A clock is being unveiled in Vancouver today to mark the countdown to the 2010 Olympics in exactly three years.
The Vancouver Sun has an update on the events venues as part of its ongoing, upbeat coverage. The occasion seems mostly ignored by Washington and Oregon media — even a Bellingham Herald story today on an Olympian athlete missed the connection. It seems that the rest of Cascadia is a slow to capitalize on the games and the publicity around them.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing health care, economic and environmental policies independently of the federal government — precisely because the state is big enough to go it alone. Should Cascadia band together to do similar?
A New York Times piece argues the U.S. is too big and needs to be decentralized:
Scale also determines who has privileged access to the country’s news media and who can shape its political discourse. In very large nations, television and other forms of political communication are extremely costly. President Bush alone spent $345 million in his 2004 election campaign. This gives added leverage to elites, who have better corporate connections and greater resources than non-elites. The priorities of those elites often differ from state and regional priorities.
When the U.S. was founded, the most populous colony was several times larger than the smallest. Now California has something like 70 times the population of Wyoming, yet the smaller state has influence far beyond its size. Gov. Chris Gregoire already is fond of referring to Washington as “like a small nation” when discussing trade issues, and has made steps to coordinate policy more closely with British Columbia and Oregon. It’s time to extend this effort to all policies that transcend the political boundaries of Cascadia.
The Gates Foundation broke ground on its massive new headquarters north of downtown Seattle last week. The predictable reaction: Oh no, traffic is going to get worse.
The foundation is kicking in some money for transportation fixes, but that’s ultimately the city’s job. To prevent gridlock, the city needs a formal plan — with time milestones — so development can grow around the future infrastructure. Mayor Greg Nickels wants to reconnect city streets across Aurora Avenue (when? with what funding?) and to extend the short city streetcar line currently under construction (when? it doesn’t appear to be in the public plan).
Oregon’s Measure 37, the law allowing free-for-all development of property, faces major opposition. But it’s too soon to gloat over the demise of the law or a resurgence of something similar elsewhere in the region.
A court ruled that the voter-approved measure doesn’t apply to the scenic Columbia Gorge because that area is protected by federal law. Gov. Ted Kulongoski has proposed changes to the law, and a new survey says most Oregonians wouldn’t vote for the measure if they had the choice today. Sightline Institute published a report on the law’s impact.
Similar measures to roll-back land-use planning were defeated at the polls around the region last November. But there’s evidence that people still aren’t satisfied with property rules, which seem arbitrary to many yet still can’t focus growth and coordinate services. The debate is far from over.
Who’s idea was it to redesign U.S. quarters so they’re easily confused with Canadian ones? Now that the value of the currencies is approaching parity, this is getting tricky.
Anyone who travels between countries and then tries to use a vending machine or operate a coin laundry is in for a surprise. Newer U.S. quarters have an individual state’s design on the tail side. While Canadian quarters are slightly thinner, who can tell between a coin with a Canadian caribou and one with, say, Kansas bison?
With the greenback tanking, the dollars are closer in value than at any time since the early 1980s. Considering Canada’s economic fundamentals and the Bush Administration’s apparent desire to devalue the U.S. currency, it’s possible that the dollars could match again, a change that would affect everything from trade to Whistler bar tips. Maybe Cascadia should take the lead by rejiggering its coin machines now.
One measure of the frustration with Seattle’s political process: put together a party with the explicit purpose of speeding things up and plenty of people will come. The trick, of course, is focusing the energy after the party ends.
It was no different Tuesday night at the launch party for Friends of Seattle, a year-old group that promotes development policies in the city. True, there was plenty of energy from a crowd of maybe 300 business and political types, but I left wondering if the group can keep the momentum.
The highlight was a speech by Councilman Peter Steinbrueck, focusing on adding transit and removing the waterfront viaduct freeway to help cut pollution. He started asking how many people walked or took the bus to the party. Many hands went up. How many lived nearby? Almost none. He noted the obvious: “Seattle is the most car-dependant city on the West Coast.” But beyond removing the viaduct freeway, there were few concrete policy proposals.
Yet others were less convinced, which was surprising at a party for a group that has made preventing a viaduct rebuild its first issue. Several people said they came to the party because they received an evite but weren’t sure about what Friends of Seattle stands for. One woman said she couldn’t see how Seattle could possibly survive without the viaduct.
Movements can start with platitudes, only to fizzle when it comes to finding a way to pay for big ideas or convince people to change their way of life. The party showed that frustration with the city’s status quo; the group that can focus that energy has its work cut out for it.
A tax increase to pay for passenger ferries across Puget Sound was defeated by voters — again — in Kitsap County on Tuesday.
After the second such defeat in four years, most reports say the idea of passenger ferries is dead. But another group says it’s just the idea of county-wide taxes for ferries that should be dropped: “The problem is not the voters. The problem is not the idea of foot ferries.” Instead local governments and nonprofits should have the authority to start such operations.
UPDATE:
I somehow missed this op-ed outlining five reasons to vote against the measure that was on the ballot. Two are convincing. Raising sales taxes is the knee-jerk mechanism to fund public needs in this state because of the stunted tax system. So why not goose demand (and generate revenue) by adding modest usage fees on arterials? The other is that Kitsap County shouldn’t bear the entire burden for a transit system that also benefits the Olympic Peninsula.
Any ferry user knows that more capacity is needed. Who is solving the basic problem that keep tripping up passenger service?
Legislation in Montana would tax the income earned in the state by real estate investment trusts like Plum Creek Timber, potentially upending the model that has made such companies successful developers.
The article wraps up a multi-day series in The Missoulian about the changing timber business, especially that of Seattle’s Plum Creek. Articles document how the timber company’s focus has changed over the years from tree harvesting to real estate development. One notes the rising public costs of developing housing subdivisions in rural areas.
The latest issue of Inc. magazine has a fascinating case study of a Vancouver-based company being hindered by Cascadia ports and borders. It shows the hardships of small firms that make up so much of the area’s economy. (No online link yet.)
Snowboard apparel maker Westbeach was a niche player but managed to survive until the 2005 strike by Vancouver dock workers delayed shipments and led customers to cancel orders. After a trip through bankruptcy, the company is under new ownership and focusing on the Canada market, despite being just miles from the U.S.
“On paper, you would think that a Vancouver-based company would look at the U.S. and say that’s a no-brainer because it’s just across the border,” he says. “But it could just as well be a million miles away.”
British Columbia would set aside C$50 million from oil and gas royalties to fund research in alternative energy, under a plan by the opposition party.
The NDP proposal also faults the government’s support of a massive roadway project in the Vancouver area, saying that it downplayed the environmental effects by including Washington’s more-rural Whatcom County in its projections.