Port names Kersey new executive director

MOSES LAKE — Don Kersey said he’s won “the job lottery.”

“This is truly an honor,” Kersey, current plant manager at airbag maker Joyson Safety Systems, told Port of Moses Lake commissioners after being named the port’s new executive director at a regular meeting on Monday.

“I was born and raised in Moses Lake, and Moses Lake is my home,” the 55-year-old father of two said. “This is a dream come true.”

“I think we have made a fantastic choice,” said Commissioner Stroud Kunkle.

Kersey will start his new job overseeing the day-to-day operations of the port on Jan. 2 with an annual salary of $165,000 per year, and follows Jeffrey Bishop, who was fired as executive director in July following a disagreement with commissioners over the port’s future direction.

As a child, Kersey said his father used to bring him out to the port to watch airplanes land and take off.

“I remember that clearly,” he said. “Now to be a part of it.”

Kersey said he began working for Joyson 26 years ago, when it was still Takata, as a lab technician after short stints in the wine industry and with the Grant County Health District, working his way up to plant manager eight years ago.

Describing himself as “a natural leader,” Kersey said he knows and understands local industry and wants to re-establish and reconnect with the Port of Moses Lake’s industrial tenants.

Auburn Hills, Michigan-based Joyson is owned by Chinese auto parts conglomerate Ningbo Joyson Electronic, which bought Takata several years ago after production problems with the company’s airbags prompted the recall of millions of airbags and pushed the company into bankruptcy.

Kersey said he sees running the port as an opportunity to “create jobs and promote economic growth” in the community he believes has given him so much.

“What more of a payback is there? It’s a dream come true,” he said.

“This has been a trying process,” Commissioner Darrin Jackson said of the search for a new executive director. “Don understands the port and the community.”

Port commissioners also approved a $250,000 feasibility study to examine the possibility of building a rail line connecting the port’s planned but unbuilt west side business part to the Union Pacific hub at the Port of Ephrata.

Jackson said the rail link as currently envisioned will eventually connect both of the port’s planned rail lines, allowing train traffic to move directly between Connell and Ephrata, “the way it originally was.”

Commissioners also approved allowing Boeing to use a portion of a vacant lot across from the company’s operations at the Grant County International Airport for parking — for the number of employees temporarily in Moses Lake tending to the roughly 200 737 MAX aircraft parked here.

“I don’t have a problem with it,” Jackson said. “It isn’t like we’ve used it in the last 40 years.”

“Any help we can give them,” added Kunkle.