mike Bunney, a stoic 51-year-old native of Tulsa, Okla., will have a huge say in the future of commercial-airplane production in Washington state.
On March 31, Bunney was quietly replaced as general manager of Boeing's Delta rocket plant in Decatur, Ala., and brought to Seattle to lead the super-secret team reviewing potential final assembly sites for the proposed 7E7 jet. His new job was not announced.
The company denied a request for an interview with Bunney, and little biographical information is known about him.
What is known, however, is that he has done this before.
Bunney was an integral member of the Boeing site-selection team that in 1997 reviewed 38 manufacturing sites in 14 states for Boeing's newest rocket, the Delta IV.
The team persuaded the company to leave behind its longtime rocket-manufacturing home of Huntington Beach, Calif., and build a $410 million facility in Decatur.
People who witnessed Boeing's 1997 search say it was super-secretive, unsentimental and focused unsparingly on the cost of doing business.
"Everything we brought to the table had a (dollar) value for them," said one economic-development official involved in the process. "They had spreadsheets. It was a very bottom-line decision."
Finalists emerging
As the summer ends, Boeing's search for a 7E7 final assembly site is clearly narrowing to a small number of top contenders.
Though Boeing insists there is no "shortlist" and pledges to remain mum until a final site is chosen, Gov. Gary Locke deviated from the script last week and said Washington has made it to the "next round," along with a "handful" of other states.
Boeing officials remain in close contact with Washington's team trying to win the 7E7, Locke said, and they remain interested in both Everett, Boeing's longtime home of widebody aircraft, and Moses Lake, 176 miles east of Seattle.
Other potential finalists are emerging as well. The Savannah Morning News reported that that Georgia port city was still in the running, and the Dallas Business Journal reported a Boeing team last month visited Harlingen, Texas, in the state's southwestern corner. On Tuesday voters in Tulsa will vote on a 1-cent sales tax that would provide $350 million of incentives to Boeing.
Yet with less than four months remaining in 2003, the pace must quicken if Boeing is to meet its stated goal to choose a site by the end of the year.
That means more hands-on involvement by Bunney and the rest of his team after Boeing let its South Carolina-based site-selection consultants, McCallum Sweeney, handle much of the early heavy lifting.
'Mr. Business'
Bunney had a crucial role in Boeing's search for the Delta rocket plant in 1997: negotiating the best-and-final incentive packages from each of the finalists.
The outcome of those negotiations would decide the winner.
"You can't change your distance from the water, and you can't change your geography," said Lynda Weatherman, CEO of the Economic Development Association of Florida's Space Coast. "All you can change are your incentives."
Weatherman negotiated with Bunney on behalf of Titusville, Fla., Decatur's top competition for the Delta plant.
She remembers him as an amiable but extremely focused and attentive negotiator who did not sugar-coat his remarks.
"He was very nice when you got to know him a little bit," recalls Weatherman. "But when you first met him, he was Mr. Business."
Titusville narrowly lost the competition to Decatur, but Weatherman said Bunney and the rest of the Boeing team were "straight shooters" who were respectful and honest throughout.
"When it was over and done they came back, as busy as they were, and provided a debriefing and went through the strengths and the weaknesses" of the proposal, said Weatherman. "It was really a textbook case of how site location should be done."
Keeping the lid on
Since Boeing publicly opened the 7E7 site sweepstakes in May, the company has tried to put the genie back in the bottle by keeping all aspects of the search secret.
Recipients of Boeing's 37-page "request for proposals" were required to sign nondisclosure agreements, and state and local officials around the country are under strict instructions not to discuss their 7E7 bids.
"Boeing's got things so tightened up, people are afraid to tie their own shoes," laughed one labor leader peripherally involved in the search.
Even in the hush-hush world of site selection, Boeing has taken secrecy to extremes, several economic developers said.
Indeed, many believe the secrecy surrounding the 7E7 site search is an outgrowth of Bunney's experience with the search for the Delta plant.
Billy Joe Camp was a top recruiter for the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama, a nonprofit marketing arm to get and retain Alabama businesses, when he got a phone call in January 1997 from a site-selection consulting firm, Lockwood Greene.
The consultant, Ralph Carnathan, invited the Huntsville-Decatur area to bid on Project Anchor, as the Delta search was known, but would not identify the product or the company.
Early in the process, the Alabama team held a reception for the consultants and the mystery manufacturer.
Bunney and the rest of the Boeing representatives refused to give out business cards and put only first names on their name tags.
All the Alabama representatives could figure out was that most of them were from the West Coast.
"Our first indication that these folks came from out West came at a social meeting at the Decatur Country Club," Camp said. "Some of our folks noticed the visitors had their watches on Pacific time."
The longtime headquarters of Boeing's Delta program was in Huntington Beach, Calif.
Bunney and his cohorts were similarly cagey in Florida.
Weatherman said it was not until the company's second or third visit to the Titusville area that she knew they were from Boeing. "For a long time they went by first names — George from finance, Sue from human resources," she said. "They could have been from anywhere."
Mike Bunney's identity is now out in the open, but from all indications the 7E7 site selection process will not be.
Tomorrow, 7E7 program manager Mike Bair will hold his first media conference call since June. He is not expected to provide any updates on the site selection.
David Bowermaster: 206-464-2724 or dbowermaster@seattletimes.com
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