An Everett, Wash.-based commercial and military aircraft painting company plans to move its headquarters and about 40 jobs here if the Spokane Airport Board can secure a $3.9 million loan to construct a hangar facility for the company at Spokane International Airport.

The company, Associated Painters Inc., says on its Web site that it paints more than 100 aircraft annually at three facilities it operates—at Paine Field, in Everett, and at airports in Goodyear, Ariz., and Oklahoma City. It has painted aircraft ranging from smaller de Havilland turboprop airliners to Boeing 747s, 767s, and 777s and Airbus A310s and A320s, and has done a variety of specialty work, such as painting a giant salmon that stretches almost the full length of the fuselage and tail on both sides of an Alaska Airlines jet.

Associated Painters has what's described in Airport Board documents as a "symbiotic relationship" with Cascade Aerospace, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based aircraft maintenance and modification company that recently opened a U.S. offshoot facility at Spokane International Airport. Cascade Aerospace has said it expects its work force here to grow to several hundred workers within five years.

Associated Painters' potential relocation here "is a great thing for the region" and could help serve as a catalyst for other aerospace-related business growth at the Spokane airport, says Todd Woodard, airport spokesman.

Rod Friese, Associated Painters' CEO, couldn't be reached for comment. However, the Spokane Airport Board, which oversees SIA and the Felts Field municipal airport, last week approved entering into 20-year lease agreements with Associated Painters and Cascade Aerospace for two hangars that would be constructed on the south side of the airport.

The hangars would be located side by side, along an aircraft ramp just west of the new air traffic control tower and east of a renovated World War II-era hangar where Cascade Aerospace has begun operating.

An SIA staff report submitted to the Airport Board says, "It is AP's intention to relocate their corporate headquarters to Spokane and consolidate their professional positions such as graphic arts from their various operations located throughout the United States to Spokane."

Also at its meeting last week, the Airport Board approved submitting applications to the Washington state Community Economic Revitalization Board (CERB) for separate 20-year loans of $3.9 million to fund construction of the 23,000-square-foot Associated Painters hangar and $4.8 million to fund construction of the 25,000-square-foot Cascade Aerospace hangar.

The lease agreements are contingent on approval of those CERB loans. The airport would provide a local match of about $437,000 for the Associated Painters hangar and $535,000 for the Cascade Aerospace hangar.

CERB, which is part of the state's Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development, finances public infrastructure to encourage new development and expansion in targeted areas, and the two loan applications will be the fifth and sixth the Spokane Airport Board has submitted. The board is expected to render a decision on the applications on May 21 at its final meeting of the 2007-2009 biennium.

"Everything rides on the CERB decision," Woodard says.

The sums being sought here are well above an informal $2 million cap that CERB has strived not to exceed on any one project, Woodard says. He adds, though, that the Spokane Airport Board has a good track record with CERB because "every project we've brought to them we've tripled the job projections" that were expected to result from the funded project.

"I'm very positive," he says. "I think the (potential for) positive results for the region are tremendous, and we're a community that needs family-wage jobs, and I think this is a natural for us."

If the loans are approved, the intent is to be ready to begin construction of the hangars in January 2010 and for the companies to be able to move into them by the following Aug. 1, Woodard says. That approximate timetable is significant, he says, because airlines that need to take jets out of service to have maintenance work done on them often try to schedule that work after Labor Day.

With financially strapped airlines cutting back on new aircraft purchases, and being forced to keep older aircraft in service longer, the growth prospects for companies such as Cascade Aerospace and Associated Painters that provide maintenance-related services appear to be strong, Woodard says.

Also, having the two companies side by side at the same airport could be attractive to the airlines since it potentially could translate into additional cost savings, he says.

Associated Painters is a subcontractor of Aviation Technical Services Inc. at Paine Field in Everett and a subcontractor of AAR Aircraft Services Inc. in Oklahoma City, and occupies space next to a company called Aero Turbine Inc. at Phoenix Goodyear Airport in Goodyear, Ariz., near Phoenix, the company's Web site says.

"This would be their first stand-alone facility," Woodard says. The staff report submitted to the Spokane Airport Board says that having its own facility would enable the company "to pass significant time savings and additional value-added services on to their airline and military customers. They enjoy a symbiotic relationship with Cascade Aerospace and will be a tremendous addition to the region's aerospace cluster." In addition to hangar construction costs, the analysis says Associated Painters "capitalization costs in technology, tooling, equipment, and training are substantial."

Woodard says the company has indicated that its employees here would receive an annual wage of about $36,200, which compares with an average wage in Spokane County of $34,000.

A separate report submitted to the Airport Board regarding the proposed Cascade Aerospace hangar notes that the company's new facility here received its first aircraft to service, a Boeing business jet, on Feb. 3, and says the facility expects to receive its second plane next month and its third by this summer. At that point, it says, the company will be out of floor space in the hangar it currently occupies.

In a July 2008 CERB application that resulted in funding for renovation of that hangar, Cascade projected it would employ 138 people there within the first 12 months of operation, but it's on track to reach that goal in five months, the report says. As a result of strong customer demand, the company would like to get under way with planning and design of the proposed additional hangar by early in the third quarter this year, with the goal of beginning construction in January, it says. Cascade invested more than $2.2 million in the hangar it now occupies and would spend an additional $1.8 million on tooling, equipment, and training for its second work center, the report says.