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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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The weakening housing market coupled with tighter financing standards took their toll Wednesday on two major projects on Tacoma's Thea Foss Waterway.
The oft-postponed Foss hotel project won yet another delay from the Foss Waterway Development Authority Wednesday evening.
And a lawyer for Tacoma developer Prium Companies told the authority board Prium needs a year's postponement for the execution of sale of property planned for a mixed use office and residential project near the South 21st Street Bridge.
Seattle hotel developer Bob Thurston had told the Foss board that his planned boutique hotel project between Thea's Landing and the Esplanade on Dock Street that his bank now wants him to sell half of the condominiums in the hotel-condo project before it releases construction funding for the building.
The structure as it is now designed has 100 hotel rooms and 22 condos as well as garage and restaurant space.
Foss Hotel
Ironically, Thurston has told the authority, the condos he added to the design two years ago to enhance its bankability are now a detriment to the project. Thurston incorporated those condos to the project when the condo market in Tacoma and the nation was hot and the hotel market was lukewarm. With home sales now weakening, he told the board last month, it would be easier to finance a building that had no condo component.
Thurston and his partners bought the site from the authority in November and had faced a deadline of this month to start construction. The authority board extended that deadline until April 28.
The hotel project, first hatched four years ago, has been delayed numerous times because of issues regarding its financing and design. The board picked a California developer to build out the hotel site and the site of condo building to the north over a rival because that developer promised to build a hotel. The original proposed hotel owner dropped out early on and Thurston, owner of Seattle's Inn at the market, stepped in.
Regarding the proposed office-residential building near the bridge, Prium general counsel Matt Sweeney said the
"tremendous uncertainty" in the market is slowing Prium's plan to construct a new Foss building.
Prium also lacks the shoreline permits needed to start construction. The developer hasn't been pressuring the state to expedite those permits because the market is weak, Sweeney said.
"I didn't see any advantage in saying, 'Run, run run,' when things were getting 'bad, bad,bad," said Sweeney.
The board is expected to consider Prium's request for a year's delay in the purchase date for the site at its February meeting. Prium has already spent some $3 million on the site preparing it for construction, planning the building and seeking permits, according to Prium's chief operating officer.
