To Ken Alhadeff, the Seattle businessman who is the financial force behind Memphis, winning the coveted Tony award as Best Musical isn’t the climax of his five-year love affair with this play. It only sets the stage for subsequent acts, including a national tour that will launch in October of 2011 in the musical’s namesake city.

And he suggests that the award and the recognition it brings will also set the stage for the next act for Alhadeff and his wife, Marlene, who he emphasizes is his full partner not only in the development of the Memphis success story but in the opportunities that he knows will now open to them.

In fact, it was Marlene’s acquaintance with the founding partner of Junkyard Dog Productions, Randy Adams, when he was managing director of Palo Alto-based TheaterWorks, that set the stage for Alhadeff’s meeting Adams and his partner, Sue Frost. Alhadeff decided to join them as a partner, which he did in 2006.

He was soon given the script of a show that had been in production since 2003 to which they wanted the rights. Thus the Alhadeffs’ ties to Memphis were born.

“As the plane I was on sat on the tarmac in Seattle, I pulled the script out and read it and before the plane lifted off, my tears were falling on the pages of the script,” Alhadeff said during a telephone interview a couple of days after the gala New York celebration that followed the Tony Awards event.

Those who know Alhadeff know him as an emotional guy who gets as strongly committed to the success of his causes as he does to success in his business ventures.

And after that first reading of the script five years ago, he got emotional about Memphis, which he describes as “a meaningful statement about the power of music to change people and about the state of race relations in America.”

For those who haven’t paid attention, Memphis is the story of a poor white kid who frequented now-famous Beale Street’s black clubs to hear what he described as “the music of my soul.” It’s about his struggle to popularize the music in a white world and his relationship with a black singer. One reviewer described it as “a show of soulful sounds and a parade of engaging characters.”

I told Alhadeff that I had the distinct impression, when we talked in early 2009 for an earlier column as he set about the effort to raise the millions necessary to take the show to Broadway, that he viewed his effort as being as much a commitment to a cause as to a potential investment.

“That’s totally true,” he replied. “We believed strongly that this story needed to be told and realized that musical theater is the ideal vehicle to shed light and joy on a subject.”

Now the story has been told and retold on the Sam Shubert Theater stage to enthusiastic audiences. And the wildest-dreams kind of reward has come for the Alhadeffs and others who made the commitment to the cause.

“The production company will continue on,” he said. “Clearly, being Tony-award-winning producers will open almost any door for us to evaluate scripts.

“Because we have produced at the highest levels, along with our partners, it validates our credentials and thus opens doors,” he added.

And financial rewards will begin coming in from those who invested in the Memphis dream, even though he was clear from the outset of his raising capital for the musical that  “the core of the investment in this show has to be based on the passion that comes with seeing it.”

Alhadeff, at age 61, has made numerous successful investments during his business career. But he says this was the first time he had to ask other people to invest substantial amounts of money in his vision.

Part of the vision going forward is for growing theatrical success for his hometown, where Memphis had a two-week run in early 2009 at the 5^th Avenue Theater before its move to Broadway.

That last pre-Broadway stop marked a milestone both for the Alhadeffs and the 5^th Avenue, since it had been 30 years since his late father and a partner had undertaken the restoration and reopening of the landmark theater, which occurred in 1980. Alhadeff went on the 5^th Avenue board in 1994, after his father’s death, and subsequently served as chair of that board.

“Seattle has been on the rise for a long time as one of the premier theater cities in America,” Alhadeff said. “We are going to continue to see major productions developed in Seattle on the way to Broadway.”

And it’s clear that he and Marleen plan to bring their new national theater credentials to boost Seattle’s future opportunities.

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.”

Helen Thomas, who as a White House correspondent has been peppering presidents with prickly questions since before the current occupant of the White House was born, deserves a better career climax than the sudden end that occurred for her this week.

The 89-year-old Thomas, role model for decades of women journalists and admired by many for her willingness to confront the powerful, resigned in the wake of an unacceptable comment about Jews needing to “get the hell out of Palestine.”

It’s doubtful if anyone with a television or a computer could have missed the avalanche of comments that has dominated websites and blogs since the video interview with her by a rabbi with a website called rabbilive.com surfaced last weekend.

No one could or would defend the unacceptable comment she made to the rabbi after he spotted her at a Jewish Heritage Day event at the White House late last month and came up with a microphone to get her to make a comment about Israel.

Some bloggers have suggested the rabbi bushwhacked her. And he likely got the kind of comment he was after when he spotted her in the crowd and came up to interview her. But he didn’t put the words in her mouth.

The interview became viral in 24 hours after it surfaced last weekend, the video taking over the Internet and the torrent of comments it unleashed dominating blogs and newspaper columns. The interview came before, but began gaining traction after, the death of nine activists as Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza.

But amidst what one well-regarded political blogger named Robert Scheer characterized as a “media tirade” against her that he described “as illogical as it is hysterical” has come the suggestion that the body of work and accomplishments of 60 years shouldn’t be washed away with a single unacceptable comment.

“The few sentences uttered by her were, as she quickly acknowledged, wrong, deeply so I would add,” Scheer wrote in his truthdig blog. “But they cannot justify the road-rage destruction of the dean of the Washington press corps. Suddenly this heroic woman who broke so many gender barriers and dared to challenge presidential arrogance was reduced to nothing more than the stereo-typical anti-Israel Arab that is so fashionable to hate.”

It was a little more than a year ago that Thomas was honored at Washington State University as she and senior CBS White House correspondent Robert Schieffer received lifetime achievement awards at the 35^th annual Edward R. Murrow Symposium.

Because she and I once worked for the same wire service, she a major figure covering presidents for United Press International while I operated down in the relative anonymity of covering governors and legislatures, I got to spend a couple of days with her in Pullman, basically carrying luggage for an old lady.

And in numerous conversations with her during those few days in Pullman, what emerged was the sense of a person irate at the use of military force, whether by the U.S. or Israel. The former was evidenced by her sharp questions of then-President George Bush over the Iraq war in particular and the latter by questions about the U.S. role in the Middle East that made her hated by Israeli lobbying groups in Washington, D.C.

Thomas, a Lebanese-American who grew up in Detroit and joined UPI in 1943, moving to the White House beat during Dwight Eisenhower’s last year as president, is widely known as a critic of Israel. But our conversations made it clear she’s a harsh critic of the Israeli government and what she views as its militarism, not of the citizens of that nation.

Many viewed her penetrating and critical questions posed to Bush, particularly about the war in Iraq, during news conferences as proof that she was liberal. It was a sense that created a virtual hatred of her among Bush Administration officials and GOP leaders.

Thus when President Obama called on her at his first news conference last year, he smiled expectantly, apparently thinking he’d get a softball question. Instead she weighed in with a zinger and a hard-nosed follow-up question that brought a furrow to Obama’s brow.

After her ill-considered comments raised the fire storm, she was forced to resign from Hearst, the company that she’d worked for as a columnist since leaving the then-dead wire service in 1980, and issued an apology.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League said the apology wasn’t acceptable. Refusal to accept an apology is a somewhat untenable position since when the Israeli government apologized after 23-year-old Olympia activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer on the Gaza strip as she sought to keep Palestinian homes from being bulldozed, it was accepted.

And just today, the Israeli government apologized for sending the press a link to an online video parodying last week’s deadly commando raid on the flotilla of pro-Gaza activists, an apology they hope will suffice. So someone with more savvy is likely to advise the executive of the Anti-Defamation League to be quiet.

Thomas turns 90 in August. And hopefully some group, ideally a women’s organization, will have the courage to say the litany of firsts in her resume and the barriers she broke on behalf of women deserve recognition. So does the courage she evidenced as a front-row journalist to ask the questions no one else wanted to ask to help keep 11 presidents on an honest track.

It’s a recognition that would be more than appropriate as an honor for her contributions, rather than having the memory of those contributions ravaged by reaction to a single mistake. Hopefully some organization will have the courage to do her that service and be willing to put down anyone who would be so small as to think she should be denied that.

A former female colleague at UPI was quoted as saying she hoped the end of Thomas’ career “does not taint a long and important legacy.” It’s important that some group picks up Thomas’ banner to ensure the legacy is recognized.

Microsoft, once the “Beast From Redmond” that loomed over any venture-capital deal discussion in Silicon Valley, “isn’t even a part of the conversation these days,” says Jon Staenberg, onetime Microsoftie and a venture capitalist with involvement in both Seattle and Bay Area venture communities.

The Seattle entrepreneurial and investment communities need to think about that as they discuss the state of innovation in the Puget Sound region, suggests Staenberg, whose involvement in both region’s venture activity extends back well over a decade. “Otherwise, we might be in trouble in the future.”

Ironically, Staenberg’s comments came in an interview about a week before a Kauffman Foundation report on entrepreneurism that ranked Seattle last in entrepreneurial activity among 15 metropolitan areas and launched a round of hand-wringing and defensive conversation in the local entrepreneurial and venture communities.

“The Bay Area has recognized, though it’s a process still in progress, that there needs to be change and transformation, to reconsider what it takes to be a successful venture community,” says Staenberg, a partner in California-based Rustic Canyon Partners and has his own Seattle-based Staenberg Venture Partners. He’s viewed as one of the more experienced venture capitalists in the Northwest.

“The Bay Area is undergoing that necessary transformation and as that happens, Seattle is less a part of discussions there,” he adds.

With respect to his comments about Microsoft, Staenberg recalled a recent presentation in the Bay Area on behalf of a company that focused on an application of Microsoft Sharepoint, the content-management system with integrated search functionality that’s being touted by Microsoft.

“Before we could begin to explain the investment-value of the company, we had to first educate every v.c. there about Sharepoint. It was an example of the fact Microsoft just isn’t part of conversations there now,” he said.

“The reason Microsoft isn’t part of discussions in Silicon Valley anymore is the same reason that IBM isn’t part of the discussions,” Staenberg said. “Enterprise software isn’t what entrepreneurs are doing. Google is the new Microsoft.

“Cloud computing has allowed start-ups to create innovative products very inexpensively and with incredible efficiency,” he added.

Staenberg summarizes the difference between Silicon Valley and Seattle as the difference between “maniacal entrepreneurism” and a focus on lifestyle.

‘It’s simply in the blood there,” he says. “When I go there I find as many as half a dozen networking events I could go to every single night.”

“The unfortunate thing,” he says, “is that we’re a natural second market for Bay Area venture folks. Seattle should be a major part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem because there’s such a natural affiliation. We have good v.c.’s here but there just aren’t very many of them.”

Staenberg is also complimentary about the manner in which those who have had financial success in their ventures in the Seattle area are seeking to put back into entrepreneurial undertakings.

“Some of the best investing work being done locally is being done by angels, many of whom are alums of Microsoft, Amazon and Avenue A,” he says, adding “this is a critical part of the venture eco-system and it gives me hope that we can ride out this storm and be a relevant and strong start-up community.”

And he also hopes for greater focus on cooperation between the markets as a key to staying entrepreneurially competitive.

“I have always felt that bridging the two communities, taking the strengths of each, would create a sum greater than the parts,” Staenberg said.

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 Les Biller settled into his new home in Seattle as a part-time transplant from Los Angeles, the retired vice chairman and chief operating officer of Wells Fargo Bank invited a former colleague from those Wells days for a visit. That set in motion a series of events in recent months that now has Biller poised to assume the role of chairman of troubled Sterling Financial Corp.

The former colleague was J. Gregory (Greg) Seibly, who had served under Biller at the bank’s co-headquarters in Los Angeles and who been elevated to be Sterling’s acting president and chief executive officer last October, two weeks after an FDIC cease and desist order ousted long-time top management.

Biller, in a telephone interview this week, said he had called Seibly, who was his executive vice president and division manager for Los Angeles/Nevada commercial banking before Biller’s retirement in 2002 at the age of 54, “just to reconnect.”

“After we started talking, I got more interested in Sterling and they in me,” Biller recalled. That ultimately led to the decision, announced in a news release Monday, that he would be the chairman, though the appointment is subject both to approval of regulators and to the successful completion of Sterling’s recapitalization plan.

Sterling, which is the holding company for Spokane-based Sterling Savings Bank, a commercial bank, and Seattle-based Golf Savings Bank, a thrift, must raise at least $720 million to meet the regulatory capital requirements.

It has raised about a quarter of that amount, primarily from Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. and announced early this month that it intends to offer about $555 million of securities to institutional accredited investors in a private placement transaction.

It seems likely that Biller’s selection, pending regulators’ approval, could help invigorate the recapitalization effort.

His credentials include overseeing the growth of Minneapolis-based Norwest Bank as its president and COO and engineering its merger into Wells Fargo in 1998, after which he joined Wells as the bank’s COO and vice chairman of Wells Fargo & Co.

His retirement from Wells was to permit him to oversee his personal investments and to provide time for his philanthropy commitments through the Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation. Both he and his wife, who is the incoming first female chair of the national comprehensive cancer center City of Hope, have been hands-on philanthropists.

Seibly was only 43 when he joined Sterling in 2007 as executive vice president and chief production officer, having already guided U.S. Bank’s California commercial banking division as executive vice president, lured from Wells after Biller’s retirement.

I described Biller as a “part-time transplant” because while he and his wife have retained their Los Angeles-area home and both their foundation and his private investment company Greenwood Capital LLC remain headquartered there, they decided last summer to make Seattle a second city for their personal involvement and philanthropy focus.

They have split their time between the two cities since then and Biller quipped in an e-mail to me, when the news release came out, “Looks like we’ll be spending more time in Washington State.”

Biller, as non-executive chairman, would have the role of coaching a management team dramatically different than the one that grew Sterling over a quarter century from a start up to, briefly (after the failure of Washington Mutual in fall of 2008), the largest financial institution based in Washington State.

Harold Gilkey co-founded Sterling in 1983, guided its growth to a $12.7 billion institution with 175 branches in five states and was the 70-year-old chairman and chief executive at the time of the FDIC order and his ouster last fall.

Heidi Stanley joined the bank in 1985 and rose through the ranks as Sterling grew and was CEO of Sterling Savings Bank at the time of her departure.

Over the past couple of years, the ambitious growth Gilkey and Stanley guided turned into an alarming level of operating losses, troubled loan portfolio and plummeting stock price.

The faces of leadership that have succeeded them include Seibly, broad in banking-leadership experience for his age, and Ezra Eckhardt, a 39-year-old West Pointer who brought experience in management and operations at both Microsoft and Honeywell when he joined Sterling in 2004. Eckhardt, described as “a rock star” by one banking blogger, was appointed executive vice president and acting COO of Sterling Savings in January.

Looking ahead, in a vision that will first require his own okay from regulators and completion of the recapitalization plan, Biller sees his role as “a focus on growth in a sane and smart way,” guiding strategy on how to grow “and looking at where acquisitions might be part of the strategy.”

From the Northwest to New York, there is a growing public sense that this is the year for the decennial political joust over legislative-district makeup called “redistricting” to be taken out of the hands of politicians. At least part of the public desire for change is a conviction that the process is slowly drawing political parties to the ideological edges.

And as unlikely as it seems, there is even a move afoot to have private citizens or groups submit redistricting proposals of their own by using new software available that includes census data. The idea is that a particular proposal might attract sufficient public support in a particular state that legislators would be pressed to accept it.

Of course more than redistricting is at work these days in pulling parties to the political fringes. As former Washington Gov. Mike Lowry, a Democrat, put it: “Sure, redistricting is part of the problem.

“But the turmoil we’re seeing in primary contests in Senate races isn’t a result of redistricting, and the process doesn’t apply to U.S. Senate seats, anyway.” He was referring to things like the removal in Utah of Republican Sen. Bob Bennett from re-election consideration by his party’s state convention and the struggle that Sen. John McCain is facing in his GOP primary in Arizona

The redrawing of legislative and congressional districts across the country is required after each census is completed, which makes 2011 the year the legislative-district remap will occur, with the first impact to be felt in the 2012 elections. That looming deadline is what’s behind the growing public pressure for change.

The number of legislative districts in each state will remain the same in the forthcoming revisions. The boundaries are merely redrawn to provide for population shifts within the states.

But the process is more stress-inducing at the congressional level where reapportionment means some states gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives while others lose seats. Some states retain the same number of seats.

Perhaps no state has had as tumultuous a redistricting history as Washington State, with federal courts ordering the legislatures after the 1960, 1970 and 1980 censuses to put together acceptable plans under the threat of being prohibited from holding elections until they had done so. During the political battles following the 1970 census, federal judges even took over the process for remapping Washington’s legislative districts.

But in 1983, Washington became only the third state in the nation to turn the task of redistricting over to a commission, a process that will be in place again after this census is completed. The commission is composed of appointees selected by each of the four legislative caucuses, with those four appointees choosing a non-voting chair.

 It’s a process that tends to keep incumbents safely ensconced, but most agree that’s preferable to the wild swings that can occur when one party or the other happens to be in power when redistricting rolls around.

But in places where redistricting has proven more blatantly political, the public concern is gaining traction.

The kind of power play the remap process can engender is perhaps most disturbingly pointed up in New York, where the president of the state senate was overheard telling fellow Democrats that if the party retained control in the next election, “we’re going to draw the lines so that Republicans will be in oblivion in the state for the next 20 years.”

A proposal for an independent redistricting commission has been proposed in the New York Legislature by two Democrats and the plan has become such a public rallying point that the New York Times editorialized that support of the commission should be a litmus test for candidates in the fall elections.

Oregon may soon leap past all the other states in removing from the redistricting process the influence of legislators, whose goal is logically to remain in office and remain in power.

A proposed constitutional amendment on the Oregon general election ballot would create an independent redistricting commission of five retired trial-court judges, one from each congressional district, appointed by the chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, totally removing elected officials from the process.

Egil (Bud) Krogh, former Seattle attorney and one-time Watergate figure, says key experts view the redistricting dance engaged in every 10 years as “an unholy but largely implicit compact between the two parties that results in 95 percent of incumbents facing little or no opposition.”

Krogh, now Senior Fellow and Chair of Leadership and Ethics at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress in Washington, D.C.,  says the organization is doing some analysis of what he calls “the urgency of redistricting reform” in the hope of providing some guidance on the issue.

 “Since most legislative candidates are essentially elected in the primaries, because of the way district boundaries are drawn, they find it more and more important to appeal to the extremes. So the two parties are slowly being drawn to the political edges, affecting stability in our political institutions,” Krogh notes.

Whether any substantial change in the redistricting process occurs in many parts of the country next year is likely to be determined by the extent to which the public agrees with that analysis.

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.

Wall Street, Walmart and WAMU notwithstanding, the public’s view of business is improving. Those who measure such things say that’s largely because of the way businesses of all sizes have struggled to continue their support of non-profit and community causes despite the bleakest of financial times.

Walmart, which now faces a massive lawsuit for alleged sex discrimination, joins the above trio, which obviously could include many others, after being burned by what may well come to be known as the Tiger Woods Rule: If your marketing folks create an inflated you, then you’ll be pilloried when the real and deflated you emerges.

The fact that the public’s attitude toward business is creeping up has been highlighted several times in recent months, most visibly early in the year with the release of the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer.

The survey by the international public relations firm, which made presentations on the survey around the country, showed what it called “a modest rise in trust for business” after the trust-index level the previous year had shrunk to historic lows.

The growing trend among corporations to engage stakeholders, rather than just focus on shareholders, and to take roles in solving major social challenges were cited as reasons for that blip up in public regard.

The most recent indication of that improving view of business by the public came at the 2010 International Corporate Citizenship Conference in Boston earlier this month.

The 10^th annual conference, put on by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, got little visibility beyond Boston despite the importance of the topic and the audience it attracts.

Tim Wilson, who is with the Center, told me “corporate America is bouncing back faster than some other sectors in how they are viewed by the public. That’s a big change from merely lobbying against what might hurt us.”

One of the interesting findings at the conference was that “more CEOs are saying they need to be involved in public policy issues,” Wilson said. “The point is the feeling of CEOs that no one prospers in a bad neighborhood and that this world is a big neighborhood and corporations need to be involved in finding solutions.

If concern about “the neighborhood” represent a big change for major corporations, many would suggest such concerns have long been the stuff that helps drive smaller, local businesses.

Rich Simmonds, co-founder of Seattle wealth management firm Laird Norton-Tyee and, since his retirement, entrepreneur in residence at the family business center at Seattle University, says “research shows that family owned businesses spend more on community and non-profit causes than other businesses. And they’re less likely to turn off the spigot in tough times because they’re more likely to think long term.”

Stanley W. McNaughton, CEO of Pemco Insurance, puts it this way: “Because we’re a local company, our philanthropy is local.” He adds that while the company has maintained its commitment to corporate citizenship through the downturn, it has “made us more selective in what we support, but more committed to our traditional causes.”

Carol Lewis, CEO of Seattle-based Philanthropy Northwest, agrees the image of business is improving as more and more companies understand how community involvement contributes to success. “Corporate citizenship is on a steady increase,” she says.

She says the declines in corporate giving that have taken place in a bad economy “aren’t permanent. In fact, there’s not only evidence of a rebound but an ever-expanding number of businesses engaged in philanthropy.”

As that expansion occurs, a key part of the evolution of corporate citizenship is going to be ever-increasing focus on the convergence of corporate citizenship and corporate strategic goals.

Part of the “convergence” inevitably will relate to image impact, a factor that has come to top the list of reasons for how companies choose their involvements. And visibility is the key of reward for corporate citizenship recognition events, like the Business Journal’s Corporate Citizenship Awards Luncheon next month.

“It’s increasingly true that aligning your charitable efforts with your business goals advances both,” says Steve Mullin, president of the Washington Roundtable, the 27-year-old nonprofit public policy organization comprised of chief executives representing the state’s major private-sector employers.

One of the compelling moments at the International Corporate Citizenship conference in Boston apparently was an observation by closing keynoter Kathryn Brown, Verizon’s senior vice president for public policy & corporate responsibility.

Brown noted that despite Wall Street’s disastrous mismanagement of consumers’ money, the most recent Edelman corporate trust barometer is going up and optimism seems to abound and wondered aloud how that could be.

 “I think it’s because we all faced the abyss and then we walked back from it and rediscovered our core shared values – as a society, as a political body and as corporate citizens,” she told the audience.

Nicole Vogel, co-founder and publisher of Portland-based SagaCity Media, one of the most successful regional publishers of city magazines and related media,has learned that the key to realizing how good things really are in the best of times is to struggle through the worst of times.

“I appreciate my life and what we’ve created so much more now for what we had to go through,” she said, reflecting on the comeback of the company that launched in 2003 when Vogel and her brother, Scott, began publishing Portland Monthly magazine.

Over her first six years at the helm, she made it look easy to build a fast-growing business in what many view as a challenged print-media industry. The company added titles, including Seattle Metropolitan, won editorial awards and grew to annual revenue in excess of $10 million and profit of almost 20 percent.

But reflecting on how the Great Recession hit her company, she admits she had no idea how good things were until growth of 200 percent a year ends “and then you’re not growing at all and it’s all sort of crumbling around you.”

“Suddenly you stop growing, and a company that has gone from four to 100 employees is back to 85,” Vogel recalls. “I thought things were good, but I had no idea how good they were. I’ve learned more in the past year than at any other time in my life.”

“We managed to basically break even last year,” Vogel said, adding that “our revenue shrank, though we’re still over $10 million. But Portland, as a market, was just killed. People don’t realize that at one point, Portland was second only to Detroit in its jobless rate.”

Vogel’s comments on the worst of times came after she put the exclamation mark on her company’s turnaround with the purchase early this year of a group of three magazines in Colorado and Utah, including the 10-year-old Aspen Sojourner, the city magazine for one of that state’s most upscale regions.

The magazines in Aspen and Vail-Beaver Creek and Park City, Utah, bring SagaCity’s magazine business to about two dozen consumer and custom titles. The company also has a number of Web sites through its electronic media division.

Vogel, then with Turner Broadcasting, and her brother, a New York Times writer, actually were putting promising careers on hold, rather than looking for new opportunities, when they quit their jobs and came to Portland to be with their sister, who had lost her husband to cancer.

As they looked for something to do in their new locations, the two researched the possibility of starting a magazine, did the numbers, and, despite the fact 13 similar efforts in the city had failed since 1980, launched Portland Monthly. Nicole estimated they’d need $1.5 million and two capital raises over four years to get into the black.

Two issues later, the originally bi-monthly magazine was profitable, having needed only $300,000 in funds from a variety of investors (plus about $175,000 from Vogel) to find black ink.

They raised another $180,000 to go monthly and have grown since then off of earnings, except for a capital raise to purchase the mountain titles, as Vogel explained: “given the economic climate we wanted to conserve as much cash as possible.”

Scott, who served as editor in chief, eventually left for a key position at the Washington Post and Nicole assumed that role for a time.

It became clear, during an interview, that lessons learned from a severe downturn weren’t the only learning experience Vogel had in launching and growing a company.

Vogel confided that she found “some of the capital-raising experience to be disheartening,” explaining that some of those she hoped would be angel investors turned out to be devils looking for more than financial returns from a young woman, then not yet 35, seeking money to launch a business.

“That was particularly difficult for me because I felt I was past that place in my career,” she added. “I thought I’d proven myself to the boys’ club a long time ago as the youngest vice president, woman or man, at Turner.”

Vogel expects to continue to grow the company, including with possible addition of other city magazines. She noted that the company backed away from pursuing one magazine in a top-10 market because the numbers didn’t work out.

 “We can always build a magazine less expensively then buying one,” she said, as happened with the launch of Seattle Metropolitan in a market that already had a city magazine.

She’s been successful with both cities’ magazines, noting that selling Portland, a smaller market, to advertisers has been easier since creating a success with Seattle Metropolitan. The fact that both have been among the national leaders of city magazines in “street” sales, meaning single-copy sales each month, has helped.

She’s also proud of the fact the demographics of both magazines skew younger and higher-income than the norm for city magazines. And that they far outsell the national magazines in their space, noting as an example that “Vanity Fair’s circulation in Seattle is half of Seattle Metropolitan’s.”

As for the future, Vogel says “I love what I do and the company is still growing and expanding, though am I going to be here forever? Not likely. I could see even myself doing international aid work at some point.”

Is there an opportunity for a national publication of some sort?

“There are holes I see nationally,” she replied, “but I doubt that I’d ever try to create a title to fill them. But the magazine that reflects women of our generation really hasn’t been created. We’re a fickle bunch and maybe if someone created more of an Esquire-style magazine for women, very crisp and with interesting thinking, it might go.”