With all the talk of Downtown Tacoma corporate headquarters sniffing at greener pastures, there’s good news from KeyBank. Good news, and somewhat quiet.

I was at their building (the old Peoples Store at South 11th Street & Pacific Avenue) for an interview with Michael Taylor, who was recruited away from Washington Mutual and now serves as regional sales manager heading a new effort to expand the bank’s home-mortgage business. The interview should run in a week or so.

Before meeting with Taylor, I took a building tour led by Tom Spilman, president of Key’s Puget Sound district.

Beginning last August, the bank remodeled all four floors - adding offices, putting down new carpet, curating and framing several decades’ worth of art, refurbishing the HVAC and refurnishing the meeting rooms with flat-screens and new leather. The exterior has also seen improvements.

Spilman said Key didn’t make a big deal of the changes – and he didn’t mention asking for city, state or federal help. A reception for clients and the public is in the works.

Here’s a challenge for an artist, a design class, perhaps, or people who are simply interested in money.

The Washington, D.C. Court of Appeals this week upheld a lower court ruling in a suit brought by the the American Council for the Blind.

Essentially, the court said the U.S. needs to design money wherein the denominations of bills are easy to determine for people with sight limitations. Today,
for the sight-impaired, knowing the difference is typically matter of asking someone if that’s a $5 bill or a $50.

"I don't think we should have to rely on people to tell us what our money is," said Mitch Pomerantz, the council's president, according to Yahoo! News.

The government can appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court – which could take another few years before it takes a few more years to design money that serves everybody.

So what’s the answer here? Make the bills in different sizes? Differentiate textures? Shapes?

Get out your Etch-a-Sketch, your Photoshop or whatever other tools you might use.

Come up with a good idea of how to differentiate bills. Send the idea back to us in whatever form works for you, and we'll make sure the U.S. Treasury hears what you've got to say.

Diane Percival is the new chief financial officer at Woodstone Credit Union. She will oversee all financial management and planning responsibilities for the institution.

Percival joined Woodstone as controller in 1992, and earned her education at Central Washington University.

Woodstone Credit Union is based in Federal Way, where it operates two full-service branches. It was founded in 1941 and originally served Weyerhaeuser employees. Today, with some 12,000 members, Woodstone reports assets of about $85 million, and membership is open to anyone living or working in Washington.

Airline travel just got more expensive on the nation's largest airline, American.

The Fort Worth-based carrier announced today it will begin charging a $15 fee for the first checked bag except for elite frequent fliers, first class passengers and those paying full coach fare. The change will take effect in mid-June.

That fee comes on top of the $25 fee American and most other carriers already charge for the second checked bag.

The new fee, if it is copied across the industry, may prove to be the kind of backdoor fare increase the industry needs to cope with fuel prices topping $130 a barrel.

Airlines have raised fares 11 times this year on most routes and imposed a plethora of fees and fee increases from overweight luggage fees to pet fees to try to raise their income to meet fuel costs.

They've not been able to raise fares across the board enough to cope, so they've resorted to fee increases that are largely invisible to ticket buyers.

In addition to the checked bag increases, the airline announced it will cut back flying by its oldest, least fuel efficient planes and retire 75 of those aircraft.

Unclear is what the consequences of the bag fee will have on airports. Will check-in lines clog because of the extra time to collect bag fees? Will security lines lengthen because more passengers will bring carry-ons? And will loading and unloading aircraft become more chaotic because passengers are trying to carry more aboard?

At the Northwest Intermodal Conference Tuesday, Peter Keller said that NYK Line will have shore power – or "cold ironing" - at its new Tacoma terminal.

That terminal is scheduled to open in 2012.

That means that container ships visiting the terminal will be able to plug into electricity there and turn off their engines, thus reducing diesel emissions.

It's not available at any other terminal in Tacoma. The Port of Seattle provides shore power at its cruise terminals.

Keller was one of the conference's keynote speakers and touched on the need for the maritime industry to find real environmental solutions that are supported by science and practical.

That was after he noted the prevalence of green claims – without a lot real action - by companies in all sorts of business.

It costs NYK Line about $750,000 to outfit each container ship with the ability to connect to shore power, Keller said.

He also said that the NYK Line is exploring solar power and other energy sources and will LEED-certify its buildings.

A small, possibly true factoid: According to Wikipedia (though article doesn't cite any sources) the term "cold ironing" first came into use when all ships had coal fired iron clad engines.

When a ship would tie up at port there was no need to continue to feed the fire and the iron engines would literally cool down eventually going completely cold, hence the term "cold ironing".