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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 Seattle developers of a planned Foss Waterway Hotel are once again back to the drawing boards with their plan for the boutique hotel on the near-downtown waterway.
This time they're eliminating all but a handful of condominiums from the building and adding 60 more rooms to the previous 100 they had planned, according to Don Meyer, executive director of the Thea Foss Waterway Development Authority.
You'll recall that four years ago another developer started planning an all-hotel building for the site on the west side of the Foss at South 15th Street.
That developer dropped out and the Seattle owner of the Inn at the Market stepped in.
During the height of the condo boom, he redesigned the structure to include several floors of condo units over the hotel, shrinking the size of the hotel in the process. Condos then were more financiable than hotels.
By the time he had secured financing for the mixed-use building, however, the condo market had flattened, and his bank required a pre-sale of half the building's units before it would release funds for construction.
Now that the market's gone soft on condos, he's going back to a concept closer to the original design for the building hoping that the building will pencil out better financially.
The owner faces an end-of-April deadline from the Foss Waterway Authority, which had sold him the property south of the nearly complete Esplanade condos, to begin the project.
The Foss's Meyer said the City of Tacoma just this week delivered good news. It won't require that the developer seek a new shoreline permit to construct the building because its mix of uses has changed.
"That's a big, big decision," said Meyer. Requiring a new shoreline permit could have meant months more planning and waiting.
The authority meets April 25. There's no request yet from the developer for a further extension, but such a request wouldn't be a surprise considering the frantic repositioning that's been going on.
