issues

The global and national outcry at the firing-squad execution this summer of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah, the last state where that form of capital punishment is possible, could presage a similar uproar directed at Washington State should the nation’s last gallows be prepared for use. Eight men on death row in Walla Walla await that possibility.

But at least some of the anger seemed focused on the fact Utah still has an “Old West” way of executing its condemned criminals, who are able to choose the firing squad over lethal injection.

Since Washington is the last state where a condemned man may choose to die by hanging, it’s pretty clear that the same sort of charge of “barbaric Old West justice” could rain down on the state should the day come for one of those eight men.

Thoughts about Gardner’s execution and an interview with a Seattle area student doing a paper on capital punishment brought back memories of the 1963 hanging of Joseph Chester Self, which I covered for United Press International as a young reporter. Self’s would be the last hanging in Washington State for more than 30 years.

The state doesn’t have a gallows in the Old West style, but rather a large room at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, a “death chamber” awaiting possible use should any condemned man choose to hang rather than receive a lethal injection.

Only men have been executed in Washington and of the 14 who have gone to their deaths since 1949, 13 were Caucasian and one was Hispanic. Two of the last four men to suffer the death penalty chose hanging, the last being Charles Campbell in 1995.

Washington’s governors have routinely passed on the opportunities over the years to interfere with the death penalty being carried out.

Mike Lowry, who was then in his first year as Washington governor, was the last to weigh whether to permit a condemned man to hang, although two men were subsequently executed by lethal injection during Gary Locke’s time as governor.

I asked Lowry to recall that hanging and his thoughts about it. In the process of answering, he disclosed that a personal visit with the condemned man at the state penitentiary had been part of what he referred to as “the considerable time” he spent reviewing Charles Campbell’s case.

“I received delegations from opponents of capital punishment and, of course, from family and friends of the people he murdered,” Lowry recalled. “In the end, I could not justify in my own mind reversing the 13-year legal process that included all the appeals that were made by his defense lawyers exercising his constitutional rights.

“One of the reasons I did not commute Mr. Campbell's sentence to life without possibility of parole is that there was a very legitimate fear that he might try to kill a prison employee or other inmate,” Lowry added.

Lowry conceded it’s possible there will be other executions in Washington State, noting:  “I feel for whoever is governor at that time and I hope he or she will explore every opportunity to find a solid justification to commute the sentence to life without possibility of parole.”

The case of Joe Self was different. When he made the short walk from his death-row holding cell to the door of the chamber, he had long-since converted to Catholicism and he had willed his eyes to an eye bank.

Self was convicted and sentenced to die for shooting a cab driver to death in a $15 robbery, the final criminal chapter in a life of otherwise petty crimes.

Spenser, the young man who contacted me for the interview for his project, told me he and a friend had decided to do a paper on the death penalty and had searched the Internet but found “mostly factual, neutral stuff. It was difficult to find sites that gave us opinions.”

I shared with him the details of the June evening of 1963 when two other young journalists and I were among the group of about 35 people on hand for Self’s hanging, by tradition just past midnight, “the first minute of the new day.”

Self, Warden Bobbie Rhay, a catholic priest who had become Self’s regular death-row visitor, and a couple of guards entered a door to the cement balcony against the back wall of the chamber, with the witnesses looking up from below. They walked to the center of the platform and stopped as Self stood above the steel door through which he would fall to his death when the door was sprung open.

Rhay asked Self if he had any final words and the condemned man replied: “Ask me if I’ve said my prayers, warden.”

With that, a hood was pulled over Self’s head. A straightjacket pinned his arms to his body. Rhay flipped a wall switch, signaling three men in a room below the death chamber that they should each flip the switches in front of them. Only one of the switches activated the trap door, through which Self fell in a moment, his neck snapping before onlookers could even grasp what they had witnessed.

That only three young reporters, all print journalists in their early ‘20s, were on hand (no radio or television news people and no seasoned reporters) to cover the execution was a commentary on the relative importance of a hanging then, though there was certainly media coverage in the weeks prior. After all, hangings occurred on average about once a year. But Self’s would be the last for decades.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Washington’s death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, but voters reinstated it, addressing the court’s concerns, in 1975.

By the time 30 years after Self that another death row inmate was to be hanged, the attention was widespread and went on for weeks, and all three of us who had been at Self’s execution found ourselves being interviewed by various media on “what it was like.”

Coincidentally, a week after Gardner’s execution, I got a card from Spenser that said: “Thank you for the interview. I got an A on my project.”

Cary Bozeman, who was mayor of two Washington State cities and is now CEO of the Port of Bremerton, senses that revenue-starved local governments might be ready to sacrifice sacred silos to ease their financial strain by creating new public-public partnerships.

Bozeman is thinking specifically about an alliance between Washington’s cities and port districts, something he says might benefit taxpayers as well as the public entities that are facing shrinking resources.

So he wants to put together a statewide conference, either late this fall or early next year, that would draw representatives of the state’s 250 cities and 72 port districts to explore how such collaborations might be brought about.

“The old system of providing services isn’t going to work any longer in a financial environment in which public resources will continue to be challenged,” said Bozeman, who was elected mayor of Bellevue three times and of Bremerton twice.

“We’ve entered a time when political silos can’t work,” Bozeman said. “I think a good start to dealing with a new era for local government would be for cities and ports to explore how we can share things like economic development, tourism and recreational programs.”

Former Seattle mayor Greg Nickels and former Spokane mayor John Powers, as well as former Port of Seattle CEO Mic Dinsmore, think Bozeman’s proposal is an idea whose time has come.

 “I concur with his view that there are significant possible benefits to breaking down the political walls to advance the opportunity for a public-public partnership between cities and ports,” said Powers, who also served as CEO of economic-development focused Enterprise Seattle and headed Collier’s International’s Washington State operations.

“The upsides of the idea of cities-ports collaboration are many,” Dinsmore said. “For one thing, projects get built faster and at lower cost to the taxpayers. Joint marketing is more effective as well.”

Nickels, Seattle’s two-term mayor who was defeated last year in a bid for a third term, thinks that port powers relating to economic development should be the key focus of any more formal collaboration “because those are powers that cities don’t have.”

But he also raised what would be a hot political issue in any such silo-busting talks when he suggested “it would also be worth looking at the silos between ports,” noting that the ports of Seattle and Tacoma would together be the second largest port on the West Coast. But instead they’re constantly competing with each other.”

Bozeman was first elected to the Bellevue city council in 1976 at the age of 36 and subsequently was elected three times as mayor of the state’s fourth largest city, simultaneously serving over much of that time as the head of the King County Boys and Girls Club.

He moved to Bremerton in 1996 to run the Olympic College Foundation and six years later ran for mayor of that city, both because he saw the potential to revitalize the decaying downtown area and because of “a love for local government, where you can make things happen.”

Bozeman first proposed the city-ports cooperation idea in a speech in Spokane about a month ago and says the reaction since then has been positive. So now he’s putting together the steering committee he hopes will take the lead on a conference.

 “Port districts in Washington State have some interesting legal powers, which is why so many port districts have been created in Washington State,” he said. That’s why they’ve been formed across the state, even in places far from any body of water larger than a lake.

“Ports can build sports facilities, provide recreational opportunities for people like parks and marinas and collaborate on economic development and job creation.”

Pointing to the budget-driven decision by some cities to close a majority of their parks, Bozeman said “ports could absolutely have an impact on those sorts of spending challenges. Ports have the authority to generate the resources to support park systems as one example of what they could bring to a partnership.”

Bozeman suggested “the future of government providing necessary services and doing economic development is going to be about devising ways to cooperate with other government agencies, non-profits and the private sector. The silos in which we’ve worked all these years simply must be broken down.”

“Over time it’s not just developing public-public relationships that will be important,” offered Powers, the Spokane mayor turned economic development director turned private sector business leader. “It ultimately will be about a triadic relationship that invites and balances participation from private enterprise, public entities and civic organizations to address big regional issues, as some are suggesting for national and global issues.”

Herb Bridge, who fought in two wars and had a part in setting the stage for the first Gulf War before retiring as the nation’s highest-ranking reserve admiral, thinks nine Memorial Days of U.S. at war in Afghanistan is enough.

Bridge, longtime Seattle business leader as CEO then chairman of the Ben Bridge Jeweler, the West Coast chain of jewelry stores, says “we need to get the heck out of countries that don’t want us and have no significance to our survival, or indeed no impact on the world as a whole.”

I asked Bridge for his thoughts as the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan reached the 1,000 milestone last week and we prepare for Memorial Day next Monday to remember, or are at least we’re supposed to remember, those who died in service to the nation, nine Memorial Days on since the U.S. launched war there.

It took seven years to reach 500 deaths in Afghanistan, but the spike in military action there has taken the second 500 in less than two years. That doesn’t count the thousands more who have had their lives shattered by physical or psychological wounds, or both.

The conversation with Bridge was also prompted by a series of exchanges on an e-mail train on which one-time colleagues in the former global wire service United Press International gather to share thoughts. Soldiers’ deaths and Memorial Day occupied e-mails on the train a couple of days ago.

Gary Haynes, a retired photographer who spent much of his career with UPI, offered this: “Both Iraq and Afghanistan have become, for Americans with no kids in the fight, some sort of abstraction.

“We have no draft. There is no ‘war tax’ to remind us of the cost associated with two wars,” he said. “Reinstate the draft, and the war would be wound down quickly. Make sure to include all the draft-age kids of our Senators and Congressmen, and the war would get top level attention.”

When I sent that to Bridge, he e-mailed back: “In my Navy Times, received today, are the pictures labeled the Human Toll, close to 500 of the men and women (491 to be exact) who have lost their lives (in the past two years) of the damned war that seems to have no conclusion in sight.”

“Yes, maybe if (members of Congress) had a personal stake, like their offspring being over there, they might come up with innovative and constructive means of getting the heck out,” he said.

Bridge, a vibrant and active octogenarian, known for his love of motorcycling and outings with the group of CEO cyclists known as Hell’s Rotarians, wears his Democratic party loyalty as visibly as his military honors but is unhesitatingly critical of continued Afghan involvement.

Susan B. DeLong, A retired UPIer now living with her husband in Australia, recalled visiting Normandy and the cemetery of another war.

“My walk through the cemetery was one of the most humbling experiences of my

life.,” she e-mailed. “As I walked past the gravestones, I noticed the ages, row after row of 18-19-20-year-olds. I started to tear-up and noticed I was not alone.”

When I shared that with Bridge, he offered his thought that the death of each young man in earlier wars left grieving families “but generally didn’t leave dependents. Now, with many of those killed being older, they leave not merely the pain of loss but families bereft of their sole support.”

Recalling his own military career, Bridge said he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 at the age of 17, was selected off his ship to go to officer candidate school and returned as an officer before the war ended.

Married and with a baby, he was called up at the outbreak of the Korean War and served as a carrier officer for the duration.

His final command was in 1982 when he was asked as a reserve admiral to take over active command of a fleet of 45 logistics ships for a few months while the eventual commander underwent final preparation back in the states.

It was during that command that he helped set the stage for U.S. response in the first Gulf War by landing 1,000 marines quickly in a maneuver that he said eased Saudi and Arab concerns about the U.S. ability to muster rapid response in any war with Iraq, “which was exactly how it was done when Kuwait was invaded.”

Contrasting his thoughts about continuing the Iraq involvement with his convictions about getting out of Afghanistan, Bridge said “I just feel the Iraqis have a nation. We took it apart when we launched that war and we have an obligation to finish the role of rebuilding it.”

With regard to Afghanistan, Bridge said: “There’s not really a nation there. We need to let them go fight among themselves and leave them alone.”

As Bridge talked about Afghanistan, I was reminded of a quote about the place from another former UPI colleague, one-time Vietnam correspondent Ray Herndon, that I included in another column last fall, a quote that bears inclusion here.

Herndon observed for that column, which was aimed at drawing parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan: “It was the first and only country that Alexander the Great couldn't conquer. And Imperial Britain, which easily gobbled up the combined territory of India and Pakistan next door, somehow couldn't defeat the much smaller Afghanistan. And it wasn't for lack of trying.”

He recalled the then-Soviet Union’s failed 10-year effort to occupy Afghanistan and added: “Why do we think that we can wage a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan using only one-tenth the number of troops we committed to Vietnam? Are we kidding ourselves?”

As both old and new media devise ingenious ways to reach consumers with advertising in disguise, “transparency” is rapidly becoming a discussion focal point. The FTC is trying to legally impose transparency on bloggers and tweeters while the Washington News Council is attracting increasing attention in its quest for voluntary transparency.

At issue is the conviction on the part of government officials, consumer advocates and many in traditional media that consumers need to know when they are being fed information that was selected or crafted by an advertiser.

The blogosphere went berserk after the Federal Trade Commission last fall announced revised Guidelines for use of endorsements or testimonials in advertising. In the new guidelines, the agency sought to focus specifically on bloggers and others being paid to make plugs for products in “non-traditional contexts” such as tweeting.

Meanwhile, Washington News Council president John Hamer has begun to get traction on his concept of what he calls the TAO of Journalism, which is a pledge that conventional media and new-media entities would take, promising Transparency, Accountability and Openness in their communications.

Hamer’s TAO has gotten good reviews from media types around the country, including a piece in the respected Columbia Journalism Review.

And it’s about to get international exposure next week when he will discuss it as a panel member at the annual meeting of the Organization of News Ombudsmen in Oxford, England.

Thus it may turn out Hamer’s proposal for a voluntary TAO seal that each media entity, traditional or new-media, would display and be subject to “policing by crowdsourcing rather than by bringing in licensing sources or the government” could eventually be the preferred vehicle for transparency.

The conviction about the need for transparency is growing as creativity on the part of advertisers and marketers seemingly to avoid transparency expands.

Several examples of that in recent days were pointed up in articles in the New York Times, LA Times and Seattle’s alternative weekly The Stranger. The latter took KING TV to task for taking money in exchange for content on its New Day Northwest daytime talk show.

The Stranger disclosed that KING TV’s New Day Northwest is airing segments that have been paid for but not disclosed as such, specifically focusing on the 5^th Avenue Theater’s paying for a year’s worth of weekly appearances then “renting” some segments to other arts groups.

A New York Times item this week discussed a web-only reality series called “A Conception Story” on TLC.com (which was The Learning Channel before it was acquired by the Discovery Channel) that follows five women trying to conceive.

An interesting story idea, but in this case the idea came not from the producers at the network but from a company that makes pregnancy, ovulation and fertility test kits. Guess what product the women on the series turn to for information on their progress.

The LA Times disclosed Monday that it will begin selling e-commerce links in certain articles and posts, though the newspaper says the links won’t be included in news stories or columns.

In this case, the newspaper deserves credit for making two important transparency steps. First, the links will be in green, with double underline, so they won’t be confused with the standard blue links. Plus the newspaper says the links will carry what it calls “disclaimers” that will disclose that the sites link to a third party. The issue, of course, will be determining how well those two transparency protections hold up.

Two challenges face those campaigning for transparency. One is the sense that many consumers seem not to care whether what they are reading, seeing or hearing is as it seems.

The other is the underlying concern that the Internet is an evolving e-commerce vehicle and that rules shouldn’t be imposed that could stunt its e-commerce growth.

The latter is another reason Hamer’s voluntary-seal approach may deserve broader exposure.

He thinks the TAO concept can be flexible enough to work for all of the varied organizations and individuals that make up the emerging media landscape, with each entity agreeing to post the seal on their sites or their pages indicating they will follow ethical standards.

 “We don’t specify which ethical codes or what standards you’re going to follow—we just want you to be open about them,” Hamer explained. “Just tell us.”

Readers or viewers would then determine the extent to which the entity was following its code of transparency, accountability or openness.

“Reports of violations could then lead to a review/hearing by a peer review group that would look at the reports of violations and determine whether the seal needs to be revoked,” he explained.

That would leave it to entities that might lose the right to use the seal to explain to their audience why they are no longer permitted to display the TAO seal.

Cries of alarm went up from angel-investor groups this week as the awareness spread that a bill with potentially disastrous impact on the ranks of angels, and thus on start-up entrepreneurs, had passed out of a U.S. Senate committee without consideration of even one of 400 proposed amendments.

If the bill isn’t modified when it gets to the full Senate for consideration, the major impact would be felt in Washington, Idaho Oregon, Montana and other western states, as well as smaller communities, where the angel pool isn’t as deep as in major population centers like California. It’s in the smaller-population areas that a gutting of the ranks of angels, the network of informal investors who provide start-up capital, would impede business startups and thus hinder job creation.

Up to this point, concern over the few pages of Section 926 in the 1,300-page financial-reform legislation filed by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., has been mainly fodder for tech bloggers carrying comments of early alarm from some angel-group leaders who perceived the potential damage from the bill.

But now that it was passed out of Dodd’s Senate Banking Committee by a 13-10 party line vote, with no changes even discussed, alarm bells are going off across the angel-investor spectrum. So the effort is now under way for personal visits by angel-group leaders with their state’s senators, as well generating response from key supporters of entrepreneurs and of job-creation initiatives.

I e-mailed angel-group leaders around the Northwest and in California over the weekend in anticipation of the outcry that was likely to crescendo once the Senate committee’s punt on the bill became broadly known. At this point, it should all hit the fan, with not just angel investors but every organization supporting entrepreneurism sending wake-up calls to members of Congress.

Two provisions in the bill are at the heart of angel-group concerns. The first would repeal the federal pre-emption of state regulators for so-called Reg D offerings that allow companies to raise relatively small amounts of capital without federal or state registration. The second would raise the bar for investors to qualify as “accredited,” meaning jacking up the current $1 million net worth or $200,000 annual income requirement to about $2.3 million or $450,000 of annual income.

The provisions are in this bill apparently in response to the concern that part of overhaul of financial institutions should include “consumer protection” for investors who have been scammed by investments they didn’t understand (should we include buying homes they can’t afford in this?).

And a challenge for angels is they’re a breed little understood by elected officials and state policymakers (neither of which likely has personal experience with entrepreneurism). Not helping in the process of understanding is that most angels have mistakenly viewed it a plus that they go about their business quietly with little fanfare about what they do.

One of the early alarms was sounded late last year by Liz Marchi, founder and general manager of the Kalispell-based Frontier Angel Fund, in a letter to Sen. Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Baucus, a Democrat, has been a supporter of the angel investor groups that have collectively energized entrepreneurism, and job creation, in Montana.

“The proposed change to the definition of accredited investor would have the net effect of reducing by 75% an already small pool of potential angels in Montana who are beginning to get real traction with a growing population of young, entrepreneurial innovators,” Marchi, coordinator of Montana angel groups, said in her e-mail to me.

Change in the definition of accredited investor “has dire unintended consequences for the recovery and for America's greatest asset, entrepreneurs,” she said.

Eric Pozo, one of the managers of the Oregon Angel Fund, says the bill in its current form would “most likely shut down our fund,” which would close the most active source of early stage capital in Oregon.

The group raises $25,000 each from up to 60 accredited investors each year, with that State of Oregon matching the funds up to $1.5 million. Pozo says with far fewer potential accredited investors, “we won’t be able to achieve the critical mass required to continue.”

John Pariseau, general manager of Spokane-based WIN Partners, says “the severe restriction in the supply of angel dollars that would be the immediate effect of the bill, if passed, would disproportionately affect secondary and tertiary markets like Spokane, Billings, Fargo. There simply are fewer angels who could climb over the new bar in those areas.”

Villette Nolon, founder and CEO of start-up home-design website HomeSavvi and president of Seattle’s Seraph Capital (first women’s angel group in the country) says the legislation “would be detrimental to the angel community at large, but more so to women angels, whose earning power and wealth is often less than men’s.”

Cathi Hatch, founder and CEO of the Seattle-based for-profit angel group Zino Society, said she’s “concerned that with more regulations and a higher minimum hurdle level that it would have financial implications for our ability to attract sufficient angel capital for entrepreneurs, and could even threaten the continued existence of ZINO Society itself.”

Dan Rosen, CEO and President of Dan Rosen & Associates, an early-stage technology investment and advisory firm, and chair of Seattle’s Alliance of Angels, fears that “Congress will pass an imperfect bill just to act because there is a perceived need to act to prevent another financial meltdown.”

“As a result, it could be no one will act on our narrow issue,” he added. “So the bill will pass and we will have to live with the mess it creates, though I suspect if we can get their attention, they’ll do the right thing. But standing out from the noise will be the issue.”

Both Gary Ritner, who guides Seattle’s oldest angel group, the Puget Sound Venture Club, and Bruce MacCormack, leader of the Bellingham Angel Group, expressed concern about the impact on cross-border fund-raising efforts.

“Some of our presenters end up soliciting in Oregon and California, as well as some other states” Ritner noted, while MacCormack pointed out the co-investment activities with British Columbia in particular that would be adversely impacted.

Richard Sudek, who chairs the five-chapter Tech Coast Angels in Southern California, the nation’s largest angel group, admits even his group “will be hurt” if the provisions become law, but adds “some smaller angel groups could effectively be eliminated.”

Sudek,  a board member of the national Angel Capital Association (ACA), which serves as the trade organization representing various angel groups, says ACA estimates that “nationally we’d lose over half of the angels.”

If one of the histories that could be written about Congress were a tome entitled “Laws of Unintended Consequence,” filled with chapters detailing examples of when lawmakers acted without understanding cause and effect, passage of Dodd’s bill with those two provisions intact would earn a separate chapter.

(Full disclosure: I am part of the WIN Partners group and on Villette Nolon’s HomeSavvi advisory board)

As local governments across Washington State and elsewhere go looking for funds for development projects or small-business assistance in this critical economic environment, many are finding the funding source of last resort isn’t federal stimulus dollars but a non-profit entity called the National Development Council (NDC).

New York-based NDC is a 40 year old organization little known to the general public but a key source of federal funds for state and municipal governments seeking capital. It’s an organization that prides itself on functioning as would private investment bankers, private developers or private lenders.

Except that the pockets of financing that NDC taps are an array of federal assistance sources like SBA guarantees or tax credits that it has either learned how to employ by negotiating through the federal maze of instruments and requirements or, in some cases, it has helped counsel Congress to create.

I only recently became aware of the NDC and found it intriguing because the 501c3’s role is to bring private-sector practices and efficiencies to the use of federal funds of various kinds to state and local projects as well as programs to assist small business.

Readers of this e-mail who are already familiar with the organization need read no further. Those who aren’t might find the way it operates to represent an interesting bridge between the polar-opposite views of government, between those whose view is that only government can resolve key issues and those whose view is that if government is involved, only waste and mismanagement will follow.

NDC, which operates with an annual budget of  $15 million to $16 million, has been instrumental in helping Washington State municipalities find funding for, manage and complete a variety of community and economic development projects. Along the way, has become a major owner of Washington real estate.

NDC’s holdings in Washington State are estimated at $1.36 billion with most of that in the Puget Sound area and $825.9 million in Seattle. Its $850 million worth of LEED-certified buildings gives it perhaps the state’s largest portfolio of such real estate.

 In reality, it only “owns” the real estate on behalf of the communities who will receive the properties without cost once the loans are paid off.

But owning real estate on behalf of eventual municipal owners is a relatively small part of what NDC does, according to John Finke the Seattle-based Senior Director for the Western United States. It also helps funnel SBA-guaranteed funds to certain types of small business, including most recently the Recovery Café, which is a non-profit that provides recovery services in Downtown Seattle.

In fact, Recovery Cafés grand opening of its new facility, secured with $9.75m NDC helped garner for land acquisition and to help renovate a historic building with a special round of New Market Tax Credits, is this week.

“As a nonprofit organization, NDC is able to offer tremendous benefits to municipalities, small businesses and other partners,” said Finke. “Through our diverse range of funding mechanisms, spanning government loans, New Market Tax Credits and bond issuances, we are able to deliver the best expertise, talent and cost to enable public projects to move forward with substantial cost savings.”

In the four decades since its founding in 1969 by one-time Sen. Robert Kennedy aide Sam Beard, who still serves as chair of the organization, NDC hasn’t sought publicity.

But as it becomes increasingly active in the Northwest, guided by Finke as well as Chuck Depew, who oversaw the Recovery Café investment and who provides technical assistance in project finance, housing finance and other assistance to communities throughout the Northwest, explaining what it does may become increasingly important.

For one thing, it’s frequently employing what’s called the 63-20 bonding process that allows a private, not-for-profit entity to issue tax-exempt bonds to develop facilities for use by local governments, which become owners of the buildings at little or no cost when the debts are paid off.

That seems like a win-win, except state entities that traditionally sell bonds for such new facilities may not be happy with what they view as a new competitor.

Some proponents of what the NDC does also express frustration that segments of the public inevitably view things like SBA loan guarantees as grants that are somehow squandering tax dollars rather than being dollars that will eventually be paid back.

One NDC partner that viewed participating with NDC’s Northwest office as “an inviting investment opportunity” is the Seattle Foundation. It put $1 million into an NDC and City of Seattle partnership for what’s called the Grow Seattle Fund that offers financing for growing small businesses, those with annual revenues under $10 million.

In explaining the innovative involvement by the community foundation, Seattle foundation’s Michael brown said it was a reaction to “what we knew to be a challenging environment for small business to access capital and credit and a way to do our part in addressing that community need.”

As President Obama prods the nation’s big Wall Street banks to boost their lending effort, there is an increasing sense that the Administration needs to pay more attention to how it can help community banks on Main Street get back into the lending game.

State officials and members of Congress are beginning to suggest the key to that renewed activity by community banks may be less aggressive regulation and more understanding Fed policy.

Some of the community bankers say they’ve been battered almost as much by the regulators as by the economic spiral that hit after they were lured into seizing lucrative, though risky, lending opportunities by an economy that seemed to promise limitless growth. Those who got hit hardest, as many point out, made their own beds.

Elected officials, including Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, and members of Congress who have stepped forward are now wading into the fray, albeit cautiously, on behalf of the local banks whose executives and customers are important constituents. Many understand that increased lending to businesses is one of the keys to economic recovery.

A letter this week from Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner may be the first inkling of a possible growing pressure on the Administration to begin focus on the needs of the nation’s 7,000 community banks.

Levin, noting that institutions with assets of less than $1 billion accounted for nearly half of all small-business lending in the second quarter compared with 22 percent for the largest banks, told Geitner that smaller banks need “improved access” to any new TARP program.

And Gregoire, in a letter last month to FDIC chair Sheila Bair, suggested that the input she has received from businesses and community bankers suggests “a belief that our regulatory systems are unfairly weighted against ‘Main Street’ and in favor of ‘Wall Street.’

And she said she agreed with earlier comments from Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Financial Institutions Committee, that “a self-fulfilling prophesy of community bank failures, shrinking credit availability and a slower economic recovery can all result from a regulatory over-reaction.”

There are a couple of good reasons why politeness is thus far guiding the comments from the state officials and members of Congress. One is that many of the elected officials and congressmen speaking out are from the same political party as the President, so they’re unlikely to bash his administration.

Another is the memory of the savings and loan scandal of the ‘80s and Charles Keating Jr.’s, effort to get key members of Congress, including Sen. John McCain, to get the regulators off his back with his troubled Lincoln Savings & Loan. That became one of the S&L debacles.

A sobering reality for those in need of a healthy community-bank environment is that, by some assessments, the troubles in the ranks of community banks may get worse before they get better.

For example, one member of a panel of regulators at a recent Washington Bankers Association conference predicted that the number of Northwest banks under some form of protective order from the Fed would increase from the current 40 to 50 percent to as much as 70 percent by the end of next year.

The kinds of things that are impacting the ability of banks to lend more include situations in which even healthy community banks suddenly find themselves under orders to increase their capitalization with regulator explanations being the need to guard against future “deterioration.”

Add to that the fact that the rates on FDIC insurance skyrocketed for the banks. And now they face the impact of a decision by the FDIC to require the banks to pay the next three years of insurance premiums in advance rather than a quarter at a time. That’s money that was bankable and could have been loaned to borrowers.

Scott Jarvis, who heads the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions, says the FDIC action “is a huge hit at a terrible time” for the banks, but notes that FDIC is basically an insurance fund that has to raise enough money to pay for damaged banks.

Jarvis also suggests that “there are a lot of sides” to the issue of how regulators deal with community bankers, often depending on how much trouble individual banks have gotten themselves into. “The key solution to all this is for the economy to turn around and to have people again buying homes so the troubled assets can be cleaned up.”

Jack Schultz, the CEO of an Effingham, Ill., based industrial development company called Agracel and chairman of a $1 billion Illinois bank, raised a broader concern when I e-mailed him for comment.

"I do have a continuing and growing concern about the concentration of assets in the hands of a handful of banks," he e-mailed. "I'm not sure that we as a country want to let this continue. I was hopeful the Feds would see this problem and do something to either encourage them to split up or to make their capital costs so high that they would limit their growth prospects."

Legislation introduced Wednesday by Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell and McCain may create more serious discussion in that direction. Their bill would separate commercial banks and investment banks. In essence, the proposal would make financial firms operating both commercial banks and investment houses decide which business they wished to be in.

It was Schultz who first suggested that the long-term goal of the Fed was to shrink the number of community banks by 1,000 or more to create a more manageable oversight by the FDIC. Others are now coming to have a similar suspicion, which could become the fodder for broader discussion in the months ahead.

Before there was basketball at Gonzaga, there was football. And just as a Stockton (John) in the backcourt in the mid-80s set the stage for the Spokane school’s subsequent hoop prominence, a Stockton (Houston) in the backfield 60 years earlier keyed a 20-year quest in which Gonzaga sought to use football as the key to fame.

Appearances by Gonzaga University basketball teams in NCAA post-season play have become almost the norm over the past decade. But the Bulldogs also made a post-season appearance on the football field, a Christmas-day game in 1922 that was intended to match Gonzaga against Notre Dame.

The idea for the long-ago game was a promoter’s dream: a post-season contest between the Notre Dame team of Knute Rockne and the Gonzaga team coached by Charles E. “Gus” Dorais, the man who had quarterbacked the Irish while Rockne played end as the two of them basically first popularized the forward pass.

This is the story of how that game came about and the effect the outcome had over the next two turbulent decades as Gonzaga pursued a dream of gridiron glory, only to become entangled in a morass that threatened financial ruin for the tiny school.

Gonzaga, like Notre Dame, had been calling itself the fighting Irish for years. In fact, the nickname bulldogs was used for the first time in 1921.

According to legend, the decision on whether Rockne or Dorais would be hired as Notre Dame’s new head coach came down to a coin flip that Rockne won. Dorais stayed a year as the assistant then headed to Spokane in 1920, sought out by the little Jesuit school to fulfill its dream of national prominence through football, starting with hiring a “dream” coach.

Dorais spent his first couple of seasons beginning to build a reputation among Northwest schools. Then in 1922, Houston Stockton, John’s grandfather, who had been singled out for All-American honorable mention as a freshman at St. Mary’s in Oakland the previous year, transferred to Gonzaga.

Stockton quickly began to make his mark as a Bulldog. In the home opener in a new $100,000 stadium before an overflow crowd of 5,600, Stockton turned in a stunning single-game performance, scoring six touchdowns and kicking 10 conversions for 46 points as Gonzaga beat Wyoming, 77-0.

The Bulldogs beat College of Puget Sound, 34-0, Montana, 37-6, and Montana State, 12-0, in a Bozeman snowstorm. They lost 10-7 to Washington State College on a late-game field goal.

Then came the official invitation from San Diego officials for the dream-game clash between Rockne’s and Dorais’ teams. But Notre Dame was upset by Nebraska in its season finale and Rockne decided to turn down the invitation.

 So West Virginia, undefeated in the 1922 season, victor over the Pittsburgh team that went to the Rose Bowl that season and a club generally regarded as one of the two or three best in the nation, was invited instead.

The odds against Gonzaga were overwhelming and the way the game unfolded bore that out as West Virginia took a 21-0 lead into the fourth quarter. Then Gonzaga found itself. The Bulldogs scored two touchdowns, one by Stockton, in 10 minutes. With two minutes to go, Stockton (who rushed for 110 yards that final quarter) found future Gonzaga coach Mike Pecarovich in the end zone. But he dropped the ball. Final score: West Virginia 21, Gonzaga 13.

The game got an eight-column headline in the New York Times sports pages as Gonzaga won praise from coast to coast, lauded as “the Notre Dame of the West.” A Chicago Tribune sports writer enthused that “West Virginia won. But it wasn’t a Christmas present. Pulling a bone from an angry bulldog is not like getting a toy drum from Santa Claus.”

Dorais and Stockton teamed for two more years, including an undefeated 1924 season. Then Stockton moved on to professional ball with the Frankfort Yellowjackets, predecessor to the Philadelphia Eagles, and Dorais headed for the University of Detroit where he spent most of his coaching career.

A number of great players followed Stockton as Gonzaga stars. George (Automatic) Karamatic, who won a place on the 1936 All-America team, and Tony Canadeo, known as the “Grey Ghost of Gonzaga” for his prematurely gray hair, went on in pro ball to set the Green Bay Packers single-season rushing record.

Ray Flaherty, a member of the 1924 undefeated team, subsequently starred with the New York Giants for nearly a decade. Then he became coach of the Washington Redskins, guiding them to two NFL titles and five division titles, with his teams always including a cadre of Gonzaga players whom Flaherty routinely drafted..

The outbreak of war ended Gonzaga’s football program, one that was doomed to end at some point, having cost the school $60,000 in its worst year and providing less than a dime of profit in the best.

 It’s been almost seven decades now since the blue-and-white uniforms were packed away for the last time. And 60 years since the dilapidated wooden grandstands of Gonzaga Stadium were razed to make room for the Crosby Library.

Old photographs carefully packed away in the basement of the Administration Building are the last tangible reminders of the days when Gonzaga pursued the mirage of big-time college football fame.

Gonzaga was among the first of a score of little colleges, mostly private schools, around the West to pursue an Ozymandian delusion that football could be the ticket to a wealthy campus and national renown.

Down through the years, sports has inevitably been the vehicle that colleges and universities have sought to use to gain prominence and recognition, as Seattle University is doing in seeking to restore the one-time luster of big-time basketball at the school.

For Gonzaga, basketball has indeed brought the prominence and financial success that football was never destined to do. But football will always be the ghost in Gonzaga’s closet.

(The above is gleaned from old files compiled from long-ago newspaper clippings by a then-Gonzaga student who imagined that a book on Gonzaga football awaited in his journalistic future. But all that really came of that research was an article in the student newspaper in the mid-60s that stirred a short-lived student movement to revive football. The effort died quickly when the then-basketball coach advised a skeptical administration that the cost of athletic tape alone would be $20,000.)

The modern-day role of Don Quixote is played by anyone who fails to grasp that challenging the practices of social media sites is akin to tilting at windmills. So where can I find a skinny old “Rocinante” to saddle up and ride to my next joust?

In fact, some of those web services whose model is to lure users by the millions, and thus put those users’ e-mails and personal information and that of their contacts in play, can prove to be more like a digital fortress than a windmill for anyone trying to challenge their practices or question procedures. Or just trying to make real contact.

That’s by way of leading into sharing details of a disturbing experience I had last week with LinkedIn. A request to connect with me on LinkedIn, meaning share information, was sent to several hundred people from my e-mail roster without my intending that to happen.

For those not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s a social media site that’s pitched as a business-connection tool through which people accept invitations to “LinkIn” with each other and thereafter share each other’s network of people who have linked with them. In essence, that means I can find the contact information for dozens of people who don’t know me but that I might suggest we should do business together.

LinkedIn’s pitch is that the total potential business contacts you can learn about multiplies exponentially. There a lot of other aspects to the contacts potential, but they all flow from enhancing user numbers that LinkedIn can then use to link better with its advertisers.

LinkedIn is a business-connection tool that I had previously viewed as respectable and useful. Unlike other social media sites, it’s mostly just to learn about prospective business connections and how to connect with them.

My view of the business was shaken last week when I found that several hundred whose e-mails were in my database had been told I was inviting them to connect via LinkedIn.  The view of the firm was further damaged because of my frustration at trying to make contact with LinkedIn to express my outrage and ask how that had happened.

I became aware of the fact that a large number of people had received the request when dozens of acceptances to connect started filling my e-mail file. So what’s the concern, you might ask, if I’m getting a lot of new links?

The unacceptable aspect of the LinkedIn action is that I, as do many others, have a number of e-mails of people I would not presume to invite to join me on LinkedIn. Those are people who don’t care to share their e-mails, don’t need the contacts, have more interest in privacy then networking, and have legitimate concerns about sharing their contact information. I know who those are. LinkedIn doesn’t.

So I first searched the LinkedIn home page for a phone number to contact customer service. Finding none, I scrolled down the page to the customer service tab, clicked, and sent an e-mail asking for an explanation of how the mass e-mailing from my list had occurred. Nothing.

A second e-mail advised LinkedIn that if I didn’t hear from them, I’d explain what had happened in a column. I’m sure they felt the wind from Quixote’s sword as it swung through the air at the windmill.

Meanwhile, I checked the LinkedIn privacy policy, scrolled down the details of the policy and learned that the social media service had a provision with respect to using my personal information that indicated their sharing it with a third party was “usually” at my option.

As I digested “usually,” I thought of examples like: would you accept an invitation to dine at the home of a friend who “usually” washed their hands after using the bathroom? Would you invite someone to be a house guest who “usually” wiped their feet before coming onto the living room rug?

So my next e-mail was to inquire what kinds of information sharing would fall outside the “usually.”

I added that I would be suggesting, in an e-mail column, that people should be most cautious about considering LinkedIn with that provision of "usually" in the privacy statement and the risk of mass requests from their e-mail lists without their specific approval.

I must admit that I didn’t expect the apology e-mail that came from a Stacey in customer service. Her note: “We apologize for the inconvenience caused from the importing function. Would you like us to withdraw all your pending invitations at once from our end?”

I contemplated the potential confusion that would follow a withdrawal of invitation to Link In to anyone who was just about to accept the invitation. How would someone about to accept react if they received word that I no longer wanted to connect?

So unable to understand how a withdrawal of request would work, I replied, “thanks, but no. I’ll send your apology to those on my list who would view such a request to Link In as presumptuous.”

In fact, the invitation itself had resulted in some confusion, as with one friend who replied to the invitation, “be happy to link in. What is it?”