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Contributors
Marce Edwards is the business editor. She has been at The News Tribune for seven years and has written about technology and big businesses in the South Sound including Weyerhaeuser and Russell. Before moving to Tacoma, she worked at The Idaho Statesman in Boise. She is a Northwest native who likes to garden and refuses to use an umbrella. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and two kids.
C.R. Roberts is a Tacoma native. Before joining The News Tribune, he worked as a freelance writer and part-time cowhand on a cattle ranch in Northern Idaho. He writes about small business, personal finance and other business issues.
John Gillie writes about the aerospace and airline industries, commercial development and consumer issues. During his 30-year-tenure at The News Tribune he has covered issues as diverse as the Native American fishing rights disputes, crime and the courts, the wood products industry and energy. He lived in Tacoma with his family for 25 years, but now lives in Kent because his wife heads a five-state non-profit foundation headquartered in Ballard, and it only seemed a sensible compromise to make considering their workplaces are 40 miles apart.
Kelly Kearsley has been a business reporter at The News Tribune since 2005. She covers the Port of Tacoma and international trade. Being born and raised in Spokane she’s used to living in cities with inferiority complexes and, in fact, prefers it. Prior to working at The News Tribune, she spent three years as a reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon and another year working stints for The Associated Press and Seattle Times. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and miniature schnauzer.
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Forget the bad name that passports have received thanks to new requirements at the Canadian border. This is different - and it could spell discounts and prizes along with a healthy downtown business climate.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber's “Downtown Tacoma 2007” project group – which includes the Chamber, the Business Improvement Area, Pierce Transit, Downtown Merchants Group and Tacoma Farmers Market – today inaugurated its “Go Local” passport program, designed to draw shoppers to the greater downtown Tacoma area.
It works like this: You get a passport at the Chamber or at any one of the participating businesses downtown. (The businesses include, for example, Watermark Gifts, University Bookstore, Buzzard CDs, Vin Grotto, Greenspace Tropical Plants along with dozens more.) The passport is actually a map encircled by coupons good for discounts and freebies.
When you visit a merchant, you get your “Go Local” passport stamped. On Thursdays, a downtown “prize patrol” will be on the lookout for shoppers wearing an emblem available on the passport. Again: more prizes.
And there will be a grand prize awarded in October.
Alaska Airlines was among a handful of U.S. airlines that saw it's workforce grow in the last year, a new federal Department of Transportation report says.
The SeaTac-based airline's workforce increased by 3.7 percent between March 2006 and March 2007. The airline employed 9,500 full-time equivalent persons in March.
Other airlines enlarging their workforcss were Continental, America West and JetBlue.
Alaska's employment has yet to reach the peak it hit in 2004. Since then, the airline has outsourced some maintenance and baggage handling jobs and offered voluntary retirement deals to executives and other workers alike.
Southwest Airlines has hired Kent's Naverus to develop a high-technology navigation system that promises to save the airline time, money and fuel and improve safety.
The Required Navigation Program (RNP) uses satellite global positioning systems coupled to the aircraft's controls to follow flight paths that more precisely dodge obstacles, avoid noise-sensitive areas and save fuel by allowing aircraft to follow a sloping descent path instead of one with multiple steps.
Southwest, working with Naverus, will develop specificslly defined RNP approaches to all the 63 airports it serves as well as RNP ascent paths for those same airports. The airline will implement those RNP programs throughout its fleet.
Naverus was founded four years ago by pilots and executives who had helped Alaska Airlines develop the nation's first RNP procedures for the terrain and weather-restricted airports it serves in Southeast Alaska.
