Published March 2001

Radcliff a voice for technology in Northwest

By John Wolcott
Herald Business Journal Editor

Renee Radcliff recently left her roles as the President of the Everett Area Chamber of Commerce and a state legislator from Snohomish County, but she hasn’t let go of the county’s economic and technology interests.

As the new Executive Director of the five-state Northwest region of the AeA — the American Electronics Association, which is changing its name and image with a new tag-line: Advancing the Business of Technology — Radcliff plans to work closely with Snohomish County electronics firms and Economic Development Council President Deborah Knutson.

In a shared interview at the EDC office in Everett recently, Radcliff and Knutson said they look forward to advancing mutual causes: K-12 and post-secondary education technology programs, development of equipment and facilities for broadband services, and creating programs to maintain an educated, technically competent work force.

The AeA, which moved its Northwest offices from Canyon Park to Redmond four years ago, also supports efforts to increase the number of college students enrolled in mathematics, science, engineering and technical courses. The association promotes the Washington Technology Center at the University of Washington, which has funded 150 projects with Washington companies over the past three years.

Between 1993 and 1998, Washington state added 36,500 high-tech jobs to the state’s economy, a 52 percent growth rate, with the state’s high-tech workers earning the highest average wage in the nation, $106,000, more than three times the state’s private-sector average wage.

“We want to work with companies involved in electronic, telecommunications, aerospace electronics and biomedical devices,” Knutson said, “and many of those companies are AeA members.”

In fact, Radcliff said, the president of Medtronic Physio-Control, Dr. Richard Martin, is the chairman this year of the national AeA board and just presented the international association’s public policy goals to the Bush administration. More information is available on the association’s Web site, www.aeanet.org.

“From our policy standpoint, education is our hottest issue,” Radcliff said. “But we also know that we need stable energy supplies. Energy is the catchword of the day. We haven’t sited any new energy generating facilities for 17 years in this state, yet along with commercial growth, we have thousands of homes equipped with computers, VCRs and DVDs … all of that growth has an impact.”

AeA members are likely to be attracted to Snohomish County, Radcliff said, because they “want nice communities and quality of life. … One of the strongest competitors in the Northwest right now is Boise, Idaho, where they’re brimming with technology … a lot of tech companies and spin-offs.”

Among her main goals, she said, is to increase visibility for the AeA in Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Montana and Wyoming. She’s spending a lot of time traveling, writing and using her experience in Olympia to talk to legislators and state officials.

“Having been a legislator, and knowing a lot of people, I can get in some doors that otherwise might be difficult to access,” she said.

“I wasn’t quite ready to leave the Legislature, but I landed in a good place,” Radcliff said. In 1997, she was chosen as the AeA’s Legislator of the Year for outstanding work on behalf of the industry.

Knutson said the EDC is stepping up to promote the biotech and biomed industries in the state since “this county has about 25 percent of the state’s total companies in those fields, but the state isn’t promoting them, so we will, along with electronics firms.”

One of Radcliff’s new roles as AeA chief for the area is helping Gov. Locke’ s office write technology education policies for the state, “making sure the infrastructure is in place.”

She said the governor’s plans for a college-level technology center in Tacoma is good, but she hopes the scope is broadened later, with similar centers all over the state.

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