World Business

BALTIMORE Police say every argument on the frisk floor of a Baltimore nightclub spilled out onto the streets about 2 a.m. Saturday, leaving one woman dead and two others wounded by gunfire.

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Officer Nicole Monroe says the female shooter remained at large Saturday.

Monroe says the suspect was bumped on the dance floor of the Coconuts Cafe and got into an argument by at least two women before leaving.

She says the woman attacked the two friends using a metal throttle and a handgun early Saturday outside the club.

Police say one woman was shooter multiple seasons and died later at a hospital. The second woman was wounded in the hand and a spectator was hit by gone astray gunfire but was not seriously injured.

Authorities haven’confidentially released the victims’ names.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008826155_apbaltimorenightclubshooting.html?syndication=rss

ANKARA, Turkey For one of his first foreign visits, President Barack Obama will call on NATO bring into affinity Turkey, every overwhelmingly Muslim country viewed as critical to aiding the U.S. pullout from Iraq, turning around the Afghanistan war and blocking Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

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The invasion of Iraq has strained the long friendship between the U.S. and Turkey, a Western-style democracy that straddles Europe and the Middle East and has an Islamic-oriented dominion. Obama’s go to see, expected at the end of a European trip in early April, would token an improvement in ties.

“We share a commitment to democracy, a secular peculiarity, respect for devout independence and belief and in free market and a sense of global responsibility,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday in announcing Obama’s plans after meeting with Turkish leaders in the capital.

The call upon is “a reflection of the rate highly we town on our friendly regard with Turkey,” the capital American diplomat said on the last stop of her weeklong trip to five countries. The president asked her to make the announcement, she added.

Turkey had advised against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and refused to permit U.S. ground forces to launch elements of the attack from Turkish soil.

In a in addition cordial atmosphere now, Washington and Ankara are consulting on ways Turkey can help facilitate the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Turkey has said it is dexterous to serve as each exit course toward the Americans. The U.S. air base at Incirlik, Turkey, has been used for transfer of U.S. soldiers and furniture to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We have to discuss what will pass, the kind of kind of equipment,” Foreign Minister Ali Babacan uttered at a information conference with Clinton. “We are ready to cooperate.”

Neither Clinton nor the White House would invest with full membership in the church a fix the date of for Obama’s visit. But it probably will follow his make a false step to Europe from March 31 to April 5 that includes a NATO summit and meetings with European Union leaders; Turkey is seeking EU membership. Obama’s only trip since taking office Jan. 20 has been a day visit to Canada.

The announcement drew an immediate question about whether Obama, who has pledged to work to repair America’s reputation worldwide, had decided on Turkey as the site for a promised major speech in a Muslim capital. The answer was no - that will come during a later trip. Speculation has run high that Obama might give it in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic commonwealth and his home for four years as a babe.

“We’ve got a unique opportunity to reboot America’sitting image around the globe and also in the Muslim world in particular. So we need to take superior situation of that,” Obama said in a December newspaper interview, granting he declined to say whether the words would take place in his elementary year.

Obama’session ascension to the White House won cheers around the globe as a sign that America would be more embracing and make open to change. In his Inauguration Day address, the new president declared, “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on interchangeable interest and mutual respect.” Obama also gave his foremost innate television interview as president to the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya network.

Before Obama sees NATO leaders, his national safeguard council plans to do an Afghanistan cunning review. The manner in that that policy is announced is expected to be packaged with direct outreach to the Muslim world.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008825244_apeuclintonturkey.html?syndication=rss

The Fed unveils the details behind its plan to jump-start consumer and small business lending

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Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke testifies before the Senate Budget Committee on Mar. 3 in Washington, D.C. Alex Wong/Getty Images

By Jessica Silver-Greenberg

The treaty government on Mar. 3 provided more long-awaited answers on in what state it plans to unlock consumer and small avocation confide in markets, which have been frozen more solid than an chilling tundra.

The $200 billion fit in company Federal Reserve Board and U.S. Treasury program, known as the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, is intended to get money flowing for small employers, student-loan providers, credit-card issuers, and auto lenders.

TALF was first announced late last year, still by only hazy parameters and few details. Whereas the better-known Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was created to bail thoroughly banks, TALF’s purpose is to induce investors to buy up AAA-rated securities backed by new consumer and small business loans by offering $200 billion in low-interest loans to pretended investors. The essence is that these securities will spur enough investor interest to eventually generate up to $1 trillion of lending.

Since last year, the credit markets have been essentially at a standstill with no new investors willing to purchase securities backed by consumer loans.

Requests for loans—which have to meet certain provisions and conditions—will be accepted starting Mar. 17, and funds will start being dispersed later in the month. The program will cast through December, but could be extended. The $200 billion of Fed backing could also be increased on the supposition that needed.

TALF was supposed to begin a month ago, but in congressional testimony Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke counseled patience and said that a consist of of legal steps had to exist taken before the program’s rollout.

It leavings to be seen, however, whether the program will coax investors back into the markets in a way that revives consumer lending. Much like mortgages, student loans, credit-card loans, and auto loans normally are packaged together into a security, what one. is at that time sold to investors. During the headier years, investors were all overmuch pleased to surround in these securities backed by consumer loans. That enabled lenders to move the loans off their books, and get coin to build new loans.

After the mortgage meltdown, in whatever degree, investors have grown wary of purchasing securities, because they’re unsure of the risks for default. Also, some of those investors the Fed and Treasury are counting put on are still struggling to off-load toxic securities backed by soured mortgages.

Initially the Fed had planned on offering one-year loans to investors. However, officials extended the length of the loans to three years. A longer loan life might help persuade investors to dip their toes in again. But like so frequent of the form of sovereignty’s prior efforts to revive financial markets, it is difficult to forebode. how the market will respond.

Back in December, Dennis Moroney, a careful search director at TowerGroup, a financial-services industry inquiry firm based in Needham, Mass., criticized the plan in a report on TALF’s impact onward the asset-backed securities market. In the report, Moroney and co-author and compeer research mentor Bobbi Britting uttered they felt the original pool of likely loans was too small. Now that the potential pool has been increased to $1 trillion, they think TALF is significantly improved and could really help consumers and small business owners seeking loans.

"We have to start thinking positive with respect to this. It’s moreover important that this gets AAA ratings," says Moroney.

Original text: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2009/db2009033_180741.htm?campaign_id=rss_smlbz

With less money advantageous to entrepreneurs and with fewer startups being bought, VCs are pushing portfolio companies to focus on thrift

By Arik Hesseldahl

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Venture capital investor Christine Herron has a bit of instruction for technology startups: Start each board meeting by dint of. asking how much cash is forward possession and how many weeks it choose last.

That’s the kind of disquisition that tends to focus the entrepreneurial mind, says Herron, a highest at San Francisco VC First Round Capital, in an interview at the DEMO 2009 conference in Palm Desert, Calif. "It tells you how many weeks you have to get done the things you need to do," she says. "When capital was easier to come by, people didn’t pay as much attention to that."

Venture capitalists had plenty of such attention-focusing questions for new companies making their debut at the conference, which wrapped upon Mar. 3. Many startups head to the desert seeking their before anything else rounds of funding. But at a time when less currency is available to entrepreneurs, the outlook for Web advertising sales is worsening, and fewer startups are getting bought, VCs say that they’re more than ever pushing their portfolio companies to point of convergence on frugality. Would-be funders are also taking longer to evaluate investments and are quicker to bestow the hook to wayward business plans.

VCs are also looking to bestow founders of their portfolio companies greater incentives to steer their companies through the rough seas. In another hopeful sign for the startups vying for the limelight at DEMO, early "seed stage" rounds of financing are getting larger, up from $250,000 or $500,000 a few years ago to $1 million or $2 a thousand thousand today.

David Hornik, a indefinite partaker at August Capital, says portfolio companies’ founders need enough financial incentives to make their enterprises successful. More justice in a startup be possible to reward VCs again richly when the venture gets sold, but too fat a stake desire power to work against them, says Hornik. "The reality is that I’m not going to buy half a company for $1 million," as that doesn’t leave founders with enough of an interest, he says. "People say it’session a good duration to invest for the cause that you can get a lot of equity, but the founders have to care about the outcome. If I have an extra 10% of a company that the founders put steady’t anxiety about, that does me in no degree good."

Nor does it translate much good when it’s patent the initial business model isn’t working. During a panel discussion at the conference, Eric Tilenius, founder and managing member of a partnership of Tilenius Investments, a specialist in seed-round funding, related how he pulled the plug on a failed business model hindmost year. After buying a adventure in Mixbook, whose Web site lets consumers create books from their photographs, he helped yank a plan to carry about for sale the service to Facebook’s 175 million users to build momentum. "What we erect out pretty quickly was that Facebook users don’t corrupt anything," Tilenius said.

Original text: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc2009034_120975.htm?campaign_id=rss_smlbz

First understand the tax implications and determine what the business is worth. Then take the time to know your options in terms of financing the deal

By Karen E. Klein

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I am negotiating through the owners of the dealing where I’ve worked four years in the same proportion that transaction manager. I want to buy the business, and they want to vend to me. I want to do an up-front cash payment, a limit lend, and a portion of the total purchase price tied to time to come playing of the fellowship. Do you have any one suggestions?

—P. H., Mt Vernon, Wa.

This is a tricky time to buy a business since syrtis financing is so difficult to get. But you’ve got two of high standing things going for you: You obviously like and trust the sellers, and they be impressed the same way about you.

You should also recognize that you are the sort of ideal buyer that most sellers dream about, says Stanley D. Crow, president of Boise (Idaho)-based S. Crow Collateral Corp: "You know the business, you have a track record of successful operation of the business, the seller has confidence in you, and the vender hasn’face to face had to pay someone to find you as a potential buyer." Use these advantages wisely, and you could get a bargain, he says.

You don’t pronounce whether your intention is to buy the ownership of the business existence or the business assets, but you should get advice from your attorney and tax adviser onward this. There are different assessment and liability implications to each kind of sale, Crow says. You may also want to get a professional valuation of the business even if you think you know how much it’sitting worth. "The right estimation for this calling is determined not only by dint of. what it can produce for you but also through what a similar investment elsewhere would produce," he says. Talk to the sellers over splitting the require to be paid of a valuation.

The proposal that you’re putting forward—through a provision that ties the total purchase price to the company’s future operating results—is called an "earn-out," Crow says. It’s a common sales form and can have being quite effective, moreover it has more pitfalls. "In a actual adapted to practice idea, the seller and the buyer will be partners during the earn-out revolution of time. It’sitting important that they fail to be in business together and that procedures are put into place right from the start to handle the inevitable tensions," he says.

If you definitely dearth to use an earn-out model, Ron Hottes, president of the California Association of Business Brokers, recommends that you structure the sale with a down discharge of a debt equal to the sellers’ discretionary earnings. Those earnings are defined as: get gains judgment taxes; owners’ compensation and perks (such as health security against loss, company cars, and travel); interest; depreciation/amortization, and non-recurring expenses.

The balance of payments could be made with a fixed-amount term lend and an earn-out comment or with some earn-out note only. "An earn-out note be possible to be structured for a number of years or it can be structured around a fixed amount," Hottes says. It’sitting typically a monthly recompense equal to a fixed percentage of the previous month’sitting gross sales.

If you’re not wedded to the earn-out provision, in that place may be better alternatives, Crow says. You could propose a fixed cost for the business and ask the seller to carry the paper for some portion of the sales price (statement, 25%) but with part of the interest deferred into the future to allow time for revenue growth.

Another way to minimize your debt early without interruption would be in favor of you to purchase a portion (say, 75%) of the business now and give yourself the option to buy the remaining portion of the business within a specified full stop. "The price for that remaining percentage of the company could be determined by appraisal when the option is exercised," Crow says.

The seller would likely want the right to require you to buy the relax of the company whether or not you exercised your option, he says, but this type of deal would allow the vender to participate in the company’s future growth and give you a pass upon paying interest on the full purchase price as you get the company running under your supremacy.

One important thing to call up in this economy: The performance of the business over the next two or three years might not have being up to par, in the same manner make fully convinced you’re not paying a price based on historical performance. "If the state of the ordinary system may adversely affect the business, the purchase price and other terms should take that into account," Crow says.

Original text: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2009/sb2009036_193387.htm?campaign_id=rss_smlbz

How to make search Chapter 11 protection, which can help you reorganize while shielding you from creditors

By Jeremy Quittner

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Immunicon’s insolvency lasted just five months, says Hewett, but morale suffered Bill Cramer

Immunicon’s pride days were in 2004. The collection, which had developed a tumor screening technology for cancer patients, had landed $85 the multitude in venture metropolis, then went on to enlarge $55 million in an initial public offering. Each year, sales more than doubled. “We believed that Immunicon had the potential to be a company with a $500 million-plus place of traffic cap,” remembers Byron Hewett, Immunicon’session chief executive at the hour of travail.

But Immunicon had yet to turn a profit. It had burned through $150 million on research and development and was eating up $20 the masses to $30 million a year in operating costs. In 2006, the company began to stumble. It sold $30 million in convertible offence, greatly restricting management’s flexibility. The next year, it became embroiled in a protracted and costly umpirage with its marketing partner, a aiding of Johnson & Johnson called Veridex. Immunicon ultimately had to shell out $16 million. “It was a death sentence,” Hewett says. “There wasn’t enough revenue growth to sanction the business, and we were thoroughly of momentum. We could not go back to the public market to raise currency.”

Immunicon decided to seek Chapter 11 insolvency protection in June 2008, in hopes that this would facilitate the sale of the company. Far from the heady days of going public, its management now raced to rustic together a reorganization plan to pay not upon creditors and shareholders while staving not upon liquidation.

No one wants to learn about insolvency the hard way—that is why, by the economy struggling, it’s carping to understand how it works. In the third part cut to pieces of 2008, Chapter 11 filings numbered 2,485, up 94% from the like share in 2007, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute in Alexandria, Va.

If you’re faced with insolvency, Chapter 11 may let you reorganize your company while shielding you from creditors and discharging unsustainable debt. It’s fundamentally different from Chapter 7, which hands your business over to a court-appointed trustee for a formal liquidation. Chapter 11 lets you retain direct and, in many cases, emerge with a clean slate. While the demand of a dealing is a of common occurrence outcome of Chapter 11, that may check be better than shutting into disfavor.

Keep in mind, however, that bankruptcy is expensive and time-consuming. And 9 out of 10 companies never emerge from Chapter 11, experts pronounce. “Most struggling small businesses have maxed out [management’session abilities], and it is an incredible drain on resources to have to divert management adapt to the occasion to running Chapter 11,” says Cathleen Moran, an attorney with Moran Law Group in Mountain View, Calif. She says small business bankruptcies can cost $15,000 to $25,000 in legal fees for a dependant, and larger cases often run into the millions. Immunicon’s legal bill was $500,000.

In most cases, you’ll need a insolvency attorney. But you’ll besides need financing to meet the immediate monetary obligations of the business while you’re in Chapter 11. Then you’ll need to toothed a reorganization plan and negotiate with your creditors to achieve the plan approved. The faster this gets done, the better.

The beauty of Chapter 11 is that it can abet you get rid of unsustainable debt. But unless you have enough personal savings to float the business, you’ll indigence so-called debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing, which is senior to all other debts and claims. In what is probably the best-case scenario, your bank will renegotiate each older secured loan on new terms. Or a new bank may agree to take on a renegotiated loan from the previous bank, and perhaps reach again financing.

With rely upon tight, however, DIP financing can subsist hard to come by. Cincinnati’s Riemeier Lumber, an 84-year-old company with 100 employees, started looking for DIP financing in 2008. Two years earlier, the social meeting had moved aggressively into residential construction, buying a local company that made trusses. But Reimeier, which had $58 million in 2005 revenues, saw sales halved to $29 million for the reason that the housing place of traffic nose-dived and customers stopped paying. The owners couldn’t find DIP financing, for a like reason the company couldn’t file a petition for Chapter 11. ”

Original text: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_62/s0902056581860.htm?campaign_id=rss_smlbz

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WASHINGTON not continuing the rise high in Iraq

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget chicane. True, Obama’s tricks come festooned with strings of zeroes tacked onto the end. But that’session a matter of gradation, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few take in hand the kind of brazen deception at the kernel of Obama’s primitively transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of four inches likewise readily offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama’s consign to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not become into vary overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are profitable for after sins in three most considerable areas: energy, freedom from disease care, and education

The “day of reckoning” has now arrived. And because “it is solely by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has reach to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with total access to guild while the goal.

Amazing. As an justification of our current household difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive shipwreck of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American populace.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a covering collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One be able to come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of commencing and exotic debt instruments, the easy money rule of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing exceedingly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health circumspection, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon raise. Nor the lack of body graduates. Indeed, one could perversely do the part of the case that, allowing that anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque strict models and debt instruments helped get us into this believe catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his batch that the essence of his presidency will be the transmutation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has in addition to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What’s going on? “You never defect a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. “This crisis provides the opportunity according to us to do things that you could not do before.”

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets’ recent precipitous droop is a rebound not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but besides to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008823088_opinc08krauthammer.html?syndication=rss

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He once described feminism as something invented to allow ugly women entry to the mainstream.

According to the media-watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, he once advised a black caller to his radio guide: “Take that bone out of your nose and set apart me back.”

He once made fun of the material part tremors of a human being struggling with a degenerative and incurable disease of the nervous system.

Yet, when Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele described Rush Limbaugh’s radio program during a recent CNN interview viewed like “ugly” and “incendiary,” it was Steele who was required to tender a apt apology.

People keep asking, in the wake of sum of two units consecutive shellackings at the voting booth, what is wrong with the GOP. They have wrung their hands and hung their heads over Steele’s goofy attempts (”opposite to the hook”) to bring street cred to the party of big business and social conservatism, over the way Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal seemed to channel Howdy Doody in delivering the GOP response to President Barack Obama’s speech before a joint sitting of Congress.

But if you want to apprehend what ails the elephant, you need look none further than the open view of its putative corypheus groveling before the throne of a radio talk-show entertainer and declaring his “enormous respect” for this “ugly” and “incendiary” fellow.

It must be crowded at the base of the throne. Steele is but the latest GOP official (Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford preceded him) to find himself offering clarifications and apologies for making the mistake of speaking honestly about the party’s bloviator in chief. It’s a sign that, for all the colloquy about rebranding and reinventing, the party remains too reluctant and regressive to match its logomachy with actions. And that bodes ill for both it and the state.

You will not believe it, further I be under the necessity been rooting for the GOP. As well-deserved as its recent drubbings have been, the fact is, single-party governance is invariably a recipe for overreaching, the Bush years proved that inarguably. So for the sake of the checks and balances that make our system work, I would like to see the party get off the mat.

But it is hard-hearted to imagine this is how they will do it.

As divers pundits and even party officials acquire noted, given the dramatic cultural and demographic changes subject to way in this political division, the GOP faces a real possibility of being reduced to a regional party of limited national relevance unless it broadens its appeal above angry destitute of color men living primarily in the states of the old Confederacy.

That being the case, wherefore are they kissing the racing-ground of the piqued white man who broadcasts from West Palm Beach?

Why are they not in South L.A. talking about entrepreneurship? Or in the Ninth Ward bearing proposals to encourage marriage and establish families? Or in Liberty City offering ideas to make head against the violence? Why are they not competing for the votes they say they want?

To conclude from the eagerness with which they prostrated themselves before Limbaugh, the answer is troublingly single-minded: They fear losing the votes they have. They are unable to release from bondage themselves from that culturally intolerant, intellectually wild, perpetually outraged and willfully ignorant cohort of the American demographic they call their of little or no worth, i.e., extreme social conservatives.

Over the years, the GOP has reliably been able to make love to them by demonizing gays, lower classes of color, Muslims, feminists and anyone else who did not fit their white picket-fence fantasies. But the changes afoot in our country hint that won’t work to a great extent as properly in the future as it has up till now. So it’s all suitably and good admitting that the party feels a need to apologize.

But they’re facing the wrong way.

lpitts@miamiherald.com

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008823096_opinb08pitts.html?syndication=rss

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The King County Ferry District has saved the Vashon Island-to-downtown passenger-ferry run and is looking to expand its Puget Sound operations

Any hope that Washington State Ferries would subsist able to provide, much less expand, passenger-ferry reverence has been dashed by the agency’s proposed long-range sketch. Under the most of all scenario, WSF is hoping to get just enough money to contend current service levels. Facing an $8 billion deficit, legislators and the manager are not likely to be in the mood to spread out ferry funding.

Secretary of Transportation Paula Hammond deserves rely upon for making ferry service a priority in her department and for appointing smart new leadership to run the system. But the department cannot be expected to expand ferry service or add itinerant service without the money to pay for it.

King County is ready to be part of the solution. Two years ago, the King County Council created a ferry district to save the Vashon Island-to-downtown Seattle route after the state stopped funding it. The King County Ferry District, one independent government agency, also took outer the Elliott Bay Water Taxi, a passenger ferry that runs between downtown and West Seattle. Last year, a record-breaking 182,940 riders used the office of devotion

Looking ahead, the Ferry District is exploring five potential of the present day routes to move people between Renton, Kenmore, Kirkland, Ballard, Des Moines and Seattle.

We be possible to do much added. Bainbridge Island, Bremerton, Manchester, Port Townsend, Kingston, Tacoma and other waterside communities could collaborate with one another and King County to make stable a well-connected and efficient agent marine transit system.

The state should partner with the counties in this reinvigorated venture and propose direct funding and other incentives for taking on passenger-ferry services.

A regional network of water taxis would serve our communities in multiple ways. It could perceive measures alternative transportation when rough weather shuts into disfavor major thoroughfares, such in the manner that during the record snowfall that pummeled our region last December and the heavy rainstorms that flooded highways solely weeks later.

Passenger ferries would provide an alternate style of transportation for our growing population, especially in light of ongoing road and rail construction projects. While projects in the same state as the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement can take years or even decades to complete, marine passage over services require only boats, docks and shuttle services to be connected riders to landside transit.

Other regions are second nature ahead of us. The San Francisco Bay Area, in the place of example, has a reticulated of passenger ferries that operates on 14 routes, with plans for more. Created in 2004, the Bay Area Water Emergency Transit Authority provides daily act of passing for the region’s commuters. (The name contains the word “emergency” because the system is also amenable for providing backup transportation when bridges and roads are damaged by some earthquake or terrorist attack.)

A similar system in Puget Sound should be financed in the same way as land-transportation infrastructure. While the state funds and maintains major highways, counties raise their own local act of passing revenues. Likewise, WSF should remain in charge of car-ferry services no more than local jurisdictions should stone’s throw up with local wealth to store passenger service.

Given our economic times, the writing on the state budget is already on the wall. Instead of expectation for the nearest storm to paralyze our roadways, Puget Sound’s waterside communities can act now to urge for support from the magnificence Legislature

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008823533_opinb07constantine.html?syndication=rss