Share this article! Wave energy race is on A new wave-energy buoy is under construction at Oregon Iron Works, with plans to deploy it later this year. The launch of the buoy — with possibly more to follow — is part of the effort to push Oregon forward as a leader in wave energy. “Oregon … Read more
Wave energy race is on
A new wave-energy buoy is under construction at Oregon Iron Works, with plans to deploy it later this year.
The launch of the buoy — with possibly more to follow — is part of the effort to push Oregon forward as a leader in wave energy.
“Oregon has a lot to be proud of and a lot of people have shown a lot of leadership,” Onno Husing, executive director of Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association. “We are literally helping to figure this out for the nation.”
If that happens — if Oregon wins the wave energy race and does it well — proponents say it could someday mean $1 billion plus annually to this state.
Read the full story at OregonLive.com.
Economy inches forward
Hiring activity is still relatively weak, but Oregon’s economic forecast is slowly improving according to the University of Oregon’s Index of Economic Indicators.
In addition to a slight rise in the index from January to February, initial unemployment claims were down 35% in February compared to the year before.
“We’ve been pulling out of this recession since late summer, early fall,” [index author Tim Duy] said. “Even though the growth we’ve seen is increasingly sustainable, it’s not enough to drive job growth higher, which is what most people care about.”
The index rose to 88.7 in February, up from 88.4 in January. The index uses 1997 as its base year of 100. The higher the monthly number compared with the base of 100, the better the economic forecast in coming months. The lower the number, the worse the outlook.
Read the full story at The Register-Guard.
Sunwest brokers to pay up
A court-appointed receiver has ordered brokers to pay back $11 million in Sunwest Management commissions.
The receiver says the 24 brokers — 11 of whom are from Oregon — “unjustly enriched” themselves after convincing investors to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the company.
Before it crashed in the summer of 2008, Sunwest was one of the fastest-growing companies in its industry, expanding from 20 senior housing facilities to 280 in seven years. A network of in-house and independent brokers convinced individual investors to put $430 million into the operation.
Over time, [received Michael Grassmueck] alleges, Sunwest became dependent on that investor money to stay alive.
Read the full story at OregonLive.com.
Transpo groups want tax money
A group of associations that includes paving suppliers and trade unions have signed onto a letter urging U.S. senators not to divert money from the Highway Trust Fund.
The groups are opposing a federal climate bill that could take money from the federal gas tax, which currently goes into the Highway Trust Fund to pay for transportation projects.
The federal gas tax puts 18.4 cents per gallon of gas sold into the federal Highway Trust Fund. That fund already fails to keep up with the need for transportation projects, requiring emergency transfers to stay solvent.
According to federal Department of Transportation estimates, it would take more than $30 billion more per year to just maintain the country’s existing transportation system, said Tony Dorsey, spokesman for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “To divert money from the Highway Trust Fund, used to pay for projects that are critically important right now, there is no wiggle room here to be moving money anywhere,” he said.
Read the full story at the Daily Journal of Commerce.
Kruse Way loses its luster
Kruse Way was once among the most attractive commercial real-estate spots, with an ideal location and 2.3 million square feet of Class A office space.
But now many hard-hit businesses are leaving Kruse Way for locations with more affordable spaces, including downtown Portland.
According to Patricia Raicht, vice president at Grubb & Ellis, Kruse Way’s vacancy rate for the fourth quarter of 2009 was 21.1%, one of the highest in the Portland-metro area. And when numbers for the first quarter of 2010 are released later this month, she doesn’t expect them to be much different.
“Kruse Way had been our bulletproof submarket for many years,” Raicht said. “But the financial services, mortgage and other firms that clustered there were hit hard by this slowdown, and they closed, consolidated or reduced their space.”
Read the full story at the Daily Journal of Commerce.
