Cascadia Report

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  • Alaska Airlines could be in play

    Alaska Airlines could be a merger partner for a larger airline, according to a report over the weekend.

    Cascadia’s dominant airline has long been considered a takeover candidate because of its route network and relatively low operating costs. There’s no evidence that such a combination is imminent, but the latest report comes amid continued financial strain and poor operating performance by the Seattle-based carrier.

    Last week the federal government said Alaska’s on-time performance deteriorated, with only 68.5 percent of its flights arriving within 15 minutes of schedule during August. Many late flights experience long delays; the Seattle-to-Burbank flight was late 87 percent of the time during the month, with an average delay of 55 minutes.

    Alaska also announced that it would quit providing snack sandwiches on longer flights and instead sell food for $5. Other changes include switching to lighter beverage carts that would save jet fuel. The moves would reportedly save several million dollars a year.

  • 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.

  • TV ads, media sap meaning from race

    Washington may be in for more aggressive TV ads in the U.S. Senate race. The gauzy, personality-driven ads that have blanketed the state so far have turned off voters, including Seattle-resident Michael Kinsley, who wrote this in Friday’s Washington Post:

    If you knew nothing about Mike McGavick except what is in his TV commercials and on his Web site, you would conclude either that he is a moron or that he thinks you are a moron. Democratic incumbent Maria Cantwell’s ads aren’t so wonderful either. They’re mainly about all the federal money and other favors she’s brought to the state. But if any of this is part of the “pork barrel . . . wasteful, out-of-control spending” that upsets McGavick, he doesn’t say so.

    McGavick has avoided talking about issues, because his positions won’t please both the Republican base and the majority of the state’s voters. Cantwell, whose reelection bid seems hardly even in question, just wants to run out the clock.

    Kinsley blames the media for dumbing-down the whole political process by simply explaining how candidates use vague inanities like “change” and “families” in their ads:

    The media do a better and better job each election cycle at pointing out and analyzing these campaign constructs. But by doing so, in a way, they legitimize it all. By raising up the subtext, they diminish the importance of the text. Don’t be naive: You’re not supposed to take this stuff literally. Politicians are trying to push your buttons. They aren’t trying to communicate with you.

    Should we expect more? Shouldn’t specific proposals come from candidates — especially challengers?

  • 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.

  • Editorial shows flaw in ‘property-rights’ initiative

    Here’s an editorial that gets to the crux of what’s wrong with Initiative 933, the ballot measure that would require government to compensate landowners for regulations that limit development options:

    To tell government that it has to pay the individual for not interfering with water, air, fish or wildlife is like telling the policeman that he should pay me for not robbing the bank.

    Governments have a responsibility to regulate individual actions that harm the larger community. Under I-933, governments would be required to pay landowners or, since they likely have funds to do that, waive the land-use rules altogether.

    Campaigns both for and against I-933 have obscured the issue. But the bottom line is that the initiative — which is mostly funded by the same group behind similar cookie-cutter measures nationwide — would gut land-use planning that has been honed through years of democratic process. Here’s a better idea: if citizens don’t like the current laws they are free to vote out their representatives in county and state government.

  • Senate race still turns on personality

    With U.S. Senator Cantwell agreeing to just two debates with Republican challenger Mike McGavick, the campaign remains stuck on generalities.

    Cantwell has an imperfect record on the Iraq war and a vague strategy to end it. McGavick’s views are more conservative than those of most of the state’s voters and he needs to tack even further to the right in order to turn out Republicans.

    That’s why McGavick is still talking about personality, barely a month before the election. In this profile in Washington CEO magazine, McGavick explains that he led the insurance industry’s trade group in Washington, D.C. but wasn’t actually a lobbyist. It’s a sleight of hand similar to his August confessional about a DUI arrest, which turned out to be incomplete. Will voters notice?

  • Watch local beer prices after fire

    Will Cascadia beer prices rise after Tuesday’s major fire in a Yakima hop warehouse? Seattle-area brewers say probably not.

    The Yakima Valley produces most of the hops in the U.S., which in turn produces a quarter of global supply. The fire burned about 4 percent of the U.S. stock.

  • B.C. to privatize housing next

    British Columbia’s government plans to rely on free enterprise rather than public subsidies to house the province’s poor.

    Under a plan to be announced Tuesday, the government would make direct payments for use in any housing. There are reportedly about 14,000 people on the waiting list for subsidized housing in B.C.

    The move has echos of the push in the U.S. for school vouchers and private-sector charities to take over government functions. It sets up another political battle in B.C., where the government has been privatizing services and cutting costs by closing schools and hospitals. Critics say that the government already has undermined the poor by cutting welfare payments so that private-sector housing is unaffordable.

  • Seattle may lose major employer

    One of Seattle’s largest manufacturing employers has run out of room and may leave the city.

    GM Nameplate, which employs 450 in the city, recently sold its building in Interbay. The owners blame the high cost of housing, commuting hassles and the state’s estate tax, which is on the mind of the company’s 70-year-old founder.

    The city wants to the company to stay and plans to help it find another nearby location, the article says. But how much can it — or should it — do to protect a single business?

  • Olympics foes threaten boycott

    Opponents of the 2010 Olympics are threatening an international boycott to force organizers to cut costs and lessen the games’ impact on the environment.

    The group, 2010 Watch, says the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee broke its earlier vows for transparent financing, ensuring that poor residents wouldn’t be displaced and protection of the environment during construction. The group also wants a province-wide referendum, claiming that a 2003 vote wasn’t broad enough and that most residents would now reject the games.

    A B.C. auditor’s report found that taxpayers would be left with a C$1.5 billion bill for the games. Upgrading the Sea to Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler is hurting environmentally sensitive areas, 2010 Watch says, and growth of hotels in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside threatens poor residents there.

    The organizing committee responds that construction plans will be modified as the projects progress but that other complaints eventually will fade away.