Cascadia Report

Category: Business

  • New growth spilling over the Cascades

    The Puget Sound-area economy has long been red-hot thanks to the technology industry. Two reports suggest some of the growth is spilling over the mountains to eastern Washington.

    Suncadia, a 6,300-acre resort project 80 miles east of Seattle, announced multi-year plans to add more condos, golf courses and a major retail community. The project targets urban residents who otherwise would have driven to British Columbia for a resort. The article quotes a Bellevure resident who just bought:

    “We always wanted to get some place that we could get to from Seattle,” she said. “We were looking at Whistler, and it was just too far.”

    Meanwhile another kind of growth is coming from tech firms planning to use cheap power in eastern Washington for data centers. Investments by Microsoft and Google have been well reported. Now a Seattle developer plans a facility for smaller tech companies looking for similar services.

    Though neither promises massive job gains, diversificatin is good for the agriculture-dominated economy. “It is really a shift and a change into a whole labor market that we have never had before,” an official with the Port of Douglas County told the P-I. “We are quite excited about it.”

  • Cascadia ports may get new local competition

    Ports in Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver are Cascadia’s shipping gateways. Now an American man is investing up to $500 million to build a container-port operation in Prince Rupert, a town on the British Columbia coast about 500 miles north of Vancouver.

    A story in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday explains that the new operation through tiny Prince Rupert could shave two days’ transit for goods from China bound to Chicago. Ships would arrive in the town’s naturally deep harbor and travel across Canada on a train line that has excess capacity (instead of on congested routes through the U.S.).

    The project still faces many obstacles. But it underscores how much competition Cascadia’s major ports face.

    A couple of years ago Vancouver benefited while Seattle, Portland and California’s ports suffered through a strike. Each port has since expanded to meet demand from the booming trade with Asia, providing more business for everyone.

    Yet when an inevitable downturn in business comes, the key question will return: who can do the business fastest and at the lowest cost?

  • If vancouver fails at wooing the Chinese…

    Vancouver isn’t doing enough to woo Chinese business, according to a Vancouver Sun article explaining how the city is trying to catch up.

    “We didn’t even have a protocol person until last year,” said Mayor Sam Sullivan. The city created a position in October just to handle foreign visits. Fourteen official Chinese delegations have visited since January and one or two unofficial ones visit each week, the paper said.

    Contrast that focus on building business ties to Seattle, where Mayor Greg Nickels is mired in debate over $3,400 the city spent on a video about replacing the waterfront viaduct. Meanwhile Governor Chris Gregoire gets criticized for not addressing “the potential downsides of globalization.”

    One result of the attention: Vancouver has 52 nonstop flights a week to China, promoting economic and cultural ties. Seattle has none.

  • U.S.-Canada deal not a fix

    The U.S. and Canada signed an agreement to finally cool the long-running dispute over the trade of lumber. But the landmark deal likely isn’t the end of the story.

    Negotiators in Geneva signed the pact late Saturday — Canada Day. The main feature seems to be that both sides agree to drop existing lawsuits and agree to abide by the terms of the new agreement for three years.

    softwood lumber
    Canadian lumber producers will get a partial refund of the billions of dollars paid to the U.S. in the form of tariffs on shipments over the last several years. But otherwise the deal seems similar to the status quo. It calls for a new surcharge on Canadian wood shipped into the U.S. if the price falls much below the current level, which is in a historically high range. And Canada gets to keep its current 34 percent share of the U.S. wood market.

    Eliminating lawsuits is an accomplishment. But unfortunately the deal doesn’t solve the market imbalances that cause the trade friction in the first place. The dispute will return as long as Canada has a massive supply of government-owned trees and U.S. consumers demand cheap wood.

    The biggest reason that the deal isn’t a fix? The Canadians didn’t get all they wanted and will finger the U.S. every time a Canadian mill closes and puts workers out of jobs.

    Canada’s parliament still has to okay the deal. You can be sure that the proposal will get lots of scrutiny, at least in Canada. On Sunday the deal was front-page news for the Victoria Times-Colonist. The Seattle Times put a wire story on A6.

  • More Cascadia train links

    Zg_talgo_092699_richmondbchTrain ties between Seattle and Portland will grow July 1 with the addition of a fifth daily Amtrak round-trip between the cities.

    The additional train helps integrate Cascadia by making connections easier along the corridor from Bellingham to Portland. Here’s the info from Amtrak.

    This is a case of supply trailing demand. Highways along the Cascadia corridor are increasingly clogged. The latest train is the first new service in the corridor since 1999. Even without additional service, passenger traffic from Seattle-Portland rose 6 percent from 2004 to 2005, according to a Seattle Times report.

    The new train is funded by a multi-billion-dollar transportation package approved last year by Washington, whose taxpayers fund three current round-trips using new train equipment. The trains make the trip in about 3:30. A daily Amtrak on its way to L.A. and back also serves the route more slowly.

    Cascadia travelers are waiting for British Columbia’s government to step up with funding to fix the weakest link in the Cascadia corridor: between the U.S. border and downtown Vancouver.

  • New rules to channel development downtown

    courtesy of the Seattle Times
    The Seattle city council unanimously approved the first measure in 20 years to allow denser building downtown.

    Allowing taller buildings is a big step toward channeling the region’s development, creating a market for better transit, making the city more affordable and limiting sprawl. Cascadia neighbors Vancouver and Portland are models for how Seattle may develop.

    Developers can build taller if they fund affordable housing units. To help pay for amenities, developers will pay an average of $19 a square foot for higher floors. The new rules call for rain covers over sidewalks, a new park in Belltown and a new public school downtown.

    Reports say developers have been lining up to build as soon as the zoning rules were set. It remains to be seen if the fees will discourage development the city is trying to channel. At least the city took action. Details can be tweaked again later.

  • Marking the anniversary — of Boeing’s departure

    Images_4Boeing’s decision to move its headquarters to Chicago five years ago was a huge blow to Seattle’s big-time pretensions. After the dot-com recession, an earthquake and a small downtown riot, Boeing said it had to leave because it wanted to be seen as a global business. Ouch. Mayor Paul Schell was quoted as saying, “I’m waiting for the locusts.”

    Today a package of Seattle Times stories makes a case that the move actually had a minor impact in terms of employment, Boeing’s charitable giving here and the local property market. In an interview, the executive who led the move, John Warner, gushes praise for the city and state. Another story cites a recent transplant from Portland saying that Amazon.com and other new tech employers better represent Seattle now.

    The package repeatedly mentions that Boeing moved just 150 headquarters jobs. But what about the impact of that elite group and the people who regularly came to Seattle to meet with them? These weren’t just hardworking machinists (and there are still more than 60,000 Boeing workers in the state). But their departure meant a drop in demand for nonstop flights, top-end restaurants and hotels, and other cultural assets. True, the sky didn’t fall. But every leading city needs a fully mixed economy and the loss still smarts.

  • Land-use initiative gets okay

    FblogoA judge gave approval this week to the wording on a “property fairness” initiative that could suspend land-use zoning throughout Washington. The title of the initiative that would appear on the ballot closely follows what the Washington Farm Bureau asked for. Here’s the text:

    “This measure would require compensation when government regulation damages the use or value of private property, would forbid regulations that prohibit existing legal uses of private property, and would provide exceptions or payments.”

    It sounds innocuous. But since cash-strapped governments would likely make zoning exceptions rather than pay landowners, the rules could be gutted.

  • A new newspaper empire in Washington

    The sale of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain may have a big impact in Cascadia. As part of the 32-paper deal, the McClatchy Co. takes ownership of a 49.5 percent stake in the Seattle Times and total ownership of the 23,000-circulation Bellingham Herald and 33,000-circulation Olympian. Add that to the Tacoma News Tribune, which it already owns, and McClatchy is the new giant in western Washington’s mainstream media.

    Changes aren’t obvious yet, but a Seattle Weekly article points out the new clout of the new owners here. McClatchy’s new major presence in the area will affect competition and news coverage throughout the Puget Sound region. Time will tell how staffing, budgets and the size of news hole change.

  • Washington passes business legislation

    Images_2The Washington legislature wrapped up its session Wednesday with several changes that affect Cascadia business. The pro-business results from the Democrat-dominated legislature could blunt GOP criticisms ahead of the November elections. Here are the highlights of what passed, from The Olympian:

    MEDICAL MALPRACTICE: Passed a medical liability package which protects doctors who apologize from having it used against them in lawsuits and addressing other elements of patient safety, insurance rate-setting and legal procedures.

    ENERGY AND BIOFUELS: Approved a requirement for 2 percent biofuel mixtures in diesel products sold in Washington; approved financing to assist the construction of seed crushers to help stimulate biofuels-oriented agriculture; approved emergency heating-bill assistance money for the poor. Lawmakers also exempted farm fuels from sales and use taxes.

    Among what didn’t pass:

    EMPLOYEE INSURANCE: The so-called fair-share bill requiring large employers such as Wal-Mart to spend 9 percent of payroll on health insurance died in favor of a study to identify employers of workers who use state Medicaid and Basic Health Plan services.