The Olympian is reporting this today. News Tribune reporter C.R. Roberts will meet with Venture officials Thursday morning for more details.

Venture Financial Group Inc., parent company to Venture Bank, reported its worst quarterly loss in company history Wednesday, losing $27.7 million in the third quarter of the year compared with a profit of $3.2 million in the third quarter of 2007.

Officials with the nearly 30-year-old company said the bulk of the loss could be attributed to an investment in preferred shares of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two companies that were taken over by the federal government this year that caused those shares to fall in value.

After taxes, the company’s investment loss in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae amounted to $26.1 million. Third-quarter earnings also were affected by boosting its loan-loss provision by $10 million, or $6.5 million after taxes, the company said.

As a result of the quarterly loss, the company has taken steps to cut costs, including the suspension of quarterly cash dividend payments to shareholders, saving Venture Financial about $650,000 a quarter, said Jim Arneson, president and chief executive of Venture Bank.

“We’re still open for business,” Arneson said Wednesday at the company’s headquarters in DuPont. “It (the quarterly loss) doesn’t change who we are or what we do. We’re the same bank we’ve always been and we will return to profitability.”

SeaTac-based Horizon Air says it is in talks with Canadian planemaker Bambardier to slow the delivery of new Bombardier Q400 aircraft.

Horizon is converting to an all-Q400 fleet, but it must sell its CRJ700 jets before it can bring those new planes into its inventory.

The market for those regional jets is slow.

The 76-seat Q400 turboprop offers better fuel economy than the jets it will replace while offering new-jet speeds on medium-haul routes.

Horizon ordered $393 million worth of Q400s in April 2007, the airline said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

A new survey by the Urban Land Institute gives Seattle the nod as the top U.S. city to invest in commercial real estate because of its diverse economy and its lack of overbuilding.

The Institute surveyed 700 real estate professionals and developers to create the ranking.

The survey, said Forbes magazine, can be extrapolated to include residential real estate because of the close links between the two.

Here's what Forbes said about Seattle and the survey:

The best cities in which to invest are those that are considered gateways to international investment, have vital downtowns where people can forgo cars and don't have a glut of condos or office space.

These traits landed Seattle the No. 1 spot on the list. No city scored above a 6.15 on a scale of one to nine (one being an abysmal place to invest and nine being excellent).

Seattle is "a diversified market, has a good base of business and is becoming a 24-hour city," says Stephen Blank, senior resident fellow, finance, at the Urban Land Institute. "It's going to be in a good position to come back."

The city is suffering from the loss of Washington Mutual and the downsizing of Starbucks, but Boeing and Microsoft are still strong. Apartment vacancies are low and there aren't too many new buildings going up, meaning the market won't be oversupplied. The same is true of retail space.

Following Seattle on the list were San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles.

President George Bush, expanding an East Coast program that worked well during last year's holiday season, is opening up West Coast military air space normally closed to commercial traffic during the holidays.

Much of that air space, normally reserved for military training and test flights, is near Los Angeles and Phoenix.

The president last year opened military air space along the East Coast during Thanksgiving and Christmas to give air traffic controllers more space to maneuver flights particularly during bad weather. That additional air space reportedly cut delays.

"We innovated last year to ease the travel, and now we're expanding that innovation this year," said Bush.

The Boeing Co. has no plans to speed up its airliner production in its Puget Sound factories to catch up after a 58-day strike delay.

That's the word from the company as it returns to business as usual after the strike by the International Association of Machinists.

The no-speed-up policy is the same one the company adopted in 2005 after a strike then.

After previous strikes Boeing had increased production to bring its delivery schedule back to its original alignment, but those speed-ups often proved to be expensive and difficult to carry out.

Suppliers didn't have the ability to increase production without advance notice, and overtime work was expensive for the company.

The 10-week delivery delay is good news for some customers who are struggling with their own cash and credit crises and who welcome the extra time.

For a few others, who'd made arrangements to retire fuel-hungry aircraft that were to be replaced by new Boeing planes, the delivery delay may cause problems.