Cascadia Report

Category: Seattle

  • Sale of Seattle biotech a loss for region

    The sale of Seattle-area biotechnology firm Icos will likely result in the loss of many jobs. The question is whether the region will gain from the sale.

    In the last five years, the leading firms in Seattle’s biotech field have been swallowed by rivals, leaving just one such firm with a market worth of more than $1 billion. “If Icos had made it, it would have made us a center for the industry,” Charles Hill, a University of Washington business professor and former Icos shareholder, told the Seattle Times. “It’s a huge loss for the region, and a huge missed opportunity.”

    The current CEO of Icos said the $2.1 billion that Ely Lilly is paying for the smaller company is proof of its success. The fact that Icos, a startup in 1990, could be sold for that price proves that the region is a fertile place for biotech investments and should encourage more startups, he said.

    It will be interesting to see if professionals from Icos, which employs 700, take their paychecks and start new businesses in the region.

  • Cascadia not alone with extreme commutes

    Commuter tales of woe are becoming more frequent in Cascadia. Yet they’re not unique, according to an article Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal.

    As traffic worsens, commuters are hitting the roads and trains far before sunrise, stretching the traditional “rush hour” and spurring businesses to meet the extra demand. In 85 U.S. urban areas, congestion occurred an average of 7.1 hours a day on major urban roads in 2003, up from 6.2 hours a day in 1993 and 4.5 hours daily in 1982, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

    Some commuters to downtown Seattle leave home as early as 4:15 a.m. in order to beat clogged freeways. Sound Transit’s earliest commuter train from Tacoma to Seattle now leaves at 5:45 a.m., a change from 6:20 a.m. when the service started in 2000, the story notes. The first daily West Coast Express commuter train into Vancouver leaves at 5:27 a.m.

    One result is longer hours for service businesses. According to the story, more than 90 percent of McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. now operate on extended hours — opening at 5 a.m., closing at midnight or are staying open 24 hours. McDonald’s restaurants generally used to open as early as 6 a.m.

  • Traffic shifting away from Seattle’s port

    The number of containers passing through the Port of Seattle dropped again in September as traffic continued shifting to California and to other Cascadia ports.

    Last month Seattle traffic dropped 7.6 percent, the seventh monthly drop so far this year. Port officials blame the decline on the draw of the large southern California market and say that cruise ships and other business will help Seattle weather the downturn.

    The numbers underscore the need for investment in efficient infrastructure in order to hold onto trade-related business. Vancouver’s port has continued to grow by investing in better on-shore transportation links, and Tacoma is poised to become the largest Puget Sound port this year. Seattle reportedly has the capacity to double its traffic to 4 million 20-foot containers a year by 2013, and Tacoma — which has more space — says it will be able to handle 6 million by 2025.

  • Vancouver’s model for downtown living

    Vancouver’s downtown elementary school is so popular after two years that it’s running out of space.

    The crunch suggests the city is doing something that Seattle should emulate, according to this article examining the merits of living downtown for families. It includes the obvious point that Seattle can’t open schools downtown until there’s enough demand. Far more important is streamlining regulations to encourage more units of all kinds, which would eventually lead to more stores and other amenities. Middle-class residents and families will follow.

  • Why Washington property measure isn’t ‘only fair’

    Campaign signs are popping up across Washington saying “I-933, It’s Only Fair.” But that’s not the impression a spokesman for the measure left at a recent Seattle forum.

    Initiative backer Steve Hammond, a former King County Council member, confirmed the issue is about fighting government. Speaking at an election forum last week in the Eastlake neighborhood, he said the measure would prevent the sort of oppression he felt a few years ago when the county passed restrictions on rural development.

    washington sprawlApparently rural landowners need a blunt instrument like a statewide initiative because they don’t have the numbers to change the state’s leadership.

    “Why not just vote for new representation? Because you need representation that represents you,” he said, noting that during the council’s vote he was the only of 13 council members who was personally affected by the land-use rules. “If they vote (on issues) outside urban growth boundaries, they need to live outside urban areas.”

    According to the voter’s guide, Initiative 933 would require government to compensate property owners when “regulation damages the use or value of private property.” Hammond agreed that the government wouldn’t have the funds to compensate landowners. Instead it “would be forced to act differently,” he said. Such a rule would turn back the clock on community planning, essentially giving rural property owners the right to dictate development of the state’s open land.

    Indeed Hammond explained that small landowners currently bear most of the cost of the state’s land-use rules. He told Eastlake residents who worry about gutted development laws that their urban neighborhood would be mostly unaffected. In other words, voters should let rural property owners do whatever they want with the land, regardless of the consequences.

    It’s true that policy needs to be fair, consistent and not hurt the little guy. That’s a good reason to reopen debate in the legislature about land-use laws — but not to support I-933.

  • Picks from Sunday’s papers

    1. A Seattle Times poll found that 51 percent of Seattleites want to rebuild the waterfront viaduct freeway. One-quarter each wanted a tunnel, a surface-street option or hadn’t decided. Unfortunately the poll simply confirms the obvious because cost was apparently the main factor presented to the 400 people who were questioned. An efficient surface-street and transit package would win support if people were told of the construction hassles and massive size of a proposed new aerial viaduct.

    2. The strength of British Columbia’s economic boom may depend on what the Canadian central bank does with interest rates. The Bank of Canada is expected to leave rates unchanged at 4.25 percent on Tuesday but could indicate plans to cut them in the future. Central Canada’s economy is on the ropes, thanks partly to the slumping auto industry. Could a sign of lower rates to help the rest of the country overheat B.C. and Alberta?

    3. Polls suggest that Republicans may take the governorship in Oregon, a trend bolstered by a pair of profiles in The Oregonian. Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who won in 2002 by 3 percentage points, comes off as a technocrat who doesn’t have much to show for his four years in office. Republican Ron Saxton, a Portland school board leader, says a governor needs to take on teachers’ unions in order to improve education. Saxton has raised more money to fund his TV ad campaign and could benefit from voter frustration.

    4. Seattle-area rental costs are soaring — a subject Cascadia Report has experienced first-hand. Some neighborhoods have a vacancy rate of less than 1 percent, according to a real estate survey. Rents rose 7 percent in the last year and are expected to climb another 4 percent this year. Blame job growth, a slowing market for new homes and condo conversions for the trend.

  • Maybe Seattle’s policy isn’t so liberal after all

    Seattle’s political leaders rage against President Bush and the support liberal events. But their way of governing, which effectively delivers spoils to their buddies and corporations, isn’t liberalism.

    So says Ted Van Dyk in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He decries the big-government land grabs by local transit agencies, massive subsidies to companies like Boeing and perennial blackmail in order to raise taxes.

    “No city, even our Emerald City, can govern itself this way without in time becoming New Orleans or Jersey City,” he writes. “Grandiose public works projects go hand in hand with payoffs and public corruption.”

    He’s mostly right. The area needs activists who are willing to question the status quo way of doing business. For example, someone needs to hold the Port of Seattle accountable for financial misses, mismanagement and waning competitiveness.

    But Van Dyk misses a key point. Cascadia and the Seattle area need to invest in better infrastructure in order to cope with growth, and that means steppingon some toes. The region also needs a tax structure that encourages companies to expand here and makes it easier for start-ups to fluourish. The key is picking competent representatives who will do this in the most efficient way.

  • Waterfront business worries and a sensible fix

    Businesses along Seattle’s waterfront say they would be devastated by construction of a tunnel to replace the dangerous viaduct. Luckily there’s growing support for a less-disruptive option than a costly tunnel.

    Businesses of the Seattle Historic Waterfront Association say the loss of parking, removal of sidewalks and visual clutter during construction of a cut-and-cover tunnel would cut their sales by 85 to 90 percent. They want to up to one-third of the total cost of the project devoted to mitigation.

    Their protest lends support to another option that would replace the viaduct sooner with extensive improvements to roads and transit. Here’s an excellent summary of the opportunity Seattle has to get this project right.

  • Picks from Sunday’s papers

    1. Cascadia’s booming beer and wine industry is learning to throw its weight around. The Oregonian reports that an Oregon booze association has showered $1.2 million on lawmakers. The result, the paper says, is cozy distribution rules and a state government that repeatedly shied away from using beer and wine taxes to cover alcohol treatment and schools during a budget crunch.

    2. Roads are crumbling or washing away in national forests across the region. The money to maintain the roads dried up along with the logging industry in the early 1990s, according to a Seattle Times report. Now there’s an estimated $1.1 billion backlog on repairs to national forest roads in Washington and Oregon. The decay hinders tourism, housing and fish runs. The story doesn’t address the millions of dollars in the government still spends to build roads elsewhere as a logging-industry subsidy.

    3. Tillamook is the new Hood River, according to a group that’s trying to turn the depressed Oregon coast community into the next outdoor-sports hotspot. The group is using grants and business partnerships to transform the strapped community, which has always made its livelihood from farming, logging and fishing.

    4. You can lock them up but then someone has to pay. Washington’s Department of Corrections wants another $175 million to cope with the leglislature’s relentless crackdown on lawbreakers. The money would pay for more workers who could operate a prison for another 2,000 inmates.

    5. One of the backers of the building boom in Vancouver and Whistler is aiming for a wider legacy. The developer started a charity called Builders Without Borders to build housing in Sri Lanka, Turkey and elsewhere.

  • Time for Seattle to act on regional bridge

    The Seattle area has studied ideas to replace the SR-520 floating bridge for years and finally settled on a transit-friendly plan that would shape the community’s growth for decades to come. Now it’s time to act.

    six-lane 520 by WSDOTThe plan would build a six-lane bridge (including HOV lanes and a bike path) and a new interchange linking with arterials at the University of Washington — adjacent to Husky Stadium and a future light rail station. It would allow easy transfers from Seattle’s rail line to buses that would connect to the Eastside much faster than cars. It would help tie the Seattle area together in the way that transit projects already have in Portland and Vancouver.

    Unfortunately Seattle mayor Greg Nickels proposed more study of the projects environmental impacts on the UW’s arboretum. Now neighboring community groups want to block the project. No one who actually uses 520 regularly or who truly favors transit-oriented development in the region would allow this.

    There are ways to trim the new bridge’s impact on the Arboretum and Portage Bay, and there are ways to connect a wider bridge to I-5 without harming the neighborhood around that interchange. Why not make the I-5 express lanes permanently two-way transit lanes and link directly to the new 520 transit lanes? For the sake of the region’s future, it’s time to act.