Cascadia Report

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  • Green’s strange rationale to defeat cantwell

    Green Party candidate Aaron Dixon has a novel justification for his run against Senator Maria Cantwell, who is well-known for having a strong environmental record.

    Dixon claims there’s no difference between Cantwell and Republican challenger Mike McGavick, who benefits from oil industry contributions and whose environmental policy includes support for increased drilling on public lands. Never mind that McGavick’s more pro-Iraq war than Cantwell or that Cantwell led the campaign against oil drilling in the Arctic, allowing tankers in Puget Sound and for more renewable energy.

    Apparently Dixon doesn’t mind if he siphons enough votes for the Republican to win: “Maria has supported the war, and the war has created a tremendous environmental destruction in Iraq,” Dixon said, according to the report.

  • New growth spilling over the Cascades

    The Puget Sound-area economy has long been red-hot thanks to the technology industry. Two reports suggest some of the growth is spilling over the mountains to eastern Washington.

    Suncadia, a 6,300-acre resort project 80 miles east of Seattle, announced multi-year plans to add more condos, golf courses and a major retail community. The project targets urban residents who otherwise would have driven to British Columbia for a resort. The article quotes a Bellevure resident who just bought:

    “We always wanted to get some place that we could get to from Seattle,” she said. “We were looking at Whistler, and it was just too far.”

    Meanwhile another kind of growth is coming from tech firms planning to use cheap power in eastern Washington for data centers. Investments by Microsoft and Google have been well reported. Now a Seattle developer plans a facility for smaller tech companies looking for similar services.

    Though neither promises massive job gains, diversificatin is good for the agriculture-dominated economy. “It is really a shift and a change into a whole labor market that we have never had before,” an official with the Port of Douglas County told the P-I. “We are quite excited about it.”

  • Cascadia ports may get new local competition

    Ports in Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver are Cascadia’s shipping gateways. Now an American man is investing up to $500 million to build a container-port operation in Prince Rupert, a town on the British Columbia coast about 500 miles north of Vancouver.

    A story in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday explains that the new operation through tiny Prince Rupert could shave two days’ transit for goods from China bound to Chicago. Ships would arrive in the town’s naturally deep harbor and travel across Canada on a train line that has excess capacity (instead of on congested routes through the U.S.).

    The project still faces many obstacles. But it underscores how much competition Cascadia’s major ports face.

    A couple of years ago Vancouver benefited while Seattle, Portland and California’s ports suffered through a strike. Each port has since expanded to meet demand from the booming trade with Asia, providing more business for everyone.

    Yet when an inevitable downturn in business comes, the key question will return: who can do the business fastest and at the lowest cost?

  • Now Victoria has to figure out HOW to treat its sewage

    According to recent orders by the provincial government, Victoria has to start treating its sewage. But how?

    The orders, reported here last month, require the British Columbia capital to have a plan for at least some treatment of its outflow by June 2007. But according to this concise report Monday in The Tyee, there is no agreement on what to do by that deadline:

    The politicians are swimming hard to pop up on the right side of the tide now, but they are largely still coming to terms with having to move forward at all.

    Local business and tourism groups want strict standards for secondary treatment, mimicing what’s long been done a few miles south in Washington. Proposals range from simple processing plants to expensive measures that would reclaim usable water and generate power.

    It will be fascinating to see if B.C. chooses the bare minimum or technology that sets a new standard.

  • Plan focuses on Puget Sound’s health

    Sunday’s Olympian has a thorough, easy-to-navigate report on the health of Puget Sound. The occasion is the state’s attempt to kickstart a new group of government and private organizations to do what previous government-only efforts have failed at: save the Sound.

    Details so far are few. The plan was announced in July and reported here.

    But the latest Olympian report offers a trove of data and an excellent multimedia show demonstrating the link between population growth, pollution and the region’s economy. There’s less contamination of soil and heavy metals, and herring populations have grown, for example, but the polluted runoff from roads has increased, more areas are closed for shellfish harvest and some populations of birds are in freefall.

  • Oil spill pollutes near Squamish

    Squamish oil spill by Vancouver SunAn oil spill near Squamish, British Columbia, threatened a sensitive bird habitat and covered several Vancouver sailboarders in slime this weekend.

    About 8,000 gallons of heavy bunker oil leaked Friday and quickly soaked into a nearby marsh. The estimated size of the spill fell during the weekend but locals were questioning the response, especially since a similar spill occured nearby exactly one year ago.

    A similar, larger bunker oil spill along the Washington coast in 1991 killed thousands of birds and spurred debate about oil shipping in the area. This month marked completion of Washington’s response to that accident: a habitat-restoration plan and stationing of an emergency-response tug nearby.

    What will be B.C.’s long-term response to the repeated spills?

  • Trains aren’t just for tourists

    Skytrain BC Transit 2000Vancouver, one of the two big Cascadia cities with functioning mass-transit systems, has a new tourist sight: its trains.

    The city’s SkyTrain is selling automated guided tours for the light rail line. For C$24 riders can rent headsets that provide commentary of the train’s route and walking tours in several neighborhoods along the way — in six languages.

    Apparently 16 percent of the train’s 200,000 daily riders are tourists, so the transit system figured it makes sense to turn them into an additional revenue source.

    Meanwhile in Seattle, where the first beleagered train line is three years away from opening, a local columnist piled on last week by suggesting that urban trains really are just for tourists. Maybe Vancouver’s example will force such critics to come up with more creative rationale to slow progress.

  • If vancouver fails at wooing the Chinese…

    Vancouver isn’t doing enough to woo Chinese business, according to a Vancouver Sun article explaining how the city is trying to catch up.

    “We didn’t even have a protocol person until last year,” said Mayor Sam Sullivan. The city created a position in October just to handle foreign visits. Fourteen official Chinese delegations have visited since January and one or two unofficial ones visit each week, the paper said.

    Contrast that focus on building business ties to Seattle, where Mayor Greg Nickels is mired in debate over $3,400 the city spent on a video about replacing the waterfront viaduct. Meanwhile Governor Chris Gregoire gets criticized for not addressing “the potential downsides of globalization.”

    One result of the attention: Vancouver has 52 nonstop flights a week to China, promoting economic and cultural ties. Seattle has none.

  • Cantwell gets help

    Seattle radio and newspapers are prominently covering Senator Maria Cantwell’s fundraiser Monday night with Bill Clinton at Benaroya Hall. Supporters paid $250 to $2,500 or more for the event.

    But outside the hall, the campaign still hasn’t caught on. While Cantwell’s campaign is still mostly visible from occasional cable TV ads, challenger Mike McGavick is shoring up support outside the Seattle media spotlight. A report about his recent campaign appearance in Moses Lake shows how he needs to artfully criticize national Republican policies even when he’s in agreement with the incumbent. One example: Senate Republicans vetoed funding for popular veterans’ programs that Cantwell supported.

    McGavick is running against D.C., not against Cantwell. If McGavick can continue to do an end run around Cantwell with his broad critique of D.C.—he could win. And Cantwell is letting this happen. She needs to make McGavick run against her—and things like her VA funding vote— if she wants to short-circuit McGavick’s charming attempt to co-opt public anger to his advantage.

    Is the appearance of this analysis in one of Seattle’s liberal weeklies proof that the race is closing?

  • Need a passport to cross the border?

    Would requiring a passport to cross the international border prevent terrorism? It didn’t stop the 9/11 hijackers, who were in the U.S. legally.

    So why does Senator Maria Cantwell support a passport requirement to go between the U.S. and Canada? She said she does because — you guessed it — security is a top priority. Surprisingly for a Republican challenger, Mike McGavick said he doesn’t support the Bush Adminstration’s passport plan.

    Often going against the Homeland Security Department’s wishes, Cantwell and Senator Patty Murray have supported no-nonsense ideas like additional guards on the border and more stringent security at our ports. So why support the passport requirement, which will hurt this region?

    Just last month, Governor Gregoire and Premier Campbell united in opposition to a passport requirement. Such a rule would hamper existing business and make it more difficult to for Cascadia to profit from the 2010 Olympics. All without demonstrably improving our security.