Cascadia Report

Category: Cascadia not cities

  • The confessional will help McGavick

    The chattering class overwhelmingly seems to think that Mike McGavick’s open letter last week admitting several personal mistakes was itself a mistake.

    In the letter, U.S. Senate hopeful McGavick said his regrets include being a lousy husband, getting a DUI, being an absent parent and laying off people while he was Safeco’s CEO. In 2003 his ex-wife told me that he was on the phone with Slade Gorton while she was in labor with their son.

    These issues may have been brought up by Maria Cantwell’s camp late in the race. Confessing now gets them out into the open and also makes McGavick seem like the honest, aw-shucks guy who most voters like to support. It’s another opportunity for McGavick to talk about personality instead of issues, in a year when his party’s record and stance seem deeply unpopular in this state.

    The race for governor in 2004 showed that a nice-guy image can nearly beat a solid policy wonk (Dino Rossi would be governor except for a few dozen votes!). By basing his campaign in Seattle and spending more, McGavick is sure to improve on Rossi’s record. Until Cantwell’s campaign gains some traction on the issues, McGavick’s chance of winning remains much higher than Democrats want to think.

  • Regional support needed for West Coast rail

    Eliminate hundreds of cars from the road, stimulate tourism and maintain a viable transport corridor along the West Coast. That’s what Amtrak’s daily train between Seattle and Los Angeles does. It also may need the support of Cascadia states to stay in operation.

    This piece in a California newspaper makes the case that passengers are effectively supporting the 1,400-mile run despite repeated Bush Administration attempts to eliminate its budget. The three states should provide financial support in exchange for better service, which would fit with Cascadia’s regional trasport needs.

  • Expect more cross-border timber mergers

    More deals between U.S. and Canadian forestry companies are likely as the industry continues to struggle with excess capacity in North America and low prices, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

    This week’s combination of paper units of Weyerhaeuser and Domtar, a big Montreal-based firm, brought more attention to the trend. Weyerhaeuser, with annual sales of $23 billion, is trying to boost its profitability by jettisoning one of its paper businesses and hopes the move helps fend off hostile takeover attempts by private equity firms.

    The industry has been cutting costs for years by closing mills and consolidating. In fact, Weyerhaeuser became a major Canadian operator in 1999 when it bought MacMillan Bloedel. But an acceleration of the trend could further undermine employment in rural parts of Cascadia and continue development away from the industry that largely built this region.

  • Alaska voters okay tax on cruises

    Cruise ship passengers who sail to Alaska from Seattle or Vancouver will each pay a $50 tax under a new law approved by Alaska voters this week. New taxes also will cover gambling and profits from cruise-related excursions in the state.

    The cruise industry spent heavily to counter the measure and is already threatening cutbacks. Carnival says the measure will cost it $24 million in 2007.

    It’s the latest attempt in Cascadia to get the booming cruise business to shoulder more of the costs of cruise-related traffic, pollution and tourism services. The bet is that the Alaska business is unique enough and most travelers wealthy enough to pay the extra fee.

  • Conference tackles what makes Cascadia unique

    A conference starting in Vancouver today explores the similarities among residents of Cascadia. Scholars, pollsters, environmentalists and others will discuss how we relate to the region’s geography and our “spirituality, ecology and social transformation.”

    This is how the organizers describe it:

    One focus will be on how public life is developing differently in the continental Pacific Northwest because of the region’s cultural openness, signified by a record low level of devotion to formal religion. The flip side of this phenomenon is an unusually passionate interest in “spirituality,” including reverence for nature.

    The event is all day today and Friday at Simon Fraser University. Call 604-291-5855 for more details.

  • Vancouver wooing Seattle passengers

    A newly appointed Seattle representative of Vancouver airport is launching a campaign to encourage more travelers from the region to use the Canadian airport for international flights, getting them to go north instead of through SFO or LAX.

    The number of passengers from Seattle connecting through Vancouver to Asia soared 40 percent from 2004 to 2005, according to the report in the Puget Sound Business Journal. Seattle passengers account for about 5 percent of all YVR traffic to Asia.

    And no wonder. Vancouver has 117 weekly flights to 8 Asian cities and 75 weekly flights to 11 European cities, according to the report. Seattle has 36 flights a week to three Asian cities and 24 flights to three European ones. Some of that is because Vancouver is Canada’s West coast metropolis.

    The development manager at Sea-Tac is quoted as hoping that near-capacity flights from SEA will attract more carriers. But the airport has lost fllights to Tokyo, Osaka and China in recent years.

  • How state law can respond to the housing crunch

    The Seattle area continues to defy the national trend of a sharply slumping housing market. The result is fewer people can afford homes, especially anywhere near their work. So what to do about it?

    Seattle homes by housingconsortium.orgA thoughtful commentary by a realtor ran in the Seattle Times Wednesday, making the case that the affordable housing cruch was caused by the state’s Growth Management Act. That law required counties to figure out how to focus development in order to curb sprawl. It also upset a lot of rural landowners, and spurred a rollback measure this fall called I-933.

    Though he doesn’t take a stand on I-933 — which many business groups support — he suggests five sensible policy steps:

    • Require that growth-management plans under the GMA result in no net loss of housing opportunities;

    • Require that growth-management plans balance projected job growth with growth in the housing supply, to ensure employees can live in communities where they work;

    • Ask communities to increase affordable-housing opportunities. Some strategies include flexibility in lot sizes and allowing detached “accessory dwelling units,” such as those proposed by Mayor Greg Nickels;

    • Establish performance measures for growth-management plans, to measure whether they actually accommodate growth and to verify that municipalities are adjusting plans to accommodate growth, as they are required to by law;

    • Make the funding of critical infrastructure projects — such as roads, sewers and water — a priority in state and local budgeting.

    Voiding current growth laws is a big mistake. But there are critical missing links. The Seattle area should follow examples of its Cascadia neighbors Vancouver and Portland in fixing them. Encourage more dense in-fill development and build the infrastructure necessary to make living in built-up areas attractive.

  • Alaska’s governor loses reelection bid

    Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski conceded defeat in his reelection bid Tuesday. The longtime politician lost the Republican primary to a small-town mayor who now faces Democratic ex-governor Tony Knowles in November.

    While Cascadia includes part of southeast Alaska, the outcome of the election is important because of the impact Alaska’s governor can have on the economy of the overall region. Murkowski was a proponent of more oil drilling and construction of a new natural gas pipeline across Canada. The governor also appoints officials who regulate the fishing industry based in Seattle and the cruise industry, whose ships sail from Vancouver and Seattle.

    A thorough report on why this governor’s race is important to the region and nationwide is here on the Washington Post’s web site.

  • Vancouver airport workers strike averted

    A strike by 250 security workers at Vancouver airport was averted Tuesday morning when their union agreed to mediation. A work stoppage could have disrupted travel because other airport staff unions reportedly were planning to honor picket lines.

  • More trouble at Alaska Airlines

    Alaska Airlines continues to struggle with its core business: getting passengers to their destination safely and on time. The airline claims it’s making progress fixing maintenance and delay problems, but anecdotal evidence and recent statistics suggest otherwise.

    Yesterday, passengers used an emergency slide to evacuate a flight in Long Beach after smoke filled the jet’s cabin. A separate flight arrived in Chicago three hours and 15 minutes late after a delay in Seattle due to maintenance problems. And a Vancouver-to-San Francisco flight on Friday made an emergency landing in Seattle after the cabin failed to pressurize. Several passengers were treated for ear pain.

    Maintenance issues are particularly sensitive for Alaska Airlines since a faulty tail screw caused a deadly crash near Los Angeles a few years ago. One of its planes took off from Seattle earlier this year with a dent in its fuselage and another filled with smoke after arriving in San Francisco.

    Also important for regular fliers, the airline’s on-time performance has worsened, according to federal statistics. Less than 73 percent of flights were on time in June and about 50 percent earlier this month, when the airline had baggage-sorting problems at Sea-Tac airport. Those numbers don’t tell the whole story since they count any flight arriving at the gate 15 minutes behind schedule as late. Twenty-six percent of Alaska’s flights in June were delayed, by an average of 38 minutes, according to the Department of Transportation.

    Alaska Airlines didn’t return a call for comment on Monday.

    Seattle-based Alaska has the most extensive route network throughout Cascadia so the region would benefit if it operated efficiently. But if the recent performance continues Cascadia travelers will increasingly avoid it, despite the convenience of its timetable. “I really want to like the airline,” a man told the Anchorage Daily News last month. “But they really, really need to reorganize and get their act together or they’re going to do permanent damage to their image.”