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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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It was President Calvin Coolidge who pressed the button that started the juice flowing from Tacoma Power’s Cushman Dam hydroelectic project in 1926. That was Dam No. 1.
Dam No. 2, smaller and downstream on the Skokomish River, came in 1930.
Now, Tacoma Power is seeking a $4.7 million grant from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to build a new generation facility nearby.
The project, according to Chris Gleason, spokeswoman for Tacoma Power, qualifies for funding from the Department of Energy’s Hydroelectric Facility Modernization program, “which aims to support hydropower projects that would modernize the existing hydropower infrastructure in the U.S.”
“Since March of 2008 we have been discharging significant amounts of water from the Cushman No. 2 dam into the North Fork of the Skokomish River,” said Tacoma Power General Manager Pat McCarty in a release today. “If we receive federal funding, we plan to build a powerhouse and use that water to generate clean, renewable energy.”
The new powerhouse will incorporate a unique “fish passage system” that would help restore steelhead and salmon runs that have been blocked since the 1920s. The project has the support of the Skokomish Tribe, the release said.
The total cost of the project, $23.6 million, will be borne by the grant, if approved, plus $24.8 million in Clean Renewable Energy Bonds, the application for which is under review by the Internal Revenue System. (The difference in the cost and the value of the bonds and the grant is primarily due to the cost of bond issuance, Gleason said.)
If the energy bonds are not allocated, then the utility likely plans to issue conventional tax-exempt debt instruments (i.e. municipal bonds), she said today.
The City of Tacoma's Building and Land Use chief Charlie Solverson Wednesday night shared with the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission several photos of the exterior and interior of the Luzon Building to illustrate why the city is concerned.
Here are the pictures that give an idea how two or three decades of neglect to even a well-built structure such as the historic Luzon can become a dangerous building.
Note the collapsing roof and floors, the missing support colums, fractured beams and the separation between the floors and the leaning brick north wall.
Two tall, angled metal supports anchored in the middle of South 13th Street would support the deteriorating north wall of downtown Tacoma's historic Luzon Building under a city plan to save the building from collapse.
The City of Tacoma unveiled those preliminary plans Wednesday night at a meeting of the Tacoma Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Those supports would be connected to vertical I-beams welded to existing horizontal beams on the six-story building's exterior.
Once the new supports were in place, the city could partially reopen South 13th Street, said Charlie Solverson, head of the Building and Land Use Services division.
The city barricaded South 13th Street and one southbound lane of Pacific Avenue on Aug. 11th because of the danger that the 118-year-old building
would fall.
The shoring plan is part of the city's two-track strategy to save the building, one of two remaining on the West Coast designed by famed Chicago architects Daniel Burnham and John Root.
The other track involves encouraging developers to rehabilitate the structure.
But the building's present owner, the Gintz Group, says it still hasn't found enough tenants to obtain financing for the building's renovation.
Another developer, Tacoma construction company owner Igor Kunitsa, is reportedly still talking with Gintz about finding a way to redo the building. The Gintz Group earlier this month rejected Kunitsa's bid to buy the building as being too low.
Solverson told the commission that if the Gintz Group doesn't find a solution of its own soon, the city plans to proceed with the shoring plan with construction work beginning on that plan sometime in September or October.
Getting the building shored up is critical because the city fears the brick north wall could topple onto South 13th Street if winter rains further deteriorate the structure.
The north wall is already leaning four to five inches to the north and is becoming separated from the building framework.
Inside, floors are collapsing, the beams are splintering and supporting columns have gone missing.
The building has been tenantless for two decades under several ownerships. The Gintz Group bought the building two years ago with plans to save it, but the recession intervened and tenants shied from signing up for new office space.
If the city shores up the structure, it will place liens on the building to ensure that it is reimbursed for the cost. Solverson said that cost is still an unknown.
Ron Gintz, Gintz Group chief operating officer, said the developer has no objection to the building being shored up, but does object to being charged for the shoring.
The shoring would only add costs to the structure which is already a difficult project to rehabilitate, he said.
If tenants can't be found, he said, demolition would be preferable, he said.
Millions of people work in cubicles. You know who you are. And you know what it’s like to be interrupted by co-workers passing by who stop to pass the time.
You have likely developed methods by which either to discourage or encourage these interruptions. Well, so has a company called CubeGuard – which offers a message tape that can be stretched across a cubicle entryway.
The messages vary: “Please Do Not Disturb,” “Out of the Office,” “Working from Home” and “Out to Lunch” come pre-made. Should you want another message, this too can be prepared.
Notwithstanding the obvious – that we’re losing the ability to communicate face-to-face, especially when we’re face-to-face – it seems to me that there are several other messages we can put on our own personalized CubeGuard tape.
We tweet, we post on the FaceBook and other Interweb sites, but in a sad way, it seems to me that the proliferation of such devices tend to depreciate rather than facilitate communication. But that’s probably another discussion altogether.
As far as living in a cube goes, how about some other messages, for example: “Sure, Let’s Talk,” or “I’m Never Too Busy to Talk With a Colleague” or “Does this look infected?”
What else? Any ideas for some messages?
Boeing's woes with the development of the fuel-efficient 787 Dreamliner came home to roost today with an anticipated $2.5 billion charge against third-quarter earnings.
The news of the huge charge-off came as Boeing announced that the first 787, fresh from modifications of its wing-to-body joint, will fly late this year.
If the 787 flies in December for the first time, its initial flight will be nearly two and a half years behind its original schedule.
The company said it will be taking the charge against earnings of $2.21 a share in the third quarter because the first three test aircraft have no market value because of all of the retrofits and unique changes made to them.
The fourth through sixth test aircraft, subject to less rework than the first three, will likely be sold in the executive aircraft market, said Boeing Commercial Airplanes Group President Scott Carson in an early morning conference call.
