The Port of Seattle may have a blank check locally but it isn’t a monopoly to shippers or airlines, notes Bill Virgin in today’s Seattle P-I.
Taxpayers have a chance this year to vote out Bob Edwards, one of the five commissioners responsible for the port’s poor performance. (Commissioner Alec Fisken is also up, but at least he’s been consistently agitating for better management.)
Plans to extend light rail from Seattle to Bellevue and Redmond are under fire from critics who could derail the project before it gets traction.
Bellevue community groups want the trains to take circuitous routes that avoid their neighborhoods but would add distance and travel time. Downtown wants a costly tunnel that could swallow the projecdt budget. A shorter line would end at Microsoft’s campus instead of reaching the shopping, office and housing core in central Redmond.
This project should be governed by a long-term view of ridership and how it will shape the region. That means choosing the shortest route through Bellevue that gets to the living and employment centers fastest. Considering that downtown Bellevue is already highly congested and that finances are limited, an elevated route may make sense there and elsewhere along the route. See Vancouver’s SkyTrain. Over the long term, property owners are likely to see values soar with proximity to the transit corridor.
The suburban daily King County Journal newspaper will close next month. The new owners, Victoria’s Black Press, apparently couldn’t find a way to make the unionized operation profitable.
Meanwhile the company is expanding production of six smaller area newspapers from twice a month to twice a week. It’s not clear what will happen to its printing press in Kent, which may have excess capacity.
Update: To compete with Black Press, The Seattle Times may add weekly newspapers in the area.
The craze for locally grown food in Cascadia supports an industry of suppliers. But it’s being squeezed by urban growth.
Consider three Vancouver markets that serve 5,000 customers per week and are on track to break sales records, according to this story in The Tyee. British Columbia reportedly is the only area of Canada where the number of organic farms rose in 2005, though pressure to convert farmland and the difficulty of maintaining a supply chain for meats is a threat.
The Seattle area has seen a similar trend, with an increasing number of community farmer’s markets in King County — 27 this year, up from 7 a decade ago. The demand for locally grown farm goods competes with transportation costs and land conversion. Even the Pike Place Market has converted some space for tourism-related businesses.
Vancouver’s markets reportedly hope to find permanent, covered locations to accommodate customer demand — if they aren’t pushed out by construction staging for the 2010 Olympics. It will be interesting to see if corporate retailers help the cause. Organic home delivery is increasingly available and once-rare Whole Foods has grown from two stores in Cascadia to at least 13 open or planned.
Prospects to keep pro basketball in Seattle appear to be improving, while a proposed NASCAR track faces more hurdles.
The News Tribune reported that the owner of the Sonics is leaning toward building a new stadium in Renton. The site, which the city would give to the team at a steep discount, is close to Eastside corporate customers and near several highways. The team is expected to ask the state legislature for a subsidy of about $300 million.
The request likely further complicates plans for a 83,500-seat NASCAR track on the Kitsap Pensinsula. According to the newspaper, no legislator in the area supports a public subsidy for the project, which supposedly would bring a development boon to the region. Yet State Sen. Derek Kilmer of Gig Harbor, who holds an economic development PhD from Oxford, says financing the project should at least be considered.
Plans for one of Vancouver’s tallest skyscrapers recently passed a design-review hurdle, the latest sign of a tall-building boom sweeping Cascadia’s biggest cities.
The new 59-story hotel-office-residential combination would rival a new Shangri-La Hotel slated for completion by 2008. The projects will dramatically alter the modest Vancouver skyline that has preserved views of the mountains. They could even begin to shift the feel of the city — if you buy the idea, quoted in the latest issue of Dwell magazine, that the focus on the outdoors has kept Vancouver’s urban culture restrained.
Meanwhile Seattle recently approved taller towers, a step that had been verboten since the building boom of the 1980s. Even Portland, with its small blocks and human-scale buildings, may grow taller as it fills underused land near downtown.
The difference from earlier building booms is that channeling growth appears to be a larger part of the calculations, in addition to the vanity of building taller towers. Vancouver, where the first building above 37 stories opened in 2001, needs more office space in the center city to counter sprawl. Seattle’s traffic is bad enough to stoke demand for more close-in housing. Concentrating building along Portland’s existing transit corridors would maximize return on the investment.
Conservative Seattle-area radio talker John Carlson this week said the federal government should act to prevent further media-industry consolidation. Meanwhile, regardless of owner, the real need is for diversity of content.
Consolidation is a critical issue because snuffing out local voices could make Seattle more like British Columbia, where a single company controls most of print and broadcast media. In B.C., CanWest’s ownership of both Vancouver daily newspapers has led to fawning coverage of the ruling party and a pro-business slant on issues such as the 2010 Olympics.
In Seattle, variety of coverage is what’s missing. The Seattle Times sponsored preliminary FCC hearings last month where speakers of all political stripes spoke against allowing more consolidation. But how often have Seattle’s daily papers reported virtually identical information on their pages, despite different ownership?
It’s true that almost all Seattle broadcast outlets are owned by out-of-town chains, including some that have cut local investment. This year McClatchy took over several Washington newspapers, ownership of Seattle Weekly changed again and Victoria’s Black Press bought the King County Journal. Against this backdrop, remaining local media need to stand up and show why they matter.
A couple of new air connections from Cascadia stand out:
— Nonstops between Seattle and Austin daily on American Airlines, beginning in April. The first such connection between the cities is driven by business demand, the airline said.
— Nonstops between Vancouver and Manchester, Glasgow and Gatwick at least once per week during ski season on Zoom Airlines, a Canadian low-fare carrier. During the summer the airline offered tourism-focused nonstops from Vancouver to Belfast and Cardiff.
From the better-late-than-never category: one of the the sharpest summaries of what went wrong at the Port of Seattle this Christmas season.
Peter Callaghan of the News Tribune says the port commissioners “received bad staff work, got bad legal advice and used a bad process” to deal with questions over Christmas trees in the Sea-Tac terminal. “The number of unintended — and bad — consequences just might set a record for a single public-policy decision by an elected body in the state of Washington,” he writes.
The uproar distracted attention from questions of whether the port is effectively doing its job with Sea-Tac.
King County Executive Ron Sims was named “husband of the year” by Seattle Magazine and apparently is proud enough of the distinction to post it on his official Web site. The Seattle area’s top elected official drew attention by skipping a dinner with the president of China at Bill Gates’ home:
Was his absence caused by some sort of county-wide emergency or pressing issue? Well, if you consider “date night” a pressing isue, as Sims does, yes. Instead of eating halibut with the richest man in the universe and the president of the most populated country on earth, the King County executve enjoyed the evening with his wife of 19 years, Cayan.
The approach is a contrast to Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan, who reportedly has made hospitality toward official Chinese visitors a priority. The city appointed a person to handle protocol because such niceties can influence the direction of any future business relationship.
