February 15th, 2013
‘New jobs needed’
Anacortes Mayor Dean Maxwell reflected on the past at his “State of the City” presentation to the Chamber of Commerce Thursday, expressing his desire to see the community “encourage industry.” The photograph on display behind the mayor shows Maxwell as a boy, arriving in Anacortes with his family as his father prepared to start work at the second of two new Anacortes refineries.
In his “state of the city” presentation, Maxwell wrote: “Fifty-five years ago my father moved our family to Skagit County to take a job at a new business at March’s Point: the Texaco Refinery. Hundreds of other families came at the same time, eager to have a scarce job and for a place to call home. At the same time, the traditional Northwest resource-based industries, fishing and logging, were in serious decline. Reading about today’s high unemployment and watching as our manufacturing job base is moved overseas, it seems we face a similar time where we must do something to keep and to create manufacturing jobs here. The alternative is to just give up and accept that our children and grandchildren will have a lower standard of living.”