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Olympia – In front of a crowd of more than 30 legislators, supporters and families of same sex couples Wednesday afternoon, state Sen. Ed Murray (D-Seattle) announced the introduction of Senate and House bills that would expand full state marriage rights to domestic partners, but would stop short of calling the relationships marriages in the eyes of the state.

The House bill has 57 sponsors out of 98 total Representatives, including two Republicans, Maureen Walsh (R-College Place) and Norm Johnson (R-Yakima), and the Senate offering has 20 sponsors from the body’s 49 members.

No Republican Senators, however, found the cause worthy of sponsorship.

The pair of bills would add over 300 rights and obligations for domestic partnerships ranging from survivor and pension benefits to business license transfers, which Rep. Jamie Pederson (D-Seattle), the chief sponsor of the House bill, said would “make sure our families are treated exactly the same.”

Still, even if the state legislation passes, certain same sex couples will lack some Federal benefits until President Obama makes good on his promise to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

Besides the usual measure of equality and long-time-coming, the legislators also took time today to frame the issue in terms of the sour economy.

“Families across this nation feel more and more insecure. If there was at theme for this session,” Murray said, “it would be family economic security.”

Extending crucial benefits to families of same-sex couples, the implication suggests, is even more important now than it was before. He said now is the time that there needs to be a conversation about the concrete ways that families of same sex couples are harmed because they lack the same benefits as heterosexual couples.

To help hammer home the need for domestic partnership benefit rights, four same-sex couples, half of them with young children in tow, spoke about their feelings of going through everyday life not only with the hardships that come from improper benefits, but the stigma that their families, especially their children, have from being excluded.

It was a regular all-American display, with one of the couples’ nine year old daughter doing her best Piper Palin turn, struggling to hold onto her baby sister as she stood beside her mother at the podium.

Another couple, both of whom hold PhDs from the University of Washington, informed the reporters that their elementary school aged daughter was “just coming to terms with the fact that our family doesn’t have the same recognition and rights that her friends’ families do, and it is confusing to her.”

Then there was the Tacoma police officer who grew emotional while reminding those gathered that she faces the same dangers on the streets each day as her straight co-workers, yet she is saddled with the additional stress of knowing that if anything happened to her, only now, with the help of this bill, would her partner receive the full spousal benefits she deserved.

Those blatant displays of humanity aside, Murray commented that one of the aspects most worthy of celebration with the announcement of these bills was the relative lack of fanfare from the other side.

“I would say the most remarkable thing about this bill is that it is unremarkable,” Murray mentioned, explaining that many of the fiercely fought battles that had been fought in the last few decades were inconspicuously absent from today’s atmosphere, even resulting in the aforementioned Republican sponsors of the House bill.

“Instead of culture wars,” Murray said, “we see a legislature that is mostly on board.”

But if the atmosphere is so good, and domestic partnerships are such a no-brainer these days, why not just go all in and join the ranks of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the two states who currently recognize gay marriage?

The lawmakers answered this question in part by passing the buck to a public that they said, outside of the greater Seattle area, was still coming to terms with gay rights.

“We are involved in a conversation with the people of this state,” Murray said. “It is still new to a lot of people in this state.”

Plus, there will be the matter of initiative battles like the recent Proposition 8 that rocked the civil rights world in California this past year.

“On a personal level, it is kind of amazing what the opposition is willing to do,” Murray said, implying that the supporters of gay marriage intend to swing with a knockout blow when they finally push for full equality. “We know that there will be an initiative at some point. We are preparing ourselves for that battle…We plan to win. We don’t plan to win and then lose.”

Despite this ongoing conversation, Rep. Jim Moeller (D-Vancouver) will be introducing a bill in the House this session, H.B. 1745, that would bring full civil marriage rights to same sex couples in common with their fellow heterosexual citizens.

“There is nothing more personal than the decision between two human beings who make the decision to be committed to one another,” Moeller said and compared the issue to private entities that know that “discrimination is no way to run a business. What we know is what we have always known for a long time, that separate is not equal.”

That bill has 40 sponsors already, including Republican Walsh, yet it won’t be considered in committee.

All part of the process, co-sponsor Rep. Marko Liias (D-Mukilteo) assured me later Wednesday afternoon.

“That’s where the conversation is centered right now,” Liias said, echoing Murray’s sentiment from earlier in the day. “Not everyone who needs to be part of the process is ready to go there right now. There isn’t quite the consensus we need.”

Liias also gave some recommendations for gay marriage’s staunch advocates.

“Get out there and start doing the community organization,” he advised, “and get folks to start writing in from all over the state. Those folks need to start speaking to their friends and neighbors.”

Even if the legislature stops short by simply adding domestic partnership benefits, Sen. Murray predicted today that it won’t be long.

“It will take some years,” he said, “but it will not take the 29 years that the civil rights bill took. It is a multi-year effort, but not a multi-decade effort.”

Yesterday Gov. Chris Gregoire was in Clark County to visit with the bidness guys and gals, and the whaaaaambulance was screeching away full throttle. I’m sure someone in the room voted for her. Well, actually, I’m not sure about that, but it’s a theoretical possibility at least.

Like we’ve never heard this one before, but the first thing to do is blame the workers. From The Columbian:

Elie Kassab, president of Prestige Development, said he advertised in The Reflector last year to fill eight entry-level jobs and had 221 young applicants. “The biggest problem we have is the 50-cent minimum wage increase,” he said. The minimum wage, tied to the Consumer Price Index, jumped 48 cents to $8.55, the nation’s highest, on Jan. 1.

Yeah, I’m sure that extra $3.84 per hour to hire eight workers is killing him. You really can’t make this stuff up.

If blaming minimum wage workers isn’t your cup of tea, you could always blame environmental regulations:

Contractor Roy Frederick drew applause when he urged Gregoire to take another look at strict new state stormwater runoff rules that require builders to set aside more land for retention ponds.

“Tell your Department of Ecology to do a cost-benefit analysis on these stormwater regulations,” he said. “It’s a giant train wreck. It has stopped development in Clark County.”

I guess it had nothing to do with the housing bubble, securitization of mortgages or fraud in the house building, financing and selling sector, nor the continued credit crunch caused by zombie banks pocketing taxpayer money instead of lending. Nope, nothing at all.

The whining is not limited to our state, however. The house building industry is peeved over in Oregon as well. From The Oregonian:

Portland-area homebuilders say things are bad enough with the recession. Now they suspect members of the Metro council – elected officials who have much to say about how and where the area grows – are philosophically bent against them.

Tom Skaar, president of the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland, says council members think growth means “sprawl” – so he wrote in a letter to Metro Council President David Bragdon

Well, growth has historically meant sprawl, at least since the construction of the interstate highway system.

To be fair, construction and associated businesses are a valuable and needed part of any economy. There are, of course, good and decent builders, real estate agents, sellers of furniture and such who are being wiped out. This is bad, and it’s every bit as tragic as a factory worker or high-tech worker getting wiped out.

It seems not to have really sunk in among the developers, however, that things are unlikely to return to normal any time soon, and may not ever be quite the same. Clark County functioned for years as a safety valve for Oregon, absorbing huge population gains while providing sub-standard urban services in many respects. Many children attend school in portable classrooms, sidewalks go nowhere, parks go undeveloped and public safety services struggle for money.

The citizenry of Clark County has already paid for the bubble, through taxes and hidden costs such as traffic congestion and environmental challenges. We simply cannot afford to keep growing in the fashion we did the last 15 years or so. There’s no money left, anywhere. It’s vaporized, along with the fish.

So while it is in everyone’s interest to have economic recovery happen, and the construction sector should share in that, it’s going to take enormous sums of public money (and it already is, through the TARP and FDIC.) That means the interests of the community as a whole need to be taken into account, not just the pet peeves of bidness guys grinding the same far right axes they’ve been grinding for the last thirty years.

Times are tough for many people. Everyone deserves a seat at the table, but nobody should own the table.

Elections have consequences, you know.

Click for Part 3

Recently, Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked “This war has gone on for seven years, the Afghans don’t understand anymore, how come a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks?” What sounds like an innocent query by someone truly bewildered by the strength of his political opponents is more of a rhetorical question than anything else. Karzai knows exactly how and why the Taliban are flourishing. He’s hoping that Americans, and the incoming Obama Administration, will finally start to ask themselves this question as well.

The answer lies primarily in the opium fields that yield over 90% of the world’s supply of heroin. Just as Mexican cartels have made themselves untouchable throughout much of their own country on drug profits, the Taliban are funding their massive resurgence through the same means. Unlike the Mexican cartels, however, they have a much more nationalist and anti-Western outlook, making this drug war failure potentially far more disastrous to our national security than anything encountered before it.

[Read more…]

Click for Part 2

If there was one success that South American anti-drug efforts had in the past two decades, it was to dismantle some of the larger drug trafficking networks that were operating there. Since the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993, there have been no comparable figures in Colombian society in terms of wealth, influence, and criminality. But the drug trafficking organizations that supplied American drug users didn’t disappear. They moved to Mexico, demonstrating one fundamental rule about the drug war – as long as demand exists, you can never end the trade, you can only hope to relocate it.

Before the 1980s, Mexican drug gangs were little more than nuisances in Mexican society. They’d profit from smuggling marijuana into the United States, and could sometimes subvert institutions through corruption or violence. But today, Mexican drug gangs control much of northern Mexico and, according to Stratfor, an organization of current and retired intelligence officials, they now pose a significant threat to the federal government in Mexico City.

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Click for Part 1

Cocaine was first discovered in 1860 by Albert Niemann, a German chemist who identified it as the active chemical compound in the coca leaf. Before 1914, when cocaine was still legal in the United States, it was consumed primarily as an ingredient in tonics, ointments, wines, and other products. It was the original “Coca” in Coca-Cola. Vin Mariani, a well-known coca wine, had the face of Pope Leo XIII on its label. Leo and his successor, Pope Pius X, were both fans of the drink. During the temperance movement, however, cocaine was banned along with other drugs in the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Over the next few decades, its use dropped significantly in America as amphetamines started to become more popular.

In the late 1970s, however, the use of cocaine began to rise again. Instead of being an ingredient in various products, though, people were ingesting the drug straight up their noses as a powder, a method that had far more intense effects for the user. Just as alcohol prohibition led to the consumption of alcohol in more dangerous ways, the prohibition of coca eventually led to a trend of ingesting the drug in ways that were baffling to South Americans, where chewing on coca leaves or brewing them in tea has been commonplace for many generations.

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Olympia – Senate Democratic leaders held a press conference today, joined by a few of their House colleagues, to announce their intention, as Josh mentioned earlier, to tighten the belt that holds up our state government’s proverbial pants.

Another way to describe the event would be to pose it as follows:

Q: How many times can a group of lawmakers use some variance of the phrase “belt-tightening” in a thirty minute press conference?

A: Considerably more than you would think.

Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown (D-Spokane), acting somewhat gubernatorial in her initiation of hard budget cuts, kicked off the afternoon presser by announcing the news that, in light of recent gloomy budget news, the state Senate would begin cutting operations in order to save money even before final cuts are made later on in the session.

Those cuts include reducing administrative budgets and freezing salaries, hiring, travel and major spending.

Brown emphasized repeatedly that the actions Democrats were taking had bipartisan support across the board, though Republicans used their position to talk some too-little-too-late smack, with state Sen. Joe Zarelli telling the Tacoma News-Tribune’s Joe Turner that “we moved from a 52-inch waist to a 51-inch waist and we desperately need to get down to a 32-inch waist.”

Zarelli also told Turner that the Senate’s plan to wait until late February or early March would further hurt the state’s ability to maximize budget savings. Brown, however, reiterated during the press conference that cuts for the sake of cuts were unwise, and that her caucus would be “deliberative as well as urgent.”

Sen. Rodney Tom (D-Mercer Island), who himself may seek greener pastures in the future, added that this move was more than just financially important, it was necessary to show the public that their elected officials have a real “sense of urgency” and that through across the board cuts the message they hoped to put across was that “we are all in this together.”

Tom also added, on multiple occasions, that the Senate plan goes above and beyond the governor’s call, citing a $78 million figure from the governor’s office compared with the $105 million that the state Senate aimed to cut.

House Democrats are also hoping to instigate some budget cuts, though they are taking the more traditional approach of calling for an early action budget bill.

“We appreciate what the Senate did in dropping an early action bill,” said House Ways & Means chair Rep. Kelli Linville (D-Bellingham), and added that the House was taking the more traditional route of creating a fast-tracked budget bill, evoking President Obama’s call for a line-by-line budget review.

“Everybody is going to share the pain,” she added.

Linville appeared tempted, but ultimately refused to give any examples of specific budget cuts prior to caucus meetings, which were set to take place after the conference. She did, however, say that they were hoping to save about $300 million from this budget, which would carry forward into $600 million during the next biennium.

Still, in spite of all the gloomy news for those on the wrong end of the budget machete, the day was not totally without cheer.

When the press conference opened up to questions from the gathered hacks, the politicians responded with the kind of comedy gold that tends to be glaringly absent from the political trail that we have been following for the last year and a half.

A couple of examples:

Asked who would be the watchdog for the coming budget cuts, Brown jokingly responded that it would have to be the seven or eight gathered journos, before immediately amending her answer to say that it would instead be the doomed P-I, which was greeted with equal amount of groans and chuckles.

Sen. Jim Hargrove (D-Hoquiam), meanwhile, did his best Dark Helmet impression when he stated that the Senate Dems would be working at, I kid you not, “ludicrous speed” in order to get the budget cuts rolling.

I suggest they go on a comedy tour with proceeds going toward paying down the budget deficit. Watch out, Paul Blart, Washington State Senate Democrats are gunning for you.

Some really outstanding reporting by Columbian reporter Courtney Sherwood about the failure of Bank of Clark County, the first Washington bank seized by the state since 1993. Well worth a full read if you are trying to understand how a smaller bank got into such serious trouble. For starters, the bank began making riskier loans starting in 2005, according to The Columbian.

Another factor that seems to be worth focusing on is the issue of brokered deposits, which are (of all things) deposits made by brokers on behalf of clients, usually those seeking a higher rate of return. As Sherwood notes in her article, the FDIC has rules about this sort of thing.

With its core deposits falling, the Bank of Clark County appears to have sought out even more of the risky brokered deposits it had come to depend on. Over three months, it brought in $28.7 million this way, and brokered deposits climbed to 35.7 percent of all deposits.

Mounting loan troubles may have triggered an FDIC rule that forbids banks with lower capital ratios from taking on any more brokered deposits, though there’s not yet enough public data about the bank’s finances to be certain.

If I understand correctly, one reason brokered deposits can be risky is that large dollar amounts can quickly be pulled out of a bank when, for example, brokered CD’s expire and investors chase higher returns elsewhere. In other words, the use of brokered deposits is part of the mix, but too heavy a reliance can be dangerous.

The underlying cause of the failure, of course, was a collapse in real estate values. While it wasn’t a Southern California scale bubble, it was still a speculative bubble fueled by lax lending standards in the house buying, selling and financing industry. As we move forward, state and federal regulators (not to mention lawmakers) are going to have to come to grips with what worked and what didn’t work in terms of oversight.

More details are emerging about the failure of Bank of Clark County. In an interesting development, it appears that the total dollar amount of uninsured accounts will be substantially less than the approximately $39 million that was widely report initially. Reported figures are now more in the $10 million range.

Most press accounts describe Bank of Clark County as a “community bank,” which is accurate enough, but it’s important to understand that this bank was essentially set up by and for real estate developers and builders. The bank’s web site disappeared Friday night, but thanks to the Google cache you can peruse the backgrounds of its board of directors.

News accounts tonight suggest the bank was heavily exposed to a collapsing construction and real estate sector, while at the same time it was reluctant to deal with problem properties. A substantial amount of money was withdrawn in the last four days of operation, according to published accounts.

[Read more…]

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.

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.

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?

The Seattle Times editorial board has published a correction today regarding a school scheduled for closure:  “It is the Old Hay building, not John Hay Elementary.”

That’s okay.  Mistakes happen, and it’s always good form to correct them. No biggie.

But as long as the Times’ editorialists are admitting their factual errors, it sure would be refreshing to see them admit their editorial errors as well.  You know… those times when their opinions were just plain wrong.

For example, take this bit of oh-so-conventional wisdom from a February 13, 2008 editorial:

The transit-only folks delude themselves if they believe voters killed last fall’s “Roads and Transit” ballot measure because they didn’t want the roads. They do want the roads. And the idea of combining transit and roads was right. Both are needed. The ballot measure failed because the light-rail part was too expensive and created a tax that was too high.

Uh-huh.

In hindsight, with the subsequent passage of the transit portion of the measure, and by a comfortable margin, the opinion leaders at the Times look pretty damn out of touch.  But it didn’t take much hindsight to pick apart the Times’ analysis, for as I wrote at the time:

Um… when the Times says voters “do want roads,” and the “measure failed because the light-rail part was too expensive and created a tax that was too high,” they’re basing those assertions on what? Polls? Intuition? Gentle assurances from John Stanton over foie gras and Chateau Lynch-Bages at the Rainier Club? A public opinion fairy they plucked out of their ass?

Yeah, that’s right, Prop 1 failed solely because of the rail portion of the package. All those polls that showed RTID dragging the measure down, and all that opposition from anti-roads advocates like the Sierra Club — that had absolutely nothing to do with Prop 1’s failure. Jesus… talk about deluded.

Of course, nobody’s perfect, and even I got it wrong on this issue, insisting during the months leading up to the 2007 measure that the powers that be would never allow a transit only measure on the ballot in 2008.  My bad.  But at least I admitted it.