With a resurgent downtown, a four-year University of Washington branch campus, more affordable housing than in Seattle and one of the top seaports in the nation, you'd think all is well in the City of Destiny, T-Town -- Tacoma. You'd be wrong. Three words:

Russell Investment Group. Russell, a global leader in multimanager investment services, will decide in 2009 whether to keep its world headquarters in Tacoma, where it employs more than 1,100 of its 2,100 total staff, or move out of town to seek up to 1.2 million square feet of new office space. That's nearly six times the size of the company's current headquarters.

Russell has made no decision, and CEO Craig Ueland is mum. Tacoma, however, is scrambling to keep Russell, advancing a program code-named Project Destiny, including finding Russell a good site to build a new corporate headquarters, assembling tax-incentive legislation and raising Tacoma's height limit on skyscrapers. At stake is roughly $77 million a year in direct spending in Tacoma's economy, according to the Economic Development Board of Tacoma-Pierce County.

Keeping Russell in Tacoma won't be easy. The city already has competition in DuPont, a Pierce County suburb, where First Industrial Realty Trust Inc. plans to develop a massive business park near a championship golf course with panoramic views of Puget Sound. Says Gary Danklefsen, regional director in First Industrial's Seattle office: "If the Russell company is going to stay in Pierce County, it would be logical to look at one of the premier business parks in development in the U.S."