Engaging our District: Northeastern Washington and Northern Idaho

The Federal Reserve’s 12th District is, by geography and economic output, the largest in the Federal Reserve System. To help us understand the diverse needs of the people we serve, you can often find me and other members of our Public Engagement team traveling across the District and gathering information to help guide our monetary policymaking.?

As an example, I had the pleasure of joining my SF Fed colleagues Darlene W. , Jenny Glass , and Steven Fisher on a recent trip to Spokane, Colville, and Coeur D’Alene to talk with banking, business, and community leaders. The visit reinforced several impressions I’ve gathered over the course of my regional travels and surprised me in a number of ways as well.??

First, there is an impressive degree of innovation and high-tech advancement taking place across the region and not just in traditional hubs like Seattle and Portland. We saw this firsthand in Spokane where we had the opportunity to visit Pearson Packaging Systems .??

Pearson manufactures robotic packing machines for companies around the world. These machines are often designed with a specific product in mind—think cans of soda or bags of dog food—and use sophisticated software to optimize packing speed and efficiency. This can lead to significantly more product shipped per pallet, more weight and size uniformity, and less damage and loss. As a consumer, I know that the products on my grocery shelves come from somewhere, of course, but touring Pearson made me appreciate the behind-the-scenes machine science that gets those products there on schedule and in one piece.??

Vaagen Timbers represents another technological innovation altogether: mass timber construction. Located an hour-and-a-half north of Spokane in Colville, Vaagen is at the cutting edge of the wood products industry, developing new milling and engineering techniques to change the way we build. In a nutshell, mass timber uses wood pieces from less conventionally-desirable small diameter logs and fuses them together to form load-bearing building components (beams, columns, etc.) as well as wall, floor, and ceiling panels. These are manufactured at facilities like Vaagen and then assembled at the job site in a fraction of the time required by traditional construction. The result can be a rare win-win-win: faster, cheaper (sometimes), and more energy efficient buildings.??

(For those of you in the Portland area, keep an eye out for the new PDX airport roof, a nine-acre showcase—though not a Vaagen project, as it was all sourced within Oregon—of mass timber construction.)?

Traveling the relatively short distance east to Coeur D’Alene, it was a reminder that the area shares both an MSA and a state border, which creates interesting regional dynamics. The obvious pattern we already knew by reputation: Coeur D’Alene is a great place to go on vacation. The lake is the main draw, of course, but the resort and neighboring downtown have shopping, restaurants, and a host of recreational activities. ?

That said, all these amenities require a robust service and hospitality workforce which has been a challenge to sustain given the tightness of the labor market. The lack of available workers is also exacerbated by housing and childcare availability for working parents which, taken together, constitute a major economic headwind given Coeur D’Alene’s reliance on service-based tourism. We spoke with elected officials, chamber leaders, and workforce development organizations about tackling these interrelated issues and they all agree: these are front burner priorities but will take time to resolve.?

We are privileged to have front row seats to the amazing things that are happening around our District supporting our local, regional, and national economies. We also see the consistent challenges business and community leaders face in making our economy work for everyone. We rely on these up close and personal opportunities to help inform our monetary policy decisions. Our thanks to those people who are willing to share their story with us.?

For more about the San Francisco Fed’s public engagement efforts, I encourage you to read “Listen to Learn, Engage to Serve.”?

For opportunities to engage with the Portland Branch, please reach out to me. https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/ian-galloway

For opportunities to engage with the Seattle Branch, please reach out to my Regional Executive counterpart Darlene Wilczynski. linkedin.com/in/darlene-wilczynski-7386241a ?