Archives for January 2009

Lots of government people in suits showed up after the Bank of Clark County closed for business this evening. It’s not good.

The Bank of Clark County became the first locally based bank to fail in recent memory, following a ruling by state regulators on Friday that the Vancouver financial institution did not have adequate cash to stay in business. Its two branches will open Tuesday under the control of Umpqua Bank, which has assumed all of its roughly $209 million in insured deposits.

Sounds pretty serious. According to the Columbian, the state closed the bank and FDIC took receivership. The newspaper reports that there is over $39 million in uninsured deposits.

Several top Bank of Clark County executives, including President Mike Worthy, were relieved of their positions on Friday.

The rest of the bank’s 91 employees, based at two branches, will continue to work for Umpqua Bank, which still plans to open a branch next to Esther Short Park this summer.

“Employees heard the news that their bank has inadequate capital and their bank was declared closed, and we walked in the room five minutes later to tell them were taking over,” said Sullivan.

He entered with a phalanx of bankers and regulators in suits and ties that converged on 1400 Washington St. just after the 6 p.m. close of business on Friday.

Bank of Clark County was basically a local bidness guys and gals bank, started by some local movers and shakers in the late 1990’s.

The bank grew quickly as it aggressively courted business borrowers and developers during Clark County’s building boom. But when the housing market soured, so did its finances, as did the finances of most other banks in the region.

Until recently, it was clear that the Bank of Clark County had lost money on construction and development loans, but not how bad things had become.

“The last number of months they saw tremendous decreases in some of the values in their loan portfolio,” said Brad Williamson, director of the state Department of Financial Institutions banking division. “That requires a bank to make tremendous loan loss provisions. If the bank does not have enough in earnings, it comes out of its capital.”

This is quite the blow to certain aspects of the Clark County economy. The credit crunch and housing bubble deflation were already putting a severe strain on developers, and now their main local bank had to be seized by regulators.

It’ll be interesting to see what details emerge.

If you care about transit oriented development, you may have resigned yourself to the idea that state policymakers in Olympia will never be a major player on the issue. The state doesn’t invest in light rail, and doesn’t do much to assist localities in providing transit service. Sometimes they can be downright hostile. Which makes this proposed legislation such a welcome change:

Transportation Choices and Futurewise are running a bill that seeks to capitalize on the ST2 investment. The bill which will be sponsored by Rep. Sharon Nelson (D-Vashon Island) and Senator Chris Marr (D-Spokane) will encourage transit oriented development around transit stations across the state. The bill is entitled “Creating Transit Communities” and will create land use guidelines and incentives to ensure that dense, walkable, and accessible development takes shape around light rail and BRT stations.

The state does some heavy lifting on land-use issues. Things like passing, then defending, growth management. Encouraging transit oriented development is something usually left to counties and municipalities. Some of the goals of this legislation:

Encourage walkable compact communities with an average density of 50 units per acre within a half mile radius around high capacity transit stations.

Provide local jurisdictions the resources and a framework to grow in a sustainable way.

Offer incentives for development in transit oriented communities.

Allow for transit oriented development in our urban centers that encourages a reduction in vehicle miles traveled and helps Washington achieve its emissions reductions goals.

Strengthen existing provisions to ensure that low-income housing is available within the transit accessible communities.

Things are getting interesting as once local housing activist (who also is a die-hard light rail opponent) is spreading disinformation about the bill.

Read more about this here and here.

Turns out firing all your experienced sales people doesn’t work out so well in the end as a business model. At least it didn’t for Circuit City.

Americans put up with a remarkable amount of shitty service, but even we have limits. The free market works well when it comes to discretionary items in sectors with numerous competitors. You don’t like a store, you don’t go back.

Not as simple, of course, when it comes to things like Enron. Hard to shop around for electricity during brownouts caused by criminals. This key difference is often overlooked by conservatives touting free market solutions to every last damn thing. Consumer choice in cheap and mid-priced electronics? Great! Handing Social Security funds over to Wall Street? Not great.

We all know that Hearst intends to shut down the Seattle P-I within 60 days, but it looks like their coverage of the legislative session has already ended :

Chris McGann, our outstanding state government reporter, resigned this morning to go to work as Communications Director for State Treasurer James McIntire.

As I quipped at the time of David Postman’s departure from the Seattle Times, if many more reporters quit the business to go into media relations, pretty soon there won’t be any media left with whom to relate.

Of course there are political reporters available, and I could hire them for relatively little money.  So if you believe that independent political reporting is absolutely essential to our democracy, and you’ve got some money to help support it, drop me an email.

UPDATE:

Apparently these three open houses were mentioned by the Seattle Times over the weekend, neighborhood blogs, KIRO TV amd radio, KING TV and KOMO TV. Not to leave out Don Ward of Seattle Weekly, who also talked them up:

Fifty staff members from City Hall, Police and Fire Departments, Metro and Seattle City Light stood idly around for 90 minutes, confering in small groups and glancing at watches while individual residents meekly made their circuit around the community center gym. The scene was somewhat reminiscent of a career fair at high school.

and:

Mayor Nickels – assuming the politician-listening-to-constituents-stance – chatted amicably with all the citizens (as well as a trio of kids going to swimming practice at nearby Green Lake Pool) and solemnly ruminated afterwards about understanding their concerns regarding garbage service and clearing roadways.

ORIGINAL POST:

Angry columnists and talk radio hosts blew their tops at Mayor Greg Nickels and the city’s response to Snowpacolypse 2008. In response to their response, the mayor and others attended meeting throughout the city to take your feedback.

SEATTLE – Mayor Greg Nickels invites Seattle residents to talk with him, department heads and city staff about their winter-storm experiences. The input is being gathered as part of a citywide performance review of emergency snow operations.

Three meetings are planned and residents are invited to attend any or all:

Tuesday, Jan. 13, 6:30 to 8 p.m., at the Green Lake Community Center,
7201 E. Green Lake Dr. N.

Wednesday, Jan. 14, 6:30 to 8 p.m., at the Garfield Community Center,
2323 E. Cherry St.

Thursday, Jan. 15, 6:30 to 8 p.m., at the Southwest Community Center,
2801 S.W. Thistle St.

The sessions will offer residents an informal opportunity to talk one-on-one with the mayor and meet with staff from transportation, utilities and other departments.

From what I’ve been told, a grand total of fifteen people showed up to the first event at the Green Lake Community Center. Maybe Seattle folks are just passive-aggressive, and are taking it out on our mayor by ignoring him. Or maybe Seattle folks aren’t really all that pissed off.

Classes will stop region wide and throughout the nation Tuesday morning, as school officials give students a chance to watch the historic swearing in of Barack Obama, our first African American president.  Except down in Federal Way, where kids will have to find something else to do unless they bring in a signed permission form from their parents.

Hell… I’m all for parental control and participation, but I can’t really imagine a good reason for a parent to deny permission for their child to watch history in action, and I can’t imagine a good reason for a school district to give parents that option.  But then, this is Federal Way, the same school district that imposed a moratorium on the showing of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth .

Forget Obama… it’s time to inaugurate a new Federal Way school board.

With Obama pledging a massive infrastructure investment, I think we can all identify the main car related stimulus projects. I would still hope that some other things are in the discussion. While most of the examples below could apply to the rest of the state and much of the country, this a few suggestions for Seattle and suburbs. Of course, people with more knowledge of Spokane and the Tri-Cities can chime in if they want.

– Sidewalks: As people who’ve been reading me here and elsewhere for a while know, this is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine. Specifically, Seattle North of 85th needs sidewalks, and many downtown sidewalks are in need of repair.

– Bus Pay Stations: I’d like to be able to pay for the bus before it gets there, and then either have a token or a card or whatever and just use that instead of trying to put that bill in the feeder and fish out the right change from my wallet while people are lining up behind me. This would speed up bus service and make the bus easier for casual users.

– Other Bus Improvements: Metro buses already have GPS systems installed, and it’s neat to be able to see where the buses are. And if your phone is more advanced than mine, it’s even better. Still, it would be nice to put the technology to more use: We could have more bus stops tell you when the next buses are coming. It would also be good for passengers (again casual ones especially) to be able to have an on-bus display of where they are and what the next stop is. These are probably too expensive for Metro right now, but I don’t see why couldn’t be included in a stimulus package.

– Ferries. We need to replace our fleet, and frankly I don’t see how we get the money to do that in a post I-695 world. This could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get some new boats in the water.

The League of Education Voters has released it’s annual Citizen’s Report Card , and Washington’s education system is far from making the honor roll:

And that’s an improvement from the previous two report cards.

But, you know, if that’s good enough for Washington’s children, it’s better to just cut education funding rather than even starting a conversation about raising additional revenues.

I’ve been neck deep in tech stuff recently, preparing for some cool new stuff in the HA universe, so I haven’t been writing much recently.  But I will again.  And soon.

So please be patient.

So if “everything is on the table” at all levels because everything is completely SNAFU, budget-wise, are we still going to stupidly spend tons of money arresting and locking up pot smokers?

In related, Atrios points out ending prohibition is the current number two issue at change.gov.

UPDATE [Lee]: Jon, the answer is no for the state legislators who introduced this bill today.

Okay, not to rain on the tunnel parade but Seattle isn’t the only metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest with a pressing mega-project in waiting.

Combine river, wind, eco-friendliness and smooth sailing across the Columbia River and what do you have? A new Interstate 5 bridge with wind turbines generating electricity.

You read that right: The latest bridge design features vertically spinning turbines that would generate an unknown amount of juice while proclaiming loudly that the Portland-Vancouver area is the sustainability center of the world.

Personally, since I don’t live in Seattle, I’ve refrained from commenting much on the whole tunnel versus surface thing. You folks who live there should get the major say.

But since you can’t put wind turbines in your tunnel, you lose the coolness war. Sorry.

Now fork over some more money for down here too. Whaaaa? Money is tight to non-existent?

Oh. Could we have a rowboat or something?

This is bad any way you slice it:

Retail sales plunged far more than expected in December, a record sixth straight monthly decline as consumers were battered by a recession, a severe credit crisis and soaring job losses, none of which are likely to ease anytime soon.

The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that retail sales dropped 2.7 percent last month, more than double the 1.2 percent decline that Wall Street expected.

And it’s especially bad for a border county.

Retail sales in Clark County experienced a sharp decline in last year’s third quarter as the effect of the housing slowdown continued to seep into the local economy.

According to a report Tuesday from the Washington Department of Revenue, the county’s store-only sales totalled $499.9 million in the three months ending in September. That was down 7.9 percent from $542.6 million spent at retail stores in the third quarter in 2007, and weaker than statewide trend.

Store-only taxable retail sales throughout Washington declined by 6.2 percent to $12.4 billion.

State lawmakers and local governments are chasing a constantly moving revenue target, and the target is going down, down, down.

That’s what happens when your system of taxation relies far too heavily on a regressive sales tax. By the time new revenue estimates are available, they’re most likely already outdated.

People are understandably worried about their own personal pocketbooks. I’m not so sure the wider public truly understands the huge impact on things we all take for granted, like schools, roads, police, parks and other basic services.

Our system of taxation never made much sense, and now it is just going to make things worse. And down here where a short drive over the river takes one to sales tax free Oregon, the trend is likely to accelerate.

Deep thought: usually recessions are relatively short and the state’s coffers are replenished. Is anyone talking much about what will happen in an extended downturn of say, two to four years?

Crying in your beer over the impending demise of the Seattle P-I?  Well join the sobfest tonight at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, which meets every Tuesday night from 8PM onwards at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. As always, some folks will show up earlier for dinner.

If you’re not in the Seattle area, no worries. check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter within snowshoeing distance from you.

How things change…

1/17/2007:

Last month, Gregoire issued her findings on the viaduct options, saying the state could afford the $2.8 billion elevated highway but said the finance plan for the $4.6 billion, six-lane tunnel didn’t pencil out.

1/13/2009:

The overall project is estimated at $4.25 billion, with $2.8 billion coming from state gas taxes and federal bridge funds. That is supposed to cover the tunnel construction, as well as most of an interchange and elevated segment in Sodo.

How can “not having the money” be grounds to spike a tunnel in 2007, but not in 2009? What has changed, other than time?

In any case, back in 2007, State Sen. Ed Murray (D-43) seems to have nailed it:

Murray said he doesn’t believe the idea of eventually building a tunnel is dead yet.

“We’re not done,” he said.