RICHLAND - The Washington Wine Commission today is preparing to launch a newly revised web site, as it gears up for a marketing blitz targeting Boston and Austin, Tex., commission CEO Robin Pollard said here Thursday.

This fall's campaigns will follow on the heels of a successful effort in Tampa, Fla., Pollard said. Over the past two years, the wine commission has focused its attention in Tampa-St. Petersburg. It was rewarded with a 60-percent increase in sales of Washington wines, she said.

The marketing campaigns began with some "sobering" survey findings among East Coast wine drinkers, Pollard said. (It wasn't clear if the pun was intentional or not.)

"There was a fair amount of confusion between Washington and Washington, D.C.," she said. "Several participants commented 'How in the heck can you grow grapes on the Potomac?'"

That's what's leading the commission toward its current marketing approach, Pollard said. "Our objective is to work a market and work it hard for a couple yeas," then let individual wineries take over the task of promoting their own products.

Pollard spoke on this and the impact of wineries on the state's tourism industry at a joint meeting of the Washington Economic Development Association and Washington Public Ports Association here in Richland.

THE THREE-DAY CONFERENCE (which is continuing this morning . . . I've got to type this quick and get over there) attracted economic development types from all over the state, talking on a broad range of subjects, including efforts underway to spin off more companies to exploit research done at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories at Hanford.

State Rep. Larry Haler, R-Richland, said that in the years he's been involved in public life in the Tri-Cities, there have been about two dozen companies worth about a billion dollars in total that have started-up to commercialize PNNL research. None of them stayed in the Tri-Cities, he said, for reasons ranging from a lack of facilities to house them to a lack of venture capital funding.

ONE OF THE BIG TOPICS of conversation on Thursday was something called Project Gold Rush. I suspect we'll hear a lot more about this in Olympia in January.

I couldn't get many details about it - the key players were still pretty discreet. But apparently Project Gold Rush has been a nine-month effort to attract a major manufacturer or distribution center to a site in Walla Walla County. A couple people mentioned it would bring in 300 jobs; I heard one mention of a $300 million investment by the unnamed company.

"We met with them," one speaker told the group. "We put a $500,000 education and training program on the table. The governor put some money on the table."

But the facility is probably going to Oregon, speakers said, because officials there are able to offer property tax abatements worth (according to one) $30 million over the next 10 years. Washington officials - you probably know this - can't offer anything like that in return, because our state's constitution expressly prohibits it.

Some speakers, like Walla Walla Community College president Steve Van Ausdle, who is a player in state and national economic development services, said Washington communities really shouldn't get themselves in bidding wars with other states for companies. "If that other state gave away the store, we don't want them," he said.

But at the same time, he and others said it sure would be nice to be able to offer at least some cash inducements to companies on the move.

I expect a push to get some sort of change in the law during the upcoming session, at least from Haler, who said he favors a referendum to overhaul the constitution. Van Ausdle didn't go that far, but he said that clearly Washington "has got to do some homework."

RECRUITING NEW COMPANIES from out of state is the sexy, high-end economic development work, but a good bit of Thursday's conversation centered on tapping a rich potential source of new jobs for eastern Washington - King County.

There are a lot of small and mid-sized manufacturers who are getting priced out of the Interstate 5 corridor, several speakers noted. Why not lure them over east of the mountains, where land is cheap and labor costs somewhat less?

"The willingness to go poach jobs out of Puget Sound" is "essential," according to state Rep. Glenn Anderson, R-Fall City. "You all should be incredibly aggressive about that. Don't ask permission."

Some westside business recruiters - notably Snohomish County Economic Development Council president Deborah Knutson - balked at the notion, making the point that as a public policy, it's a zero-sum game to just move a company from one Washington location to another. However, she conceded that it does make sense for Washington as a state to encourage King County-based companies to look east of Issaquah when they're expanding - like Amazon did in 2005, when it announced plans to open a customer-service call center in Kennewick.