Desperately seeking big dreamers

Small, supportive community looking for infrastructure, year-round jobs

MATTAWA — "Hope" sits up on a hill overlooking Highway 243 as it skirts the entrance to town.

The word, anyway.

The sign was put there by Wayne Sahli, a commissioner of the Port of Mattawa and a wine grape grower, after some medical issues arose in his household.

"We put it up there mainly for when people are down and out," Sahli explained. "If they see the sign, they can bring a little hope in their life because when you have hope, you have life."

The same holds true of the entire town of Mattawa, particularly those in the business arena, where hope is abundant.

Primarily an agriculture-based economy, with crops including apples, grapes, green peas, sweet corn, wheat, buckwheat, grass and bluegrass, hay, alfalfa and potatoes, Mattawa's location is the key to its success.

Dollar-wise, Mattawa's chief agricultural product is apples, with wine grapes closing in, Port of Mattawa manager Mike Conley said.

"The growing season here is 30 days longer than it is in other places, just because of our location, our south slope here," Conley said. "It's kind of our own micro-climate."

That climate is the reason Mattawa is one of the better regions to raise high quality grapes, Sahli said.

Butch Milbrandt, co-owner of Milbrandt Vineyards, which has been located in Mattawa for eight years, agreed.

"It's a good location for wine grape growing," he said. "We have a lot of heat units here and it's warm and dry. I think in 2003 we only had about two and a half inches of rain fall, so rain wasn't an issue."

Several rain issues in August and September 2004 caused some problems with maturation in Zinfandel, he recalled, but problems like that are rare.

"There's a good labor supply and it's basically an agricultural area, so it's agriculture-friendly," Milbrandt said. "There's not a lot of people opposed to what you're doing, as far as chemicals and herbicides and things like that."

Milbrandt's vineyards grow various varieties of grapes, which are sold to approximately 50 different wine makers, with St. Michelle Estates receiving the bulk of his fruit, he said.

Jerry Fox is one of the owners of Fox Estates, LLC, a Mattawa winery which is also the only apple-packing facility in town, he said. Fox said the majority of the area's crops are harvested, loaded on trucks and hauled out of the area. In addition, there are very few independent crop growers, he said.

"With (the crops) go all of the jobs and taxes that support the infrastructure of a community," he said. "It may be good for the state of Washington, but it's not good for the community of Mattawa or Grant County."

Still, Mattawa Port commissioner Glenn Leland said he thought that the town's business climate is progressive, noting that a building is usually rented out before it's been built, and there aren't very many empty buildings.

"The problem is, there's not enough buildings," Leland said, adding that most people don't get an idea to do something until they see an available space. "I think what we need is bigger dreamers, people that think, 'I could do this if I had this.' But they don't dream very big. They need to figure out something that they could do for their niche, and we could provide that for them through the Port."

Conley would categorize the area's business climate as optimistic, pointing at more and more jobs stretching year-round, even though the town is still a seasonal workforce for the most part.

"The one big hazard, of course, of an ag base is that you don't have really good land to develop," Conley said. "Most all of the farmable land has been farmed. I think the Port's goal is to try and accommodate jobs that are not necessarily ag-based, that attract folks here because of climate and the fact that it's not a hustle-bustle lifestyle … I'm still thinking that we're going to see benefits from the Desert Aire people."

Desert Aire is the neighboring community with a population that has recently exploded, mostly comprised of retired people, Conley said. He said that more housing on Desert Aire property is pending, another positive for the area.

Conley also pointed to the Port's industrial parks, which recently received Community Economic Revitalization Board grants for an infrastructure project to house incoming businesses and will provide sewer, water, electrical conduits and road construction, opening up more ground for more buildings.

Marty Charvet recently put up a building for storage of lumber for his hardware store, Marty's Hardware, in the Port industrial park.

"It's kind of an inconvenience, but it's also more of an inconvenience not to be able to get anything around here," Charvet said, noting that some out-of-town customers have complained about having to drive down to the storage area to pick up their lumber. "I said, 'Well, it's better than the alternative, which is no lumber, and go out of the area.'"

Charvet has owned the hardware store for about 20 years, purchasing it at a time when the town's population doubled every three years. It isn't growing as much now, he said, but there's still a lot of potential in Mattawa.

The town has a population of about 3,200 people, Conley said. The average income for the Mattawa area is less than $15,000 a year.

"That puts us way below the county average and even farther below the state average, so that's one advantage that we have when it comes to doing grant proposals to do projects, because that pushes us high up on the scale of things that qualify you for grants," Conley said.

Another company, Maslonka, based out of Mesa, Ariz., is building the Bonneville Transmission Line, running from Kittitas to Sunnyside, as part of a two-year project. That line will cure a bottleneck in moving power through the area. Bonneville is expanding and upgrading the capacity of the existing transmission, Conley said.

That brings up another point for Sahli, who would like to see more parks for recreational vehicles, since there's no place in Mattawa to put those people who are working on the transmission line, for starters.

"We need some RV parks to handle the different people that come through the area," Sahli said.

Key problems in Mattawa are the pressures on social services, including inadequate housing in town when about half of its citizens are not paying taxes and the lack of revenue to provide those services, Conley said.

"We don't have very many year-round jobs that are non-government," he said. "Year-round jobs here are the schools and medical facilities, things like that. We've got to have more companies like the (Wood) Box Factory, that (aren't) dependent on ag."

With business partner Lori Simmons, Anita Brown has been running Tiddaly Diddaly's, also on Port property, for three years. She says they started the business while seeking to move into permanent work, after operating a fruit stand on the highway during the summers. To go along with the seasonal fruit work, it was decided to sell pizzas and later, sandwiches and ice cream.

Mattawa, she said, is a good place to do business, if you have the right one.

"You don't have a lot of food choices, really," Brown said when asked what the needs of the community are. In addition, "We need more recreation for the kids. I don't know exactly what that could be, but if I ever had lots of money, that'd probably be what I'd do. Buy a bowling alley or something like that — that would be awesome."

Brown said that Mattawa is also a supportive community for businesses.

"They like it that we're here, and we like it that they like that," she said.

Milbrandt said he would like to see a farm machinery outlet and large tire operation located in Mattawa.

"Those are two services that I as a grower could use," he said.

Fox said he thinks that Mattawa is the perfect place for young people, because there's room for virtually any business that they may choose.

"(There's) a lot of businesses that we're in dire need of, that you have to travel out of here to other communities for," he said, adding that there are hopes for another four or five wineries to pop into existence in the area in the immediate future, which would bring more benefits back into the community. As more wineries become established, Mattawa would become a destination for wine tasters.

"Once that starts, it will take on a life of its own," he said. "We have a tremendous potential in the area of recreation."

That includes 45 miles of shoreline along the lake, good fishing, a prime location in the middle of anywhere in Washington and the most days-played golf course in the Pacific Northwest at Desert Aire, he said.

"Who knows? This river down here may end up being a wind surfing mecca," he said.