PORT TOWNSEND — After a 14-month uphill battle to lift Jefferson County’s declining job growth, Tamer Kirac has resigned as the Economic Development Council’s top executive.
Kirac, 54, cites a lack of support — both governmental and on the Economic Development Council’s board of directors — in his decision to accept a U.S. State Department position as an economic development adviser to 18 war-torn Iraqi provinces.
He said he’ll begin his new federal consultant position around March 15 in Baghdad’s U.S. military-protected “Green Zone.”
His last day at the helm of the Economic Development Council is Feb. 28.
“It is going to be interesting,” Kirac said Monday of his new assignment, an offer that came shortly after he weathered a controversy late last year that involved Nelson Ludlow, chief executive officer of Mobilisa Inc., one of the county’s most upwardly mobile businesses.
Ludlow pulled his company’s EDC membership after he took offense to comments Kirac reportedly made.
Ludlow took issue with Kirac’s criticism of Mobilisa’s practices of hiring employees from outside the area and the company’s lack of involvement in the EDC’s Economic Development Summit last year. Ludlow was not able to attend because he was out of state at the time.
In a final statement, Ludlow said: “Even if Tamer Kirac can find some statistic that companies have to hire 80 percent of their educated and trained people from outside the local area, why would they promote that? What company would want to move here if the EDC leader is saying that rubbish?”
Ludlow accepted Kirac’s apology, but Kirac said Monday that he felt things turned too “personal” and dominated the news, undermining the EDC momentum he helped generate in 2005.
‘I just lost my enthusiasm’
When it became personal, he said, “I just lost my enthusiasm.”
“The recent Mobilisa debacle was very unfortunate,” said Kirac.
“That I think was the turning point, and I am hoping the [EDC] executive committee meeting will result in something constructive.”
At 7:30 a.m. today, the EDC’s executive committee meets to discuss the job-creating agency’s options in seeking Kirac’s successor.
“Do we go to another search?” was one question asked Monday by EDC president Lawrence Graves, adding that pay, who the EDC looks for and whether to appoint an interim director were other options.
Kirac’s position was advertised on the EDC Web site in 2004 as paying about $50,000 annually, with a raise to $55,000 after a review in 2005.
Graves was reluctant to comment further until after the meeting today at the EDC offices on Upper Sims Way.