Electric air taxi startup Joby Aviation could pass over Marina in deciding where to build a factory.

In the roughly five years since it set up shop at Marina Municipal Airport, electric air taxi startup Joby Aviation has been a signpost for Monterey County’s economic potential – one where forward-thinking tech and manufacturing firms could help modernize the local economy beyond its traditional bedrocks of agriculture and tourism.

Yet while Joby pushes forward with plans to manufacture a fleet of electric aircraft that would serve as short- to intermediate-distance air taxis, there are concerns Marina could be left behind. The city is one of several across the country now being considered by Joby to house a new, much larger factory that would enable it to scale up operations – and some local stakeholders fear that the startup may look beyond the Central Coast, or California entirely, to lower-cost, more business-friendly pastures.

Since leasing multiple buildings at Marina Municipal Airport in 2018, Santa Cruz-based Joby has grown to around 120,000 square feet of space where it employs around 300 people for research and development purposes, including work on its prototype. By 2020, the city of Marina had signed off on allowing Joby to build a much larger facility at the airport – a factory spanning up to 600,000 square feet that would potentially generate up to 2,000 jobs and enable Joby to ramp up production once its aircraft receives certification from the Federal Aviation Administration.

But Joby has yet to start work on such a project, and in fact has been entertaining proposals from municipalities across the country before determining where it will construct its facility. With the startup now understood to be shortlisting possible locations, Marina officials are working to ensure their city remains in the running.

Assistant City Manager Matt Mogensen says the city is preparing to circle back with Joby in the coming weeks on a revised proposal, which could include enhancements like “infrastructure improvements at the airport” and expansion opportunities on surrounding land.

While noting that the city has “a great relationship” with Joby and that the startup is “going to be [in Marina] for a long time” given its decade-plus leases at the airport, Mogensen acknowledges that Joby is considering “what the cost-benefit would be of establishing that larger production line someplace else.”

That analysis includes factors like government-sponsored business incentives and tax breaks, as well as the housing available to its workforce. On those fronts, it’s likely that Marina finds itself at a disadvantage to states like Texas and the Carolinas.

Still, Marina City Manager Layne Long believes Marina has advantages to offer Joby including proximity to its Santa Cruz headquarters, a strategically advantageous airport and “hundreds of acres of land” to grow its own operations and develop more housing in the future. “Those are things Joby is aware of and we’ll be discussing with them,” he says.

A Joby spokesperson says Marina remains in the company’s plans, wherever the larger facility goes. “While we are considering locations in several states, including California, to host that scaled manufacturing facility, we expect Marina to remain a critical strategic facility for us going forward,” the spokesperson says in a statement.